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GR EA T ST AG ES OF TH E TO UR AR M ST RO NG 'S DO W NF AL L: SE VE N YE AR S ON Y BE ST RO ND E OF TH E CE NT UR

CONTENTS ISSUE 264 / JANUARY 2020

30

40 REVIEW OF THE DECADE The biggest stories, riders and races from the world of pro cycling between 2010 and 2020

Images: Getty Images

PETER SAGAN We follow the world’s most famous rider as he takes a racing trip to Colombia

REGULARS

8

14

28

124

130

GALLERY

PROLOGUE

DAN’S DIARY

WISHLIST

JENS VOIGT

The very best cycling pictures

Insight, opinion and interviews

Dan Martin’s latest news & thoughts

Race tech and the latest gear

Our race columnist on the latest events

Procycling / January 2020 3

CONTENTS ISSUE 264 / JANUARY 2020

2010: SKY’S BAD START

42

How the British team got off to a slow start in their debut season

2011: THE GREATEST RACE

48

We look at the 2011 Tour of Flanders, and why it summed up the state of the sport

2012: GB CYCLING’S DARK SIDE

52

Behind the glitter of the gold medals, did British cycling success come at a cost?

2013: THE OPRAH WINFREY PRO

56

Lance Armstrong’s spectacular fall from grace and what it all means now

2014: 10 OF THE BEST

60

A picture-based celebration of the 10 best riders of the decade, from Gilbert to Vos

68

2015: CONTADOR ON FROOME

The greatest stage racer of one generation talks about his successor

74 2016: THE TEAM OF THE DECADE

The secret behind Boels-Dolmans’ consistent success, from their team manager

80

2017: THE LAST PATRONS

How Fabian Cancellara and Tom Boonen shaped the classics for a generation

86 2018: VOS IN NUMBERS

A statistical breakdown of Marianne Vos’s incredible career so far

90 2019 10 GREATEST STAGES

A selection of writers look back at the decade’s best Tour de France stages

100 Q&A: THOMSON & JANSE VAN RENSBURG NTT’s South African pros on their path into cycling and why they are proud of their team

106 IN-DEPTH: DARIUSZ MIŁEK

112 RETRO: RAYMOND POULIDOR Procycling looks at the life and times of cycling’s most popular ever rider, the ‘Eternal Second’

4

Procycling / January 2020

Images: Getty Images

The reclusive but influential owner of CCC Pro Team, and how he built his fortune

PREFACE ISSUE 264 / JANUARY 2020

EDITOR

A

lot can happen in a decade. This time 10 years ago, Team Sky were just about to start and, let’s be honest, they were a bit average initially.

Lance Armstrong was unretired and undisgraced. Fabian Cancellara had yet to win his first Tour of Flanders.

And a British rider was probably not going to win the Tour de France any time soon, notwithstanding the fourth place that Bradley Wiggins had just achieved in the race. On the other hand, Marianne Vos was winning a lot of races, just as she is 10 years later. In a fast-changing world, some things remain reassuringly stable.

HIGHLIGHTS

THE SAGAN SAGA The Slovakian recently travelled to Colombia for the Sagan Fondo.

Matt Rendell was there to follow his progress. See page 30

PERFECT 10?

Our writers and photographers have looked back over the years 2010-2019 to see how cycling has changed. Starts page 40

ETERNAL SECOND William Fotheringham celebrates the life of Raymond Poulidor, the Tour de France’s favourite son, who recently died. See page 112

Images: Fabio Cuttica (Sagan), Getty Images.

EDWARD PICKERING

Pedants will rightly point out that the decade technically ends in December 2020, but pedants didn’t have as good a time as the rest of us on December 31, 1999. We’re celebrating the cycling teens, and what a decade it was. The last 10 years have seen the domination of Sky, the peak years of Cancellara, Peter Sagan, Philippe Gilbert, Vos and more, and most importantly, significant growth in women’s cycling. We’ve gone back and looked at the most interesting stories of the decade, from the misfiring first year of Sky, through the once-ina-generation rivalry of Boonen and Cancellara, to the women’s superteam Boels-Dolmans. We’ve looked back at the British success, and its darker side, along with the Lance Armstrong interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was one of the moments cycling really started to face up to its profound doping problems.

Cycling’s internationalisation has continued apace since 2010, and the other features in this month’s magazine reflect that. We followed Peter Sagan on his recent trip to Colombia, and have interviewed Reinardt Janse van Rensburg and Jay Thomson about being South Africans on a South African WorldTour team. Ten years ago, I couldn’t have imagined the way the sport was going to go. I wonder how things will change in the 2020s.

Get in touch with Procycling through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @procycling_mag

Procycling / January 2020 7

GALLERY THE WORLD’S BEST CYCLING PHOTOGRAPHY

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Procycling / January 2020

Cyclo-cross World Cup Koksijde, Belgium 24 NOVEMBER 2019 Mathieu van der Poel continues his run of cyclo-cross victories, on the famous sandy beachfront course at Koksijde. A bad start hadn't at all threatened his chances of victory - he'd started far back on the grid, thanks to not having ridden the US rounds of the World Cup, then a crash held him up. No matter, he simply carved his way patiently through the field, picking off riders one by one. It took about a lap, but he soon ended up in first position. He cantered to victory by 25 seconds over Belgium's Laurens Sweeck, with Toon Aerts in third,. The Dutchman's stats are becoming ever more impressive. Koksijde was his 33rd consecutive cross win in a run dating all the way back to November 2018's Koppenbergcross. The World Championships looks like a race for second place.

Image: Kristof Ramon

Procycling / January 2020 9

10 Procycling / January 2020

GALLERY

UCI Track World Cup Hong Kong 1 DECEMBER 2019 Roger Kluge throws his track mitt into the stands at the UCI's Track World Cup in Hong Kong, a gift to thank the crowd for the support he received while winning the Madison with regular partner Theo Reinhardt.

The pair have won the last two World Championships, and took victory in Hong Kong by outscoring their rivals consistently, then gaining a lap to underline their superiority.

New Zealand's Tom Sexton and Campbell Stewart were best of the rest, with GB in third. Kluge has successfully juggled road and track throughout his career.

He has an Olympic silver medal in the points race from 2008, European omnium and Madison titles and several national pursuit titles. On the road, he won a Giro d'Italia stage in 2016 while riding for IAM and he now rides for Lotto Soudal, for whom he finished the Tour de France last year.

Image: Getty Images

Procycling / January 2020 11

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Procycling / January 2020

GALLERY

Superprestige Cyclo-cross Zonhoven, Belgium 8 DECEMBER 2019 Zdenĕk Štybar of DeceuninckQuick Step slogs his way through the mud at Zonhoven in the fifth of eight rounds in the Dutch-Belgian Superprestige cyclo-cross series. The Czech rider, a former world champion in the discipline, now returns to his cyclo-cross roots to bolster his winter training for bigger priorities on the road. This time out, he could only finish 19th, four and a half minutes behind the winner Toon Aerts, who pushed Laurens Sweeck and Eli Iserbyt onto the second and third steps of the podium. Aerts also went into the lead in the overall classification, taking 15 points for his win and pushing one point clear of Sweeck, with three rounds left. Mathieu van der Poel was a DNS this time around, though his brother David represented the family name in ninth place.

Image: Cor Vos

Procycling / January 2020 13

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PROLOGUE PROCYCLING: AT THE HEART OF THE PELOTON

VUELTA 2020 ROUTE ANNOUNCED

Images: Getty Images

Vuelta’s 2020 vision: the suspense is back When it comes to the 2020 Vuelta a España, organisers Unipublic appear to have learned a key lesson from 2019, which even the most diehard of Sulprą#Urjolf#idqv#zrxog#dgplw#zdv# anything but the usual cliffhanger.

True, the first nine days of the 2019 Vuelta were hard fought and as the favourites traded blows through the mountains of Valencia, Teruel and all the way to Andorra, the GC battle stayed refreshingly open. However, placing a hefty 36km time trial on stage 10 in Pau gifted the 2019 Vuelta wr#Urjolf/#dw#urxjko|#kdoizd|1#Zlwk# the notable exceptions of the windravaged stage to Guadalajara and an impressive breakaway by Tadej

14 Procycling / January 2020

Pogacar through the mountains of Avila, the second half of last year’s race was humdrum.

Unipublic have watched and learned, and next September it should be a different story. In terms of reputation, the two monster summit finishes on the Tourmalet and Angliru, crowning short but very punchy mountain stages at the end of weeks one and two, are the key reference points of the 2020 route.

But the lesser-known assault on the Farrapona climb just 24 hours before the Angliru and the grand finale on the long ascent to the ski station at Covatilla on the final weekend also promise to be pivotal moments.

