The Omloop Het Nieuwsblad preview
Listen now as Lionel and Rob look ahead to tomorrow's opening cobbled Classic
Listen to the episode here
It’s the equivalent of Christmas Eve in Flanders – the night before Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the opening cobbled classic of the spring. Lionel Birnie and Rob Hatch met up in central London to record a short but packed preview to amplify the excitement before the riders roll out of Gent on Saturday morning. They discussed what to look out for over Opening Weekend and you can listen above, or, alternatively, the episode is online now in your preferred podcast player.
by Lionel Birnie
We were joined by Larry Warbasse in this week’s regular episode. He made his debut for Tudor Pro Cycling earlier this month, finishing 18th overall at the Tour of Oman. His reward was to be laid low by a post-race bout of the flu, which had him laid up at home for a few days, giving him plenty of time to sit on the couch watching last week’s smorgasbord of racing.
Larry made an interesting point I’d not considered about the farcical end to the opening stage of the Volta ao Algarve. I focused on Filippo Ganna being denied the victory, when he was one of the few riders to take the correct route at the finish, while the majority of the peloton were misdirected off course down the deviation. Page one of the ‘How to win a bike race’ manual surely says that you have to complete the correct route from kilometre zero to the finish line and I felt that the race jury and UCI should have come up with some way to recognise Ganna’s ‘win’. Larry made the point that the riders who took the parallel route would have felt aggrieved if Ganna’s result had stood and everyone else’s day was annulled. I’m not sure I necessarily agree with Larry – any race that finishes without a result because of an organisational foul-up is a blow for the sport’s credibility – but it was an interesting insight into how the riders think.
Larry also talked about the 150mm cranks used by Visma-Lease A Bike’s Jonas Vingegaard during the Volta ao Algarve. I can remember the 1990s when Miguel Indurain bucked the trend the other way, riding 180mm cranks – even longer for his Hour Record attempt – instead of the more popular 172.5mm or 175mm. Indurain was tall – 6ft 1in or 186cm – and the argument was that the longer cranks gave greater leverage and therefore higher power output.
Last year, Pogačar dropped crank length from 172.5mm to 165mm, but Vingegaard’s 150mm seems extreme. Shorter cranks can improve aerodynamics but it seems the biggest gain is in biomechanics, enabling the rider to achieve a higher cadence than with a longer crank in the same gear. It’ll be interesting to see whether this prompts a reaction from the rest of the peloton.
Because we recorded on Monday, before the startlist for Omloop Het Nieuwsblad had been finalised, we only briefly mentioned the race so Rob and I met up in central London this morning to record a bonus preview episode.
The Cycling Podcast will be back early next week to wrap up Opening Weekend.
• Friends of the Podcast subscribers can discuss the race with fellow listeners in our online virtual pub, The Cannibal & Badger. Sign in to your Friends of the Podcast account here now.
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Amaraterra bring the soundtrack of our Giro to London
Any time I hear the opening bars of Amaraterra’s Cozze, I am transported to Italy in May. The song by the London-based pizzica band has been our Giro d’Italia theme since we began daily coverage in 2016.
One of our greatest nights was a sold-out show at the Clapham Grand theatre in south London in November 2018 when almost 700 people came to see us talk before Amaraterra took things up a notch with a live set to round off the evening.
If you’d like to see Amaraterra live, they’re playing at Brixton Jamm on Saturday, March 15. Tickets are available from ethical ticketing portal Himanitix. They’d love as many friends of the podcast to make it as possible and, yes, they will play our Giro theme Cozze as part of their set.
If you want to know more about the band and the origins of the traditional pizzica music, Richard Moore recorded this special episode, Strictly Amaraterra, during lockdown in 2020 when all live music was suspended and the band needed help to keep going until gigs could be organised again.