The Cycling Podcast is 10 today
And Daniel pays tribute to Gino Mäder
by Lionel Birnie
Ten years ago today, at 3.26pm to be precise, our producer Jon Moonie pressed the upload button to send the first episode of The Cycling Podcast out to the world. A couple of thousand people noticed.
Richard, Daniel and I had met up in a London park a few days earlier to record a preview of the 100th edition of the Tour de France. We didn’t have any notes or fancy recording equipment, or even much of a clue what we were doing – after all, we were not broadcasters, but we were journalists with a fair few years’ experience of covering the Tour under our belts. Richard pressed play on his iPhone’s voice recorder and away we went.
Jon, a friend of mine who used to work as a radio producer and who made (and still makes) a podcast about Watford Football Club called From the Rookery End took our rough and ready recordings, added some jingles – voiced by his wife – and music, and The Humans Invent Tour de France Podcast, as it was initially known, was up and running.
Those who have listened to The Story of The Cycling Podcast, commissioned and made by three Friends of the Podcast in late 2021, will be familiar with our origin story. I skipped the grand départ in Corsica and headed to the Glastonbury Festival instead, joining up with Richard and Daniel in Nice, by which time the Tour had almost been brought to a shuddering halt by the Orica-GreenEdge team bus getting stuck under the finish line gantry and Ciro Scognamiglio was already a star.
More than 1,500 episodes and 89 million downloads later, we are getting ready to cover our 11th Tour de France.
Of course, it is impossible to mark this milestone without reflecting on our biggest loss, that of our friend, co-founder and driving force Richard Moore and there is obviously a profound sense of sadness that he will not be by my side in Bilbao in a week’s time.
But there is also a feeling of pride that the thing the three of us built together, and which has attracted a close-knit team of presenters and producers to help us improve, has reached a milestone we never envisaged when we set out.
It’s always been our belief that the grand tours are almost as much about the journey as the racing. The rich landscape that unfolds before the riders and the history of the events tell a story every bit as compelling as the race for the maillot jaune.
Over the years, we’ve recorded in the grounds of majestic chateaux, in the shadow of glorious mountains and beside beautiful lakes. But we’re nothing if not versatile because we’ve also recorded perched next to the bins outside the press room, in down-at-heel bars and, once, sheltering under a flimsy gazebo as hailstones hammered down in Andorra.
In the early days, when we were recording on a phone, I was obsessive about finding the quietest possible recording locations – partly because the phone’s mic picked up every clank of cutlery, every conversation at an adjacent table and every breath of wind. But the ambient sound of July in France can be a star co-host, helping us as we attempt to bring you along for the ride.
As we get ready to embark on another lap of France (even though it’s not much of a lap this year, more a zig-zag across the middle of the country), we’d like to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – from sponsors who believed in what we were doing, colleagues who have added their expertise to our coverage, producers who have polished and buffed our recordings into shape, Friends of the Podcast who have supported what we do, and every listener who has tuned in to hear our take on events.
We hope you join us in Bilbao a week tomorrow as we set off in pursuit of the Tour de France before handing over for coverage of the Tour de France Femmes.
The 100th Tour, 10 years on
The 100th Tour, 10 years on is the story of the 2013 edition of the race as told by The Cycling Podcast.
The first part – Richie and Chris – will be released on the regular feed on Monday. It features Team Sky’s Chris Froome and Richie Porte talking about the battle for the yellow jersey. The rest of the series, which is a deep dive into our archive, will be released on the Friends of the Podcast feed next week as we build up to the grand départ of this year’s race in Bilbao. This mini series kicks off Kilometre 0 for this year’s Tour.
Kilometre 0 from the Tour will be available for Friends of the Podcast subscribers.
What else is coming up?
The Cycling Podcast Féminin is back imminently with a race-packed episode looking back at the Tour de Suisse and the chaos at the Tour Féminin des Pyrénées, and ahead to the Giro Donne.
Our bumper Tour de France preview episode will be out early next week and Daniel will catch up with Greg Andrews of DVine Cellars to launch the case of wines to celebrate the 2023 Tour de France route. Then it’ll be off to Bilbao for the opening stage on Saturday, July 1.
There’ll be semi-regular updates from The 11.01 Cappuccino on Substack throughout the Tour too.
Boy Gino – Remembering Gino Mäder
Everyone at The Cycling Podcast was deeply saddened to hear that the Bahrain Victorious rider Gino Mäder had lost his life after a crash during the Tour of Switzerland last week. Gino recorded an audio diary for The Cycling Podcast during the 2021 Giro d’Italia and through listening to his thoughtful updates we gained an insight into the type of person he was, developed a fondness for him and felt like we were getting to know him. Daniel wanted to pay tribute to a rider who brought brightness to every interaction.
by Daniel Friebe
There is no particularly good or bad – or more or less poignant place – to hear the news of someone’s sudden, tragic and premature demise.
It’s therefore of zero real significance that I, someone who spoke to Gino Mäder perhaps 20 times over the course of his short life, was standing beside the Sanctuary of Urkiola, a solemn but sacred place in the Basque Country and Basque cycling, when the awful news landed on my phone just after lunchtime last Thursday. The ‘where’ certainly did not lessen my disbelief. Or bring solace. Or an explanation. Squint, strain and perhaps I could talk unconvincingly here about how cycling unites us all with its connective tissue of people and places, spanning continents, cultural and even religious divides – how our common wounds run as deep as our reciprocal bonds. But, again, that wouldn’t and doesn’t alter or attenuate anything about this dreadful reality.
The fact is that it happened, and I like many others who came into contact with this principled, thoughtful, gentle and talented rider could only think one thing in those first few seconds, just as we will continue to think and ask, whilst knowing the futility of the question: ‘Why Gino Mäder? Why him?’
‘Why, Gino Mäder?’ just because he was different. It felt – still feels – like cycling couldn’t afford to lose such an asset, a treasure, a dazzling light. You knew it from the first moment you met him. His voice was one of the most distinctive at any race – a rich, bass clarinet with a lilting, Swiss German cadence that, if you closed your eyes, beckoned towards his beloved Alps. Those mountains where he thrived as a cyclist – and would have made many more memories. The mountains with their melting glaciers that he wanted to help save from the ravages of climate change. That ‘world that’s so harsh but so peaceful’, as he told us when he kept an audio diary for The Cycling Podcast at the 2021 Giro, and where, on a summit, surrounded by thin air, ‘you feel like the king of the world’.
Manuel Quinziato, his griefstricken former manager, told me earlier this week there were many unique things about Gino, but one above all: ‘Every single decision, be it professional or in his personal life, was made on the basis of a deep reflection on the ethical repercussions of his actions.’ As such, Manuel said, Mäder deserved a rare accolade, or rare adjective when applied to humans: ‘He was totally coherent.’ Meaning that thoughts, values, conscience and deeds were always in alignment, even when compromises had to be made – in a sport which often uses rose-tinted glasses to look back on what was, and a moral blindfold to contemplate what is and what will become.
A certain fragility, his inconsistent streak and perhaps also our fears about the weight of those compromises (he told our colleague Kate Wagner that he entertained thoughts of giving up), make us disinclined to think that Gino Mäder would have won multiple Tours de France or supplanted Ferdi Kübler, Hugo Koblet et al. in the gotha of Swiss cycling. Whether he would have proved us right or wrong, though, I will never forget that horrendous moment, or disassociate an otherwise glorious place – the sheer silver pinnacles of the Urkiola massif – with a sickening feeling and the accompanying tortuous, unanswerable question: ‘Why Gino Mäder? Why him?’
Lovely words about Gino. A lovely tribute to a genuine man