Strategically, though, what’s arguably more important is that, just

The fearsome climb of the Angliru last appeared in the Vuelta in 2017.

Alberto Contador was the stage winner

75 This will be the 75th edition of the Vuelta

like in the Tour, the Vuelta’s midrace time trial of 2019 is replaced by a ‘mixed’ TT on stage 16. There’s a long, flattish grind along the Galician coast to start with, and the wind could play a big role. But it finishes with a very steep final segment up the Ezaro dam. The scheduling of the TT is equally important: coming so late in the race, it shouldn’t produce such big gaps as Pau last year.

It’s true there’s a flat start, as was always going to be likely with a Dutch grand depart and indeed, after a team time trial, which will produce a fairly durable GC pecking order, the sprinters have around seven stages to play for. However, as soon as the Vuelta heads south to more familiar terrain, the climbers will be in their element, as usual in this race.

Stage 4’s ascent of Arrate, the Basque Country’s most emblematic climb, is not excessively hard, and San Miguel de Aralar, just 20km from the finish in Lekunberri on stage 5 and a steep, debut ascent of Laguna Negra de Vinuesa on stage 6 could

“I fought more against a team than an individual, more against Sky than Froome.

It was me against their philosophy” A l b e r t o C o n t a d o r t a l k s a b o u t h i s r i v a l r y w i t h c y c l i n g ’s b i g g e s t t e a m p a g e 6 8

break open the race’s GC battle. But for the first big time gaps, we’ll have to wait until the Tourmalet on stage 9, preceded by the Aubisque and the Portalet, and back in the Vuelta for the first time in 24 years and for the first time ever in the Spanish grand tour as a summit finish.

Tough climbing stages abound in the second week, with the midweek assault of the little-known 11km Moncalvillo likely to cause damage.

However, the Vuelta’s only backto-back summit finishes at La Farrapona on stage 14 and, above all, the Angliru on stage 15 represent the main challenges.

Back after a three-year absence, for all its prestige as Spain’s hardest summit finish, historically the Angliru has rarely established big differences between the top names.

An all-rounder could yet bounce back into contention in that stage 16 time trial, opening up the final week.

Last but not least of the mountains is stage 20’s ascent of La Covatilla.

Extremely technical at the bottom and toughest in its middle section, La Covatilla’s well surfaced, exposed switchbacks were where Dan Martin clinched his first grand tour stage win in 2011 and 2018 GC winner Simon Yates claimed the lead for the first time.

Two years later, whoever is in red at La Covatilla’s windswept summit will have la roja for keeps.

While an uphill time trial hasn’t been seen on a Vuelta route for 11 years and like in 2012, the Vuelta is run off almost entirely north of Madrid, the most unusual element of all is the race’s return to Portugal for the first time in 22 years, albeit for a fairly run-of-the-mill sprint stage in Porto on stage 18 and the stage 19 start in Viseu.

However, in many ways it’s business as usual for the 2020 Vuelta. With eight summit finishes, the same as 2019, the 2020 route contains all the ingredients needed for an attractively jittery and unpredictable race - and throwing that uphill time trial into the mix can only make the outcome even more uncertain. After 2019, nobody’s likely to complain about that.

The Col du Tourmalet is back in the Vuelta a España for the first time in 24 years and for the first time ever in the Spanish grand tour as a summit finish

2019 Vuelta winner Roglič benefitted from the mid-race time trial

2 0 2 0 V U E LTA S TA G E S STAGE DATE

START

FINISH

KM

1

Aug 14

Utrecht

Utrecht

23.3 km TTT

2

Aug 15

s’Hertogenbosch

Utrecht

181.6km

3

Aug 16

Breda

Breda

193km

4

Aug 18

Irún

Arrate

169.5km

5

Aug 19

Pamplona

Lekunberri

151km

6

Aug 20

Lodosa

La Laguna Negra de Vinuesa

163.8km

7

Aug 21

Garray

Ejea de los Caballeros

190km

8

Aug 22

Huesca

Sabiñanigo

185.5km

9

Aug 23

Biescas

Col du Tourmalet

135.6km

10

Aug 25

Vitoria

Villanueva de Valdegovia

160.4km

11

Aug 26

Logroño

Alto de Moncalvillo

164.5km

12

Aug 27

Castrillo del Val

Aguilar de Campoo

163.6km

13

Aug 28

Castro Urdiales

Suances

187.4km

14

Aug 29

Villaviciosa

Alto de la Farrapona

170.2km

15

Aug 30

Pola de Laviana

Alto del Angliru

109.2km

16

Sep 1

Muros

Ezaro

33.5km TT

17

Sep 2

Lugo

Ourense

205.8km

18

Sep 3

Mos

Porto

178km

19

Sep 4

Viseu

Ciudad Rodrigo

177.7km

20

Sep 5

Sequeros

Alto de la Covatilla

175.8km

21

Sep 6

La Zarzuela

Madrid

125.4km

NEXT ISSUE ON SALE 24.01.20

SOPHIE HURCOM DEPUTY EDITOR

SAME TEAM, NEW LOOK Bahrain-McLaren are here to “disrupt” the world of cycling. At least, that was the message coming out of the McLaren hub (also known as the McLaren Thought Leadership Centre) when the team unveiled their newlook team, kit and bike to the world in December in Surrey. What they are going to disrupt still remains to be seen, but considering the team only dates back to 2017 it’s not taken them long to undergo a radical overhaul.

In fact, you’d barely know this squad was the same one that has been racing the past three seasons and not just because the likes of Mark Cavendish, Mikel Landa and Wout Poels have come on board as the star riders, in place of Vincenzo Nibali and Rohan Dennis.

The swapping of title sponsors of Merida for McLaren may seem fairly straightforward, and Merida are even staying on board to supply the team’s bikes. But while Bahrain may still be the first name listed for the team, the balance of power has very clearly shifted away from the Arabic state in McLaren’s favour. Gone is the maroon red and navy kit (maroon is the colour of Bahrain’s flag) and in its place is a bright red and orange strip that harks back to McLaren’s F1 heritage. When the team began, the message coming out of the camp was all about the Bahraini royal family and their passion for cycling being the project’s driving force. This time around, Bahrain barely get a mention in any of the team press releases aside from a name-check for Sheikh Nasser.

Bahrain has faced criticism that it was trying to ‘sportswash’ its image by backing the team despite its record on human rights. Perhaps the Bahrain royal family is taking a step back in response to this. Bringing a powerhouse like McLaren on board is a coup, and their approach to innovation and technology as well as huge finances will no doubt bring significant benefits.

And by making the team all about McLaren and ‘disruption’, many might forget Bahrain is involved at all.

Procycling / January 2020 15

PROLOGUE

COMMUNIQUÉ N E W S

30 The age of Travis McCabe as he signed with Israel Cycling Academy, becoming one of the older first-timers in the WorldTour in 2020. The twotime US criterium champion has spent the majority of his career racing in North America and rode for Floyd's Pro Cycling in 2019.

“I would describe myself as a rookie"

Images: Getty Images

Rolf Aldag admits he has a lot to learn as he joins CanyonSram as a new directeur sportif, switching to the women's sport.

The German previously worked at Dimension Data, Quick Step and T-Mobile men's teams.

After the best season in their four-year existence so far in which they won 15 races, WNT Rotor will add manufacturer Ceratitzit as a new title sponsor in 2020.

Former pro Carmen Small also joins the team as a directeur sportif in the new year, after two years working at Team Virtu since retiring.

16 Procycling / January 2020

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G O S S I P

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C H A T T E R

“This trophy should be a cake that I can divide into equal pieces

”

Remco Evenepoel praises his team as he becomes the youngest ever winner of the Kristallen Fiets, awarded to the year's best Belgian rider

$349,363 Raised for Unicef by CCC Team, equating to a dollar donated for every kilometre that the team’s riders have raced and trained at WorldTour level this year. The squad has worn a Unicef badge on their kit all season, in honour of their fundraising.

Belgian Sofie De Vuyst faces an uncertain future as she awaits the results of her B-sample after testing positive for exogenous anabolic steroids in September. The 32-yearold, who won Brabantse Pilj in 2019, was suspended by her Parkhotel-Valkenburg team. She was also due to transfer to MitcheltonScott for 2020.

NO WAY FOR NORWAY Organisers of the Tour of Norway may put the race on hiatus in 2020 due to a budget shortfall. With the Arctic Tour of Norway, Hammer Stavanger and Ladies Tour of Norway all also sharing funding from the Norwegian government, the organisers of the six-stage race, due to be held in May, said they will focus on finances for 2021.

13

Riders aged 25 or under Team Ineos have on their roster for 2020, as Ethan Hayter, 21, and Brandon Rivera, 23, became their latest signings. Hayter is a British world track champion in the team pursuit and is focussed on riding the Tokyo Olympics, while Colombian Rivera is a childhood friend of Egan Bernal.

