Pog v Remco

Clash of the Galácticos at Liège-Bastogne-Liège

by Lionel Birnie

The 11.01 Cappuccino is a speculation-free zone but we’ll make an exception this week with the prospect of the unstoppable force Tadej Pogačar meeting the immovable object Remco Evenepoel at Liège-Bastogne-Liège on Sunday.

The story this spring has been of the dominance by a handful of riders who have swept pretty much all before them.

Wout van Aert versus Mathieu van der Poel spilled over from the cyclo-cross season to the cobbled Classics. Pogačar versus Jonas Vingegaard at Paris-Nice was the Tour de France dress rehearsal. Pogačar then traded blows with Van Aert and Van der Poel on the cobbles before ticking off the first two wins on his way to a potential Amstel-Flèche-Liège triple. Pogačar, Vingegaard and Primož Roglič have won almost all the stage races between them. And the sixth man, Remco Evenepoel, the reigning world champion, has been on the fringes somewhat, like a kid at a school disco reluctant to show off his moves in front of the other cool kids.

Yes, he won the UAE Tour and, but for some rather showy exuberance at the Volta A Catalunya, might have unseated Roglič in their own Giro d’Italia dry run.

But Remco has not done a one-day race yet this spring, as his Soudal-Quick Step teammates have toiled to goalless draw after goalless draw like a football team without a striker.

As Daniel pointed out in a recent episode, Evenepoel is the last chance to save Soudal-Quick Step’s spring, just as he did by winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège last year.

But this time he faces Pogačar, who looked unstoppable at the Amstel Gold Race on Sunday and peerless on the Mur de Huy on Wednesday. Perhaps Evenepoel’s best hope is that Pogačar is starting to tire after a long, intense spring. He’s been on pretty much top form since Paris-Nice at the start of March.

Neither rider is scared of attacking a long way from home so maybe it’ll come down to who is prepared to move first. Or perhaps the fact that all the attention is on the dynamic duo in the build-up to the race means we’re in for a surprise and someone else can profit. What do you think? Speculate away below…

Chris Baldwin, friend of the podcast

Chris Baldwin. Photo by Simon Gill

Daniel and I were shocked and saddened to hear that Chris Baldwin died suddenly last week, aged 52.

Long-time listeners may remember Chris from his days as the press attaché for the Astana team. He featured on the podcast a few times, first back in 2014 when we collaborated with VeloNews to create a weekly US-focused podcast during the Tour de France. Vincenzo Nibali won the Tour that year and so Chris was busy dealing with media requests.

Richard and I had spoken to him at the Giro d’Italia’s grande partenza in Ireland earlier in the year and were struck by the force of his personality and sense of humour. His curiosity about the world and the people he met meant he had a story for almost every occasion. At times his anecdotes seemed scarcely believable, almost as if they were part of some stand-up comedy routine he’d dreamed up.

We all got to know him from our laps of the team bus paddock at the grand tours. I often found myself gravitating towards the turquoise Astana bus because I knew Chris would be there with a smile, a joke and an interesting story. He’d talk about anything with enthusiasm and curiosity, sometimes even the cycling.

And he acknowledged the absurdity of life on the road as part of professional cycling’s circus, sometimes giving the impression that he wasn’t really a press officer at all but perhaps an actor researching a role by immersing himself deeply in someone else’s world.

Our first question was how an American came to be the press officer for a Kazakh cycling team. He’d studied Russian at college, worked as an interpreter for the US Army, and had lived all over the world. He studied journalism, worked for Cycling News and then Reuters. ‘I wasn’t a terribly good cycling journalist,’ he said. ‘I wrote far too many words. Reuters taught me how to cut stuff down to one sentence.’

Covering races in the US, and speaking Russian, meant he forged a friendship with Vassili Davidenko, who was the sports director of Team Type 1, which is the cycling team created by Supersapiens founder Phil Southerland.

Team Type 1 became Team Novo Nordisk at around the time Chris wanted to move on up. Chris told us the story of how he came to join Astana for an episode in 2014…

As press officer, Chris gave us a window into the Astana team, which was slightly opaque to English-speaking observers. In 2015, when the team was embroiled in a succession of doping scandals and its World Tour licence was under review by the UCI, I met him in a cafe not far from the bottom of the Col d’Èze at the end of Paris-Nice to gain some insight into the team and its attitudes. Our conversation was fascinating. I was prepared for the usual PR spin but that wasn’t Chris’s style at all. His mind seemed to be able to operate on several levels at once and because he was fluent in half a dozen languages and had travelled extensively he had some understanding of how different cultures viewed the same situations. He would often pose a question which most journalists find disarming: ‘What do you think?’ And that is what he encouraged others to do – to think, to consider and to see the world from someone else’s point of view because he saw life as fascinating, nuanced and fun. I never once came away from a conversation with him without a smile on my face and a thought to ponder.

Everyone at The Cycling Podcast sends their condolences to Chris’s family and friends.

The Ardennes According to Dan Martin

With Liège-Bastogne-Liège bringing the spring Classics season to a close on Sunday, there’s a new two-part mini series for Friends of the Podcast subscribers online now.

Dan Martin, who won La Doyenne a decade ago – beating a giant panda to the finish line in Ans – compares and contrasts the two races. Liège, the older and more prestigious of the two, can make a strong claim to being the hardest one-day race on the calendar, certainly in terms of the physical effort required to race the climbs at such intensity. Flèche Wallonne is perhaps the most predictable race of the year, finishing as it does with the uphill cheeseroll™ on the Mur de Huy. And yet there are riders, like Dan, who seem ideally suited to the climb’s steep gradient who never manage to crack the code of the Mur. Why is that? Could it be that there are hidden depths to Flèche Wallonne after all?

If you want to immerse yourself in the Ardennes races before Sunday, there’s also Lionel of the Ardennes, recorded on location at the races in 2019, a companion piece to The Lionel of Flanders, featuring our adventures riding the climbs and exploring the culture and cycling history of the region.