“THE TEAM I HAD A POSTER OF ON MY WALL WHEN I WAS A KID" The Hammer Series will be one event shorter next year. Hammer Limburg was pulled from the calendar, due to fixture congestion in June. As the Tokyo Olympics is taking place in August, races such as the Tour de France and Critérium du Dauphiné are all scheduled a week earlier than usual, meaning the Hammer Limburg has been squeezed out.

Sam Bennett’s childhood dream comes true as his long-awaited transfer to Deceuninck-Quick Step is finally confirmed. The Irish sprinter also takes friend and longtime team-mate Shane Archbold with him to his new team.

“My head is still down, that didn't get fixed in the crash” Chris Froome jokes with teammate Luke Rowe about his positioning on the bike, as he continues his recovery from a crash last June. Froome has ruled out racing at the Giro d'Italia in May, and is instead focussed on getting fit for a return to the Tour de France.

“ I was lying on really hot asphalt and it was just as if I was burning alive.

I can still perfectly remember that feeling. It seemed to last forever”

6

th

Tom Dumoulin’s result at the Scheveningen MTB Beachrace in the Netherlands, his first competitive outing since the Critérium du Dauphiné in June.

€50,000 The cost to local authorities of the Tour of Flanders racing through Geraardsbergen and up the Muur, a fee that’s so high it may result in the climb being removed in the future. The mayor of Geraardsbergen said the expense is too much, considering the climb now features almost 100km from the finish line.

Working from home Two-time Tour Down Under winner Stuart O’Grady is returning as the race's director from 2021.

The 46-year-old won the first-ever edition, held in and around his home city of Adelaide, in 1999 and followed it with a second win in 2001. O'Grady retired in 2013 and will learn the ropes from current race boss Mike Turtur this January.

Wout Van Aert recalls the pain he felt after he crashed into a barrier during the stage 13 time trial at the Tour de France. The Belgian was left with a deep wound to his right leg and only returned to racing in December.

“IT'D BE TOO RISKY IN A SPORTING SENSE IF WE WENT” Total Direct-Energie boss Jean-René Bernaudeau declines his team’s invite to the Giro d’Italia, citing the lack of depth in the squad to be competitive. The French team have entry to all WorldTour races in 2020, after topping the ProConti rankings this year.

Two of CanyonSram’s longest serving riders, Tiffany Cromwell and Hannah Barnes, have extended their contracts through 2020, with both turning their attention towards the Olympics. The duo joined Canyon when it launched in 2016, with Australian Cromwell having raced for the team's predecessor Specialized-Lululemon.

24

Years it’s taken for a Frenchman to be awarded the Vélo d’Or, as Julian Alaphilippe won the prestigious prize.

The award is typically given to the top performing rider of the year, and is voted for by a jury of journalists.

The last French winner was Laurent Jalabert, in 1995.

PROLOGUE

Q&A

SILVAN DILLIER Ag2r’s Swiss rouleur on cordon bleu and his second place at Paris-Roubaix last year hat’s your favourite race?

Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders are my favourite one-day races.

Maybe I prefer the Tour of Flanders because of the parcours but in ParisRoubaix I have so many good memories from last year, so I can’t leave that one on the side. In stage races, I really like the Tour de Suisse because it’s a home race and many of my family members come to watch and that’s always really special.

W

What’s your favourite climb?

I don’t have a favourite climb - I hate climbing! At home I don’t have real climbs, I just live in an area where it’s hilly. I could choose one climb at the Tour of Flanders - the Paterberg is one I really like.

Who is the best domestique in the peloton?

I know Mickey Schär quite well and he is always a guy who commits fully to go with his leader.

What’s the best prize you’ve won?

The cobblestone from Paris-Roubaix, even if it was just a little cobblestone [for second place in 2018], I have a special place for it at home. It’s somewhere I can see it all the time.

What would be your last meal?

I really love cordon bleu. If there is a guy or woman who can make me the best one on earth, I’d try that as my last meal.

What was the last app you downloaded?

It’s one I haven’t even used yet,

18 Procycling / January 2020

“The cobblestone from Paris-Roubaix, even if it was just a little cobblestone, I have a special place for it at home”

called Foodie.

It’s a camera application, maybe I can use it when I start my food blog.

What result are you proudest of?

The second place in Paris-Roubaix. Even though I’ve won other big races, and my performance in the other races were as important, ParisRoubaix is just one of the biggest races we have on our calendar. It’s maybe the hardest one-day race.

This makes even the second place more special. I think I have the capability of winning one of these races, but a lot of different ingredients need to be in place together at the right time. I know that the engine is there, but this

doesn’t really make it easier for the next race.

What’s the toughest day you’ve ever had on the bike?

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in my first year as a pro in 2014. It was raining but it was so cold it could snow. It was one of my hardest races, I was so freezing cold, and it was my first classic race. The day was super hard.

Most of the time I ask myself if I’ll later regret it if I was to stop; I’m not a guy who likes to abandon any races.

So I just keep pushing even if it’s not comfortable at all.

What’s the story behind one of your scars and how you got it?

I have two on my chin. One is from the Worlds Under 23 road race when the Worlds were in Copenhagen.

On the second last corner my front tyre came off and I fell over my handlebars straight on my chin.

Image: Getty Images

Who’s your funniest team-mate?

I laugh quite a lot with Larry Warbasse. This year I haven’t raced with him as much as I did when we were team-mates at BMC. Now we’ve regrouped again at Ag2r, and he’s a really funny guy.

PROLOGUE SCOUTING REPORT

ALEXANDER KONYCHEV The Italian-born son of a former Russian pro has classics potential Russo-Italian, last name Konychev.

We’re going to take a punt that Alexander is Dimitri’s son…

Right on the money. Konychev senior became the first Russian rider to ever win a grand tour stage at the Tour de France in 1990 riding for Italian squad Alfa Lum. He went on to win four in total as well as stages at the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España.

Since retirement, he’s been behind the wheel of the team car, recently as a directeur sportif at Katusha.

RIDER TYPE CLIMBER SPRINTER

Was he a natural?

Alexander dabbled in a mix of sports growing up, and played football most of his teenage years, but he eventually settled into cycling after going out for a ride with his father.

He started racing in 2015 and was soon getting noticeable results alongside other familiar names such as Mark Hirschi and Tadej Pogacar.

What are his best results?

Alexander had a couple of notable highlights in 2019 which helped secure his WorldTour contract. He won L’Etoile d’Or in France, the result of a last-minute escape that saw him win a couple of seconds ahead of the reduced peloton, while he enjoyed an attention-grabbing stint in a two-rider break at the European Champs U23 road race.

He was a stagiaire with Dimension Data and that went even better, with fourth place at Coppa Bernocchi and

PUNCHEUR

So Alexander is following in his father’s wheeltracks?

He is, as Alexander will be joining Mitchelton-Scott in 2020. Although unlike his father Alexander is an Italian national, not Russian, having been born in Verona and raised in his father’s adoptive country. The 21-year-old also didn’t always seem destined to follow his father’s path, having only taken up cycling five years ago.

ROULEUR Early days but Alexander looks good to win from small groups. We’re stans for his strength, speed and finesse

sixth at GP d’Isbergues shoulder-toshoulder with WorldTour riders.

What sort of rider is he?

He doesn’t seem to have entirely worked that out yet, although he has said he’s fast in sprints and he loves to attack. Mitchelton’s DS Matt White sees him slotting straight into their classics team. “What we see in him is potential,” White said. “He rides very well positioning-wise and he will work well with that classics and sprint group.”

Procycling picks three other WorldTour neopros in 2020 20 Procycling / January 2020

CHARLIE QUARTERMAN

ATTILIO VIVIANI

EINER RUBIO

The 21-year-old British U23 TT champ joins Trek after racing for their feeder team Leopard Pro Cycling. His two top 10s at the Baby Giro caught their attention.

Elia’s younger brother joins him at Cofidis, after racing with the team as a stagiaire. The Italian, 23, will play a team role and is already learning French.

The 21-year-old Colombian joins Movistar after a successful year as an amateur in Italy. Results include second at the Baby Giro and sixth at Il Piccolo Lombardia.

Image: Cor Vos (main)

THREE TO WATCH

PROLOGUE

OBJECTS OF DESIRE T H I S

M O N T H ’ S

E S S E N T I A L

G E A R

This beautifully crafted book looks back at the 1969 season of Eddy Merckx, described by the man himself as his peak year, when he won everything from San Remo to Flanders and the Tour, £65 | $80 www.lannoopublishers.com

Until the days start getting longer, this Buster 700 light from Sigma will help guide your way, £45.59 | $59.99 www.sigmasport.com

Look California-cool with these new ‘Renshaw’ sunglasses from American brand 100% which also happen to be designed with, and modelled by, Peter Sagan. This is the matte black pair but they also come in grey, gloss black and havana, £34.99 | $150 www.100percent.com

Images: Steve Sayers, Neil Godwin

Illustrated and sold by Manchester-based cyclist Gill, these prints from Pedalare will brighten up any home. There’s a vast array of designs, including pro racing themes like Marianne Vos or those that simply show off a love of cycling, from £10 | $13.15 www.pedalareshop.co.uk

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Procycling / January 2020

23

PROLOGUE

EXPERIENCE

STEVE CUMMINGS The maverick Briton reflects on what’s next as he calls time on his 15-year pro career

I didn’t want a fuss, I just wanted to stay quiet and in my own little world. But then I decided it wasn’t wise so I did an announcement.

I’m not prolific on social media but my mum sent me some stuff and I went on and had a little look I’ve had lots of messages and lots of positive, nice things. I’m a little bit surprised and overwhelmed by all the messages of support.

The last two seasons have been frustrating but also challenging; it’s also given me the opportunity to work on my life skills. I’ve tried to deal with things in a much more rounded way, whereas the younger me would have done it differently.

I feel like I’ve gone about things in the right way.

My numbers were the same as they had been when I was really winning. There are certain things that are out of my control, like injury; that do set you back and that’s part and parcel of cycling.

What I would say is as I’ve gotten older I’ve probably fractured more.

Those things take their toll and affect condition and consistency.

I fractured four vertebrae in my back on what was my last race at the Tour of Britain. The T2, T3, T4, T11 and two of them were compression fractures. I stayed one night in Arrowe Park then I got transferred to Walton Hospital which is kind of where my mum’s from. After 48 hours I had a brace

RIDER PROFILE Born The Wirral, England Age 38 Turned pro 2005 TEAM HISTORY 2005 LandbouwkredietColnago 2007 Discovery Channel 2008 Barloworld 2010 Sky 2012 BMC Racing 2015 MTN-Qhubeka CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 2012 first, stage, Vuelta a España 2014 first, Tour Mediterranéen 2015, 2016 first, stage, Tour de France 2016 first, stage, Tirreno-Adriatico 2016 first, stage Critérium du Dauphiné 2016 first, Tour of Britain 2017 first, National Championships

Make do and Mende: Cummings gets a breakthrough Tour win in 2015

and was allowed to move, but I played it down on going forward.

I had a check up a few weeks ago and thought I didn’t need the brace but it’s just taken a little longer.

There’s always a risk you’ll end up with curvature in your spine.

The last 18 months I’ve been working with someone from the English Institute of Sport, a lifestyle coach, which is what kicked off my studying for a degree in business sports management. I didn’t start working with her thinking I might retire, I just got to the point where I felt like I needed to stretch my brain. I want to be a good example for my daughter; it’s not like I can say to her, ‘Do your homework,’ if I never did a maths test in my life.

I’ve seen Chris Boardman, he’s down the road, and he’s been through the situation. I’ve seen Brad [Wiggins] a few times, he’s completely different, like an opposite character. I’m somewhere in between. I’ve been overwhelmed by messages from riders and ex-riders who wish you well and you realise you’re not alone.

As a cyclist we get many life lessons but sometimes you can’t articulate them. The studying is drawing that out of me, I can communicate things a bit better.

At the moment, I’m not enjoying it because we’ve got the two most difficult modules - economics and accounting. I’m not super interested in either one. I was much more interested in the team culture and leadership - that really resonates. I’m fascinated by that kind of stuff. Cycling is like a team sport for an individual and that’s kind of unique. Rugby and football are team sports; that presents a big challenge with cycling.

I think that’s an area you could work a lot on and improve things.

When I’ve been in the UK, initially when I was injured, they’ve been the best days of my life, just walking to school with my daughter, doing normal stuff.

I love it. It’s given me perspective that, God, I was so obsessed with riding. I could train for weeks on my own and hardly speak to anyone. It didn’t bother me.

There are obvious results you can pick out to be proud of but I think I’ve learned a lot of lessons. I’ve made a lot of mistakes but I think I’ve come out better than when I came into cycling. I’ve learned to deal with things better, I think I’ve enjoyed the process of learning, dealing with adversity. I’m doing something now where I’m going through every year of my career and all of a sudden I’m thinking, sh*t, I’ve broken a lot of bones, always one thing after the next.

Dealing with all of that stuff and coming out the other end always fighting. That’s a good lesson.

Images: Chris Auld (main), Getty Images

The decision to retire was out of my hands. When I was younger I always thought 38 would be a good age to stop. I didn’t want to stop, really, it’s just that the opportunity wasn’t there to continue.

Procycling / January 2020 25

PROLOGUE

PERSPECTIVES

THE ODDS IN YOUR FAVOUR JAMES PICCOLI REACHING THE WORLDTOUR IS STILL POSSIBLE FROM NORTH AMERICA

Illustration: Tim Marss. Image: Getty Images (Piccoli).

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he decision that I was going to be a pro cyclist happened on the bus back from class at university. I was disenchanted with studying and I wasn’t finding any meaning in what I was doing. I knew enough about cycling to know that the deck was stacked against me, that other kids had been racing for years and been on national development programmes and had race experience. But I didn’t care. I had already jumped down the rabbit hole.

Over the next couple of years, I buried my head and rode. I rode in the snow. I wore through training tyres.

I soaked my parent’s basement in sweat. I hustled, learned, read, studied, suffered. I reached out to teams and coaches. I got the same answer more times than I could count. “Sorry, but you aren’t good enough.

And you’re too old.” I vowed that if I ever made it that I would make it clear to everyone that it was against all odds. I got my face kicked in, time and time again.

By 2019, I was 27, living in Montréal and riding for Conti team Elevate/KHS. When my director Paul Abrahams asked me what I wanted in cycling, I told him my goal was to reach the WorldTour. But, as Paul said, Euro teams still had the belief that Europe was different to American racing. Narrower roads, deeper fields... It was frustrating to hear because I’m a fan of physiology. I knew that to win some of the hardest races in North America you needed to have an engine that was more than capable of competing in some of the big European races.

My team set the goal of winning every race we entered. There were no ‘B’ races, no form builders. We lost ourselves in the now. No one was thinking about our end-of-season goals, big races to come or next year. All we cared about was today. By August, out of the stage races that we started, we had finished second, second, first and second. I had won four stages, and every mountaintop finish that I started.

But, of course, European racing was still different.

My only shot to get attention was the Tour of Utah the top ranked home race my team would be starting where WorldTour teams would be present. I went up to altitude and trained like I had never trained before.

I rode 41 hours one week, got lean, and sharpened my sword. I was going to try and beat Goliath.

Procycling / January 2020

James Piccoli is a Canadian rider from Montréal who took up cycling in his 20s.

He’s raced mostly for Continental teams in North America since, but his win at the Tour of Utah propelled him into the spotlight and he signed for Israel Cycling Academy in the WorldTour for 2020

The funny thing about racing is that sometimes the strongest rider doesn’t win. The result was only partly in my control. Except for one part: the prologue. No tricks, no tactics, no bias. Everyone, from WorldTour stars to humble North American semi-pros, would race one at a time on the same stretch of road and the fastest time would win. A level playing field. We got to Utah early. I remember my team-mates laughing at me when I told them that I wanted to go out and recon the prologue course a third time.

And then race day came, and I kicked all their faces in. I won by six seconds on an eight-minute course.

It was my highest-ranking race win.

I had been in contact with Israel Cycling Academy for a while, but now I felt like I belonged. All of a sudden, other teams and managers were responding to my emails. All of a sudden I was worth responding to because I had beaten them. But ICA were the first to believe in me, and that showed me that they were worth taking the chance on. At the time that I agreed to join the team it wasn’t certain that they would be in the WorldTour in 2020, but I knew that ICA was the place for me regardless.

What’s so ironic is that despite punching my ticket that day, in a solitary event, there is no way I would have made any of this happen if it wasn’t for the amazing people at Elevate/KHS. Paul, my teammates, and all of our staff busted their asses for me all year to give me the shot that I needed, and I could have never taken the shot if it wasn’t for them.

And now, I’ve got to make them proud.

PROLOGUE

PRO DIARIES

this is not simply a job. It’s a lifestyle. It doesn’t end when you get home. Being a professional cyclist is a 24 hour a day job with nutrition and rest/recovery just as important as the time on the bike. It was tough to get the right balance.

As a father and husband I felt an instinctive obligation to bring up my children and protect my wife as she slipped deeper into exhaustion.

Multiple training camps away from home meant that I topped up on any missed sleep, and entered the season is good condition, and we then managed to get them sleeping through the night by early March a huge milestone.

However, being away so much means that I miss out on a lot of their progress. I have no idea how riders used to do it without smartphones. At least technology means that we can see and talk to our families while away and I have

DAN MARTIN U A E E M I R AT E S

s most of you know, I became a father, to twins, in September 2018. If you are holding down a job and cycling purely as a hobby or as a way of keeping fit, fitting in a bit of training here and there becomes tricky even with the most understanding partner. For a pro cyclist, however, there is no choice. The bike is my job and sometimes having a job with such flexible working hours makes this incredible period in life difficult.

I would have liked nothing more than to stay at home with our burgeoning little family, but they were born three weeks before one of my objectives: Il Lombardia.

I simply had to get out and ride. Of course I gave as much help as I could to my wife, but dealing with the guilt of spending hours out riding, and arriving home to two screaming babies was tough to handle.

Fortunately Jess, having been an athlete herself, gets the fact that

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been home for many of the milestones that are part of that first year: smiling, laughing, clapping, standing, scooting and even their first steps. It was almost like they knew that I was there.

Even now though, 15 months later, some days I find it hard to leave them while training. On long rides my mind is occupied. But then I turned a corner and realised that it is a form of motivation. If I am spending this much time away, let’s make it worthwhile, make every hour on the bike count. Every time I pin a number on needs to mean something and also make them proud. I’m going into 2020 more driven and motivated than ever, knowing I have my little threestrong support crew watching every minute, every kilometre of every race and that whatever the result, they will be just as happy and proud when I get home. DM

Dan’s relentless racing schedule means he misses out on time with his young family

2008

NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS Dan looks back fondly to his first year as a professional, to the only time he’s claimed the the Irish champion’s jersey

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eing national champion is a career highlight for any rider. In cycling it seems to mean so much more than it does in other sports, as your achievement is honoured and symbolised for a whole calendar year with a jersey. You can’t underestimate the amount of extra attention you receive, as you stand out from your trade team-mates.

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The year i won was my first as a professional, and I won in dominant fashion with a long solo breakaway which made it extra special. I had won the Route du Sud stage race in France the week before, so was clearly a favourite, but the nationals is always a tricky race to judge as that status means the top riders are heavily marked.

Ireland isn’t exactly the hilliest place. Added to that, my Tour de

France commitments prevent me from taking the start most years, so I haven’t managed to snag another year in an Irish jersey since. The nationals is just too close to the start of cycling’s main event to add in the extra travel and risk of racing, but I have fond memories of that year with shamrocks emblazoned all over me. I even still have the bike hanging in my garage!

Images: Getty Images. Illustration: David Despau

DAN’S GREATEST HITS

EYEWITNESS

PETER SAGAN

FAMOUS, IN SPITE OF HIMSELF The racing season may be over, but Peter Sagan’s year carried on with a visit to Colombia for the first Barranquilla Sagan Fondo. Matt Rendell went along to watch the enigmatic Slovak spreading his unique personal brand into a new market Writer Matt Rendell Photography Fabio Cuttica

Procycling / January 2020 31

EYEWITNESS

at in a plastic chair with his back to the slow brown river, Peter Sagan removes his glasses, helmet and shoes, and starts peeling off his gloves. The Magdalena river must be a mile across. No longer ploughed by the romantic paddle steamers depicted in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Colombia’s largest river flows 950 miles, reaching the Caribbean at Barranquilla, the country’s fourth city and largest port.

Sagan has just ridden 160km in 40-degree heat up and down a closed motorway, and he is not a happy man.

Who would be? Well, the thousand or so Colombian fans who joined him for the Barranquilla Sagan Fondo look pretty pleased. But for Sagan, who spent the dark, snowy nights of his childhood watching Slovakia’s ice hockey heroes on TV, it is far too hot and humid. There is nowhere to change, not even a towel to wrap around him. All he has been given is a pile of tiny flannels to wipe off the sweat.

Gabriele Uboldi, Sagan’s advisor, confidant, press manager and protector, humours him with infinite patience.

There is complicity between them: just when they seem to be at war, there is eye contact, a half-smile, and astral harmony is restored. Uboldi helps him remove his

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Procycling / January 2020

shirt and, as Sagan reveals his impressive limbs, it is hard not to think of Greek gods, or a renaissance sculpture: Moses, David, their remarkable features emphasised for greater impact. The hands, forearms, neck, torso, thighs, calves, feet, veins, are thick, powerful, somewhat superhuman.

The amateur riders, looking over at those powerful legs as they rode, can hardly not have reflected about the futility of attempting to compete with this astonishing creature.

Still, even his striking physical attributes cannot make the extreme heat tolerable. Nelson Soto, Barranquilla’s only professional rider, who rode for Caja Rural in 2018 and 2019, told me at the 2018 Vuelta a España: “At the race start in Málaga, everyone was complaining about the heat. It didn’t bother me. I was an apprentice welder in Barranquilla. Until you’ve worked as a welder in Barranquilla, you don’t know anything about heat.”

Peter Sagan is beginning to learn.

His close friend Fernando Gaviria did 100 kilometres or so and stepped off. No such luxury for the man with the naming rights, contract-bound to finish the task.

Accordingly, when the celestial sweat has been towelled off, Uboldi ushers Sagan onto the stage for the next task: the awards ceremony. The champion obeys, uncomplaining, but this much is clear: even without the infinite rounds of selfies and handshakes and smiles and autographs, being Peter Sagan is a fulltime job.

In a new, small nation-state like Slovakia, short on world champions and national heroes, a globally popular showman like Sagan must be as rare as a triple rainbow.

“Everybody in the street wants to shake your hand or take a selfie with you,” he says. “As there are only five million of us, I’m working my way through everyone.”

The three-time world champion is a long way from home. On the other hand, sports fans everywhere consume their heroes primarily on television. In the universe of the broadcast media, and in the imaginary worlds they foster, our sporting heroes are equidistant from us all, however near or far they might be in the Sagan’s 2019, green jersey aside, physical world. So was a relatively Sagan is as familiar in disappointing year

PETER SAGAN

of us, that is where the quandary lies, for the Peter Sagan who appears in public (perhaps we should put him in quotation marks: ‘Peter Sagan’) is both a fantastical beast and a hybrid, hewn from the divine marble by Uboldi and Lombardi into an expensive advertising mannequin for Bora, 100%, Diesel, and the rest. The engaging, entertaining showman is only in part the man himself.

To compound matters, as a Slovakian speaker with pretty good Italian and no more than passable English, Sagan is constantly being asked to express himself in a language he does not know well. As a result, there always seems to be an impermeable, frosted screen separating him from us. Hence the air of unknowability.

His recent book, My World, doesn’t help. Its cod-wise counselling with bland truisms it is difficult to argue with – “Time spent with the people you love most is never time wasted” or “Be kind to each other. Be careful with each other.

And live life every day” – do nothing to bring him any closer.

“Sometimes the best plans in the world are the simplest ones.” Yeah, thanks for that.

Colombia as Gaviria, Nairo Quintana or Egan Bernal, even to those with no idea what or where Bora, Hansgrohe or Slovakia are.

In any case, Barranquilla is well known in Colombia for its historic immigrant communities – Italian, Lebanese, Chinese – so the city’s Slovakian connection, which dates back only a few months to when Gran Fondo organiser Pablo González approached the mayor and offered him Colombia’s first Sagan Fondo, is perfectly in keeping with its spirit. The backstory to the event is simple: a few years ago, Sagan’s agent Giovanni Lombardi fell in love with a woman from the city of Cali in Southern Colombia. He and his Colombian partner Paola have been dividing their lives between homes in Monaco and Colombia ever since. At the Cali leg of the Ruta Colombia Gran Fondo series a year ago, Lombardi met the event organiser González. Together they hatched a plan to bring the Sagan Fondo series, which began with a gravel Gran Fondo in Truckee, California in 2018, to Colombia.

Sagan shoots the breeze with local hero Fernando Gaviria

This trip is Sagan’s third to the country: he went on holiday in October 2018, visiting Gaviria before taking in Medellín and then Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast. He returned in August 2019 to publicise the Barranquilla Sagan Fondo, and is back again now, being feted and photographed by euphoric Colombians.

In February 2020 he will return again, this time for a three-day altitude camp before Strade Bianche, with Maciej Bodnar, Oscar Gatto and Daniel Oss. While he sets off for the stage to hand out prizes, I find myself talking to Hervé Orny of the eyewear firm 100%, the producers of those gold-glass motocross goggles Sagan sometimes flaunts during his podium appearances. He tells me, “Peter has a very interesting portfolio of personal sponsors: he can afford not to do it for the money, so he goes with brands he genuinely likes.”

I ask: “Is it Peter, or is it Gabriel or Lomba?”

“It’s all the same,” Orny replies.

And perhaps it is, if you are a sponsor, and image is all that matters. For the rest

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he philosophy of cycling and victory expounded in My World is only slightly more insightful: “I’d rather lose a fantastic bike race than win a boring one,” “If I win, I win. If I crash, I crash. If I come 30th, I come 30th. I’ll still be Peter at the finish.”

The book’s leitmotif and, apparently, Sagan’s personal lemma is, ‘Why so serious?’ Yet Sagan’s mouth got no wider that a half-smile during his Barranquilla visit, although whether it was irony, exhaustion, or the contrast between his Central European reserve and the Colombians’ excitability was hard to tell.

After all, at a time of year when most professional cyclists are taking a wellearned rest from their draining schedule of international travel, he arrived there at the tail end of an exhausting trip: four days in San Diego with his bike sponsor Specialized for photo shoots and wind tunnel work, three days at the San Diego Sagan Fondo, three days of down time

Procycling / January 2020 33

PETER SAGAN

snatched from his busy schedule, then the Barranquilla trip.

Uboldi told me that the Sagan Fondo series is a long-term project being developed with thoughts of Sagan’s life after cycling – not, mind, that retirement is imminent. Even so, we know from My World that it is a prospect he has considered before. After the 2015 classics season, he tells us, aged 25, washed up, and a few months into what he calls “one of the most lucrative contracts the sport had ever seen”, he made up his mind to “turn up, ride, do my best, play my part, and after three years… retire and support my family comfortably for life.”

“In my mind,” he says, “I was already an ex-professional cyclist on the beach.”

Cycling will indeed miss Sagan whenever he does become an ex-professional. An instinctive showman, he may be the first cyclist in history to be inseparable in the public mind with a specific manoeuvre, his one-handed The Sagan Fondos are a chance for keen amateurs to ride with their hero

Even without the infinite rounds of selfies and handshakes and smiles and autographs, it’s clear being Peter Sagan is a full-time job wheelie, which kids the world over are mastering in imitative flattery. His Incredible Hulk, Forrest Gump, Wall Street Wolf and Hawaiian finishes, only ever used once each, are etched in the public mind.

Then there are the jerseys. Since his first victory in the Tour de France points competition in 2012, Sagan has been closely identified with items of clothing, so much so that he’s hardly ever been seen racing in his trade team kit. In the nine grand tours that he has completed, he has failed to win the points jersey in just two: each time in the Vuelta, where the points competition favours the climbers. He has

amassed seven green jerseys in the Tour de France: a record.

In 2015, he finished runner-up so many times he joked about getting a new jersey made for the rider with the most second places.

A brown jersey, perhaps. A year later, he targeted and won the inaugural European Road Championship and the associated jersey – which he wore for 30 seconds on the podium, and never again. Stage 1 of this year’s Tour was the first time he had ever been on the race start line in normal team kit, as he’d always been national or world champion before.

After stage 2 of the 2016 Tour, he wandered into the TV mixed zone wearing his newly acquired yellow jersey over the green, and the green over the world champion’s rainbow hoops. Lost, as so often in his presence, for a question with any real hope of eliciting anything more

Procycling / January 2020 37

EYEWITNESS

African influences in a way comparable to the Palenquero language, it is called the Congo. Filmed by the head of the city tourist board, Sagan delivers, in passable Colombian Spanish – to the delight of his hosts – a message to the world: “I’m Peter Sagan, and I invite you to Barranquilla Carnival.”

Afterwards, he stops before a poster explaining a traditional Colombian dance called Cumbia; it too combines African, European and Amerindian elements. He takes a moment to absorb the diagrams and the accompanying text. He will not be hurried. It is almost a protective gesture, a focusing of his own attention – if no one else’s – outside himself.

Earlier in the day, while sitting in the elegant, interwar-style bar of El Prado, the oldest hotel in Barranquilla, built in 1927 and, according to its manager, the first hotel in South America to have telephones in all the rooms, Uboldi mentioned that his wife preferred modern design to the hotel’s traditional style.

Sagan trained his huge pale eyes on him. “Why?” he said.

It was not a corrective, ‘Well, she is wrong,’ sort of why, but a sign of childlike curiosity. He wanted to understand.

Later, I mentioned how taken my wife had been with Sagan’s own country’s capital, Bratislava, during a summer city break.

Sagan’s response was not “Good,” or, “That’s nice,” but, again, “Why?” It was not an exasperated ‘Why?’ but an enquiry. He wanted an explanation.

Uboldi tells me, “I compile his daily schedule, and I know him so well I don’t need to run everything by him. But when I give it to him, he wants to know why.

He uses the word 200 times a day.”

As well as expressing a genuine interest in other people, Sagan’s ‘Why?’ seemed to me to be a means of deflecting attention that would otherwise be focused on himself onto something out there: substantive reasoning, actual information, the contents of other people’s characters.

The 100% humidity and heat made a gruelling environment

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ewind to the previous afternoon. Sagan is standing in Barranquilla’s Carnival House in Barrio Abajo (‘the neighbourhood beneath,’ ‘the low quarter’), one of the city’s oldest and most characteristic districts, and home to its Palenqueros descendants of Africans who escaped slavery and gathered in fortified refuges called palenques, where their different African tongues mixed and melded with the local variety of Spanish and elements of Portuguese (spoken by the slave traders who brought African slaves to South America in the seventeenth century), to produce a fascinating and unique creole.

This is a place to get lost in culture.

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The mayor’s office has invited Sagan to see the city. Hence his presence at the headquarters of the second largest carnival in Latin America after Rio de Janeiro, where masks and costumes are designed and constructed, and the fourday, seven-kilometre, 30,000 strong party-cum-procession is planned. When Sagan arrived a few minutes ago, he brushed past two women. He was probably oblivious to the remarkable and unique tongue in which they were conversing.

The Palenqueros are the heart and soul of the carnival, which showcases the local inclination towards creativity and exhibitionism. The head of cycling’s most creative exhibitionist is quickly adorned by one of the carnival’s most defining symbols: a gargantuan top hat something more than two foot high, decorated with densely packed, brightly coloured paper flowers and with a long red train that hangs behind the wearer’s neck and back.

Supposed by some to fuse European and

Images: Getty Images

than the usual amused puzzlement, I uttered something like, “I can still see the stripes.” He proudly lifted each jersey, one by one, revealing the one beneath.

It was probably as good an interview as I have ever achieved with him.

But we are not our clothes. Sagan’s many gestures and jerseys define him the way a trademark defines a product: they mask him more than they offer any sort of window on his soul.

Peter Sagan’s many gestures and jerseys define him the way a trademark defines a product: they mask him more than they offer any sort of window on his soul

PETER SAGAN

Something similar was at work in Sagan’s famous interview after winning the World Championships in Richmond, when he turned the conversation away from his victory to the refugee crisis in Europe.

“I felt some of the congratulations were getting a bit over the top,” he says in My World. “I wasn’t declaring myself to be an ambassador or anything, I just felt a bit uncomfortable that folk were lining up to kiss my feet while there was more important stuff going on in the world.”

In Barranquilla, Lombardi asked Sagan which of the peloton’s Colombian cyclists he spoke to the most.

“Apart from Gaviria? Nairo.”

“Egan, no?”

“No, Nairo.”

Selfie-conscious: Sagan faces endless Of course, for years, requests for photos Sagan and Quintana and autographs

appeared together in the protocol area of the Tour, Sagan to receive the green jersey, Quintana the white: 21 times at the 2013 and 2015 Tours de France alone. That Sagan’s coach Sylwester Szmyd is a friend and former team-mate of Quintana may be part of the connection between the two.

Szmyd and his wife went to Colombia for a honeymoon that Quintana organised down to the last detail. Sagan comments in his book, “He’s that type of guy.”

The phoneyness of celebrity places huge strains on thinking people, including both Sagan and Quintana. Already so wealthy that their children, and their children’s children, should not want for a living, it would be surprising if they were not already thinking of the back door out of their respective public personae. Of course, Colombia, unlike Slovakia, is

neither small nor new: it is, if anything, several different countries rolled into one – or, to quote a well known history of Colombia, ‘a nation in spite of itself’.

The high altitude plateau north of Bogotá where Quintana lives is just one of the many Colombias. The Caribbean coast, with its beaches, its colonial cities, its Afro-Colombian population and carnivals, is another very different Colombia.

For the four days of Barranquilla’s extraordinary carnival, the people of Barrio Abajo are said to abandon their own identity and assume in full the character represented by their carnival costume. Failure to do so is said to breach convention and incur the contempt of the people of the barrio.

I wonder how they would judge the enigmatic Peter Sagan?

Procycling / January 2020 39

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2010 - 2019 2010 - 2019

REVIEW OF THE DECADE The last 10 years have seen revolutionary changes in cycling and, of course, some great racing. Procycling looks back over the decade to pick out the biggest stories, the most exciting races and the riders who have defined the era Photography Chris Auld

2010

2011

Off on the wrong foot: Team Sky’s inauspicious first season

Why the 2011 Flanders was a classic race, and a bellwether for the sport

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2012 British cycling’s golden decade, and the cost of dominance

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2013 When Lance met Oprah: the defining chapter of cycling’s doping story

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2014 In pictures: the 10 most important riders of the decade

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2015 Best of enemies: Alberto Contador on his rivalry with Chris Froome

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2016

2017

The strongest team of the decade: how Boels changed the sport

Last of the patrons: why Boonen and Cancellara dominated the classics

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2018

2019

The greatest: the career of Marianne Vos, in numbers

Top stages: we pick the best days at the Tour de France this decade

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2010 2010 - 2019

TOO MUCH, TOO SOON

From a bold beginning to a solemn end, the 2010 season is the first, but often forgotten chapter in Team Sky’s decade-long existence.

Procycling looks back at how the team that turned into the all-conquering Ineos began WRITER: PAUL KNOTT IMAGES: GETT Y

Procycling / January 2020 43

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MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Milan-San Remo Tour of Flanders Paris-Roubaix

WINNER Óscar Freire Fabian Cancellara Fabian Cancellara

O n the morning of January 4 2010 a pack of press outlets gathered at Millbank Tower in central London to listen as Dave Brailsford unveiled his blockbuster Team Sky. Brailsford had assembled a squad made up of 26 riders from 13 nations, but it was the high-profile acquisition of Bradley Wiggins, poached mid-contract from Garmin-Sharp, that was the most attention grabbing of all. Wiggins’ signature was crucial to Brailsford’s bold plan to lead a British team, and a British rider, to Tour de France glory for the first time ever within just five years.

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TEAM Rabobank Saxo Bank Saxo Bank

MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Championships RR Il Lombardia

WINNER Alexander Vinokourov Thor Hushovd Philippe Gilbert

TEAM Astana Norway Omega Pharma-Lotto

on the British Cycling Academy and two years on the junior programme so they were like my cycling family. When they said it was going to be realistic for 2010 I was really interested.”

While a lot of eyes were on Sky’s launch, even more were on the team as they lined up for their first race at the Tour Down Under a few weeks later; Sky needed to make a big impression. Swift was deployed there for his first assignment, alongside a British core of Russell Downing, future multiple grand tour winner Chris Froome Ben Swift and an Australasian make-up of Greg Henderson, Chris Sutton and Mat Hayman.

Today, we know Sky (now Ineos) as the Italian Davide Viganò was the wild card. grand tour superpower of the last decade.

The squad seemed to gel immediately.

Brailsford got his wish to win the Tour with Henderson and Sutton took a one-two a British rider in 2012 with Wiggins, a feat finish at the Cancer Council Helpline that the team has duly repeated five times Classic circuit race, for Sky’s unofficial since with Chris Froome and then Geraint first win. Then, at the Tour Down Under, Thomas. So against this, it’s easy to forget Sutton got the ball rolling for real, winning that Sky’s inaugural season consisted more stage 6 in Adelaide, combining again of the team grasping the ropes of the with Henderson in second, with the New WorldTour and learning from defeat and Zealander also finishing on the overall disappointment rather than it being an podium in third. So far so good. instant success.

At the Tour of Qatar weeks later, Wiggins Sky’s first squad was arguably a bit of made his debut and spearheaded the team a mismatch. Half were aged 30 or over, to a victory in their first team time trial and while there were strong, - a vindication, perhaps, after their reliable riders there was not futuristic skinsuits and aero necessarily a host of proven helmets raised eyebrows winners - the likes of Simon from others in the peloton Gerrans and Edvald Boasson who mostly took a more Victories in Sky’s first Hagen aside. Still the longtraditional approach to the year, the fifth best in term goal was to foster British discipline up to then. More the WorldTour talent, and among the eight wins followed at the Tour of Brits was a then 23-year-old Ben Oman, before Juán Antonio Swift. He jumped at the chance to Flecha rounded off a dream first few join a home team, and broke his contract months by securing a memorable solo win with Katusha, as Wiggins did at Garmin. at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. Downing was “When I found out Team Sky was one of Flecha’s key lieutenants that day. actually happening, a British team with “I felt as though it worked well that a lot of British riders, it was a bit of a pipe season and I didn’t see any issues or any dream and was something that was too of the big fallouts from the races I went to, good to pass up.” Swift tells Procycling. where we had good fun,” he remembers.

“I remember sitting down with Rod [Ellingworth], Dave and Shane [Sutton] THE TOUR OR NOTHING during my first Giro d’Italia [in 2009] which was quite a big Yet the goal of winning the Tour had always experience itself. been the primary aim and much of Sky’s Sutton kicks things off for Sky with their I’d been under their season was always going to be judged first ever victory at the wing for three years on how well they performed there, Tour Down Under

“When I found out Team Sky was actually happening, a British team with a lot of British riders, it was something that was too good to pass up”

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GRAND TOURS Giro d’Italia Tour de France Vuelta a España

WINNER Ivan Basso Andy Schleck Vincenzo Nibali

TEAM Liquigas-Dolmo Saxo Bank Liquigas-Dolmo

“I’ve become part of an elite group of riders who can win grand tours, but I don’t want to change as a person.”

Vincenzo Nibali as he wins his first grand tour title at the Vuelta a España, aged 26

THE DECADE IN DEPTH

EVERPRESENTS & NEW ENTRIES

particularly after Brailsford had poached Wiggins to break his contract with Garmin-Sharp. The idea was for Wiggins to replicate his 2009 season, where he finished fourth in the Tour, by riding the Giro d’Italia first in the hope it would prove fruitful again, especially with the addition of Sky’s ‘marginal gains’ mantra.

“I remember at the start there being lots and lots of meetings.” Steve Cummings, who joined Sky from Barloworld, tells Procycling. “It was heavy stuff. When you have 28 riders in a room discussing little things like rain bags and things like who was going to clean the helmets after a race, was it the riders responsibility or soigneurs - it became too much. That was the detail they were going in to, it was a good philosophy but I just don’t know whether it was executed properly.”

Wiggins won the Giro prologue in Amsterdam to take the first pink jersey. As

Image: Offside (Giro d’Italia)

Wiggins takes a celebratory glug after winning the Giro’s first pink jersey

the race progressed he held a top 10 position on GC, but when they hit the high mountains he shifted his focus to the Tour and slid back to 40th overall.

By the end of June, Sky had 15 victories including a stage win at the Critérium du Dauphiné courtesy of Edvald Boasson Hagen. Add in the strong showing at the Giro from Wiggins, and Sky went into the Tour with high hopes. Could the team live up to the hype they placed on themselves?

But another Dutch grand départ, this time in Rotterdam, led to the first hiccup in what would end as a disappointing Tour campaign. In a bid to avoid the inclementlooking weather, Sky sent Wiggins out early to ride the 8.9km prologue, while all the other GC contenders opted for later in the session. The decision proved costly.

“They went into such detail about these things, all the teams do it, but the weather is pretty hard to predict to the minute like they were trying to do,” Cummings recalls.

“In the end, he went off in the wet and it

In 2019, there were 18 WorldTour teams in total. Of these, 12 have been permanent fixtures in cycling’s top division through the whole decade: Ag2r La Mondiale, Astana, Deceuninck-Quick Step, EF Education First, Groupama-FDJ, Lotto Soudal, Movistar, Ineos, Jumbo-Visma, Katusha-Alpecin, Trek-Segafredo and UAE Emirates.

Some of these are complicated. EF, for example, were Garmin in 2010, absorbed the Cervélo Test Team in 2011 and merged with Cannondale in 2015. RadioShack 2010 merged with Leopard-Trek at the end of 2011 and begat what eventually became Trek-Segafredo. In other cases, teams have changed sponsors Sky to Ineos, Caisse d’Epargne to Movistar, Rabobank via Belkin and LottoNL to Jumbo-Visma. And some teams are exactly the same: Ag2r, Astana, Lotto...

In total, there have been 27 WorldTour teams this decade, with varying levels of longevity. BMC joined the WorldTour in 2011, and are now CCC. Vacansoleil lasted for three years between 2011 and 2013.

The most recent new entries have been Bahrain (changing to McLaren for 2020) and Bora-Hansgrohe, for whom 2019 was their third season at the top.

Despite cycling often self-criticising for its lack of stability, the fact two thirds of the teams who rode in the WorldTour in 2019 were all present at the start of the decade suggests that a certain amount of durability is baked into the system. Not only that, but of those 12 ever-presents, six were top-level teams in the 2000 season.

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WOMEN’S RACES Trofeo Alfredo Binda Tour of Flanders Flèche Wallonne

WINNER Marianne Vos Grace Verbeke Emma Pooley

was dry in the end and they all got it wrong.

Their thinking behind it was good, but it is a chance you take.”

Wiggins came home 56 seconds behind stage winner Fabian Cancellara and dropped time on his GC rivals; the team were already on the back foot on day one.

Their brash predictions appeared arrogant.

As the race moved into the mountains, it was clear Wiggins was not at the level he expected to be. On stage 8, he rolled in 1:45 down on stage winner Andy Schleck, and conceded another 4:53 the following day to Saint Jean de Maurienne. Wiggins eventually finished 24th overall, and didn’t even place as the highest Sky rider as Thomas Löfkvist came home in 17th.

Perhaps the grand expectations, big budget and unique ideas spiralling around may have distracted the team from focusing on the basics of the racing.

“We were just doing too much I think,” Geraint Thomas tells Procycling. “We had these little tents which pumped hot air in like a sauna for rest days so you could still have more of a sweat, makeshift ice baths and we were just trying to do all these little things but I think we did too much of it really. I think that was the biggest learning curve because we were trying to do Sky tried to beat the elements during the everything and Tour opening TT, but too much of it.” made the wrong call

TEAM Nederland Bloeit Lotto Ladies Team Cervélo Test Team

WOMEN’S RACES Giro Rosa GP Plouay World Championships RR

DEVELOPMENT PHASE

WINNER Mara Abbott Emma Pooley Giorgia Bronzini

TEAM P’nut Butter & Co-Twenty12 Cervélo Test Team Safi-Pasta Zara

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the team car a year later.

He believes the team had After a disappointing and to go through that phase perhaps reaffirming debut of development to reach Bradley Wiggins’ GC Tour, harsh questions were the level they are now at. result at Sky’s first being asked about the team “I think we became better Tour in 2010 and its leader. But then the after a few years because we Vuelta a España gave perspective created a culture which is not of where cycling stood in the overall something you can force. It is like the scheme of life. Team soigneur Txema All Blacks in rugby. Originally the team Gonzalez was admitted to hospital didn’t have it, they had fantastic coaches, with a stomach virus but subsequently, great management and great riders but to suddenly, passed away - news that sent say, ‘Let’s win the Tour,’ that is actually shockwaves through the team. a big task,” Portal says.

“We were all heartbroken,” Swift, who “But after a few years you fail and make was with the team at the Vuelta, says. mistakes, and then you win and analyse “The team made the right call to pull out how you win and you create this culture and bring everybody home and a lot of and know what worked one year wasn’t us went over to Vitoria in the Basque always going to work for the next year.”

Country to Txema’s funeral. It was a hard Thomas agrees the first year wasn’t memory and a hard moment to live with, entirely a success: “There were some but I think it shows how strong of a group good riders there but there were a few we got in such a short period of time.” flops as well,” he says. “It wasn’t like In a season which saw them achieve a wasted year because I think the team 22 race wins – the fifth most among the learned a hell of a lot, but it certainly WorldTour teams and a greater number wasn’t what they wanted.” than more seasoned outfits such as Perhaps confirmation of this: by the Rabobank, Euskaltel-Euskadi and Quick end of 2011, 13 of the 26 riders who had Step - to say that Sky’s initiation into the stood in Millbank Tower at Sky’s launch sport was a failure is far from the truth. had left the team and moved on. The Sports director Nico Portal was one legacy of Sky’s first year wasn’t perhaps of the original Sky riders back in 2010, in the results, but rather in the lessons before he switched to behind the wheel of that were learned.

THE FORGOTTEN RIDERS Among Sky’s first roster were some surprising names who didn’t quite make their mark on the squad

DAVIDE VIGANO (2010)

KJELL CARLSTRÖM (2010-11)

JOHN-LEE AUGUSTYN (2010)

Spent a sole season with the British team, with his best result a fourth place finish on the final stage of the Volta a Catalunya. Went on to bounce around the pro peloton at Leopard-Trek, Lampre-Merida, Caja Rural and Team Idea before retiring in 2016 with Androni Giocattoli-Sidermec.

The former Liquigas rider and four-times Finnish road race champion took Paris-Nice stage honours in 2008 before joining the British outfit.

Carlström, 34, rode the 2010 Vuelta a Espana and 2011 Giro d’Italia with Sky before retiring from the sport at the end of that season.

A sixth place finish on the Kitzbüheler Horn stage in the 2010 Tour of Austria was the best result for the South African, who suffered an injuryplagued stint with Sky. A hip operation in his second season limited him to just one race in 2011, before he retired from ongoing injury issues in 2014.

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THE GREAT RACE The 2011 Tour of Flanders pitted an epic crushing attack

by Fabian Cancellara against the wiles and race craft of Nick Nuyens. But this race, the last to finish in Ninove, also represented the way cycling changes and adapts WRITER Edward Pickering

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MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Milan-San Remo Tour of Flanders Paris-Roubaix

WINNER Matthew Goss Nick Nuyens Johan Vansummeren

here was a moment early on in the 2011 Tour of Flanders when it looked as if the race had been killed stone dead.

The trigger had pulled by Fabian Cancellara, the reigning champion. In 2010, 12 months previously, he and Tom Boonen had attacked over the Molenberg with 45km to go, then he’d dispatched the Belgian on the Muur in such violent fashion that even now, almost a decade later, there’s a vociferous corner of the internet occupied by motor-doping truthers convinced that there was more than muscle power turning his pedals. Twelve months on, it looked like history might repeat itself.

In fact, it looked as if Cancellara would crush the opposition even more decisively.

It had been Boonen who started the move, using the drag out of the Haaghoek cobbles to attack, taking Cancellara with him.

But as the pair picked their way through a group of previous escapees on the Leberg, Cancellara surged and Boonen was unable to match him. Boonen got marooned with a group who had no intention of helping him close the gap to Cancellara, while the Swiss set about reducing the gap between himself and Boonen’s team-mate Sylvain Chavanel, alone at the front, and the rest of the race. (What Boonen had been doing attacking when he’d had a team-mate up the road is uncertain, but, he had ample opportunity to reflect on the wisdom of his manoeuvre, as Cancellara disappeared over the horizon.) By Tenbossestraat, the 16th of 18 bergs and 15km after Cancellara’s attack, the gap between Cancellara and Chavanel and a 50-strong peloton was 65 seconds.

It looked like the race was over. However, we are sometimes guilty in cycling of mistaking this year’s race for last.

Sometimes riders do this as well.

TEAM HTC-Highroad Saxo Bank Garmin-Cervélo

MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Championships RR Il Lombardia

WINNER Philippe Gilbert Mark Cavendish Oliver Zaugg

TEAM Omega Pharma-Lotto Great Britain Leopard Trek

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Johan Museeuw was still cast in the same tough, Flemish mould as the original 'flandrien' Briek Schotte, who won twice in the 1940s France held the late Raymond Poulidor to understand that. When the Tour visits a town, it often wheels out the local expro to present the jerseys. The showers of Paris-Roubaix and the bends of Alpe d’Huez are decorated with plaques listing previous winners. The Tour of Flanders even has its own museum, in which a stack of cobbles is arranged, each with the name of a winner.

Usually, this is an asset - cycling’s traditions are part of the sport’s marketing.

In the case of the Tour of Flanders, this is manifested in a celebration of the tough and gritty nature of racing on cobbles – the Tour may be contested by bronzed, slight figures who can dance up the mountains but the cobbled classics are for broadshouldered thugs with square jaws and an imperviousness to bad weather. The riders who dominated in the early years of the

race were known as the ‘Flandriens’ a description of their Flemish roots, but also taken to encompass their stoicism, toughness and humility. The Belgian races are special, and the fact that they are horrible to ride is part of the appeal.

We can look at the faces of the riders in the modern peloton, covered in mud thrown up from the road, and those of the ‘Flandriens’ of the 1940s and 1950s, and see that what connects them is much stronger than what separates them. So Johan Museeuw, who won the Ronde three times in the 1990s, might have had a modern bike and a modern pay packet, but he was still cast in the same tough, Flemish mould as the original ‘Flandrien’, Briek Schotte, who won twice in the 1940s.

Cycling’s traditions are also a political football. Modernisers suggest that the sport, funded for much of its existence

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Image: Getty Images

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ycling, more than any other sport, lives in both the present and the past. You only have to look at the esteem with which the Tour de

Cancellara accelerates on the Leberg and drops his rival Boonen

“Watching the Tour de France in 1991 and seeing Indurain win planted a seed in my head. That seed grew and grew.”

GRAND TOURS Giro d'Italia Tour de France Vuelta a España

WINNER Michele Scarponi Cadel Evans Chris Froome

TEAM Lampre-ISD BMC Racing Team Sky

C a d e l E v a n s d e l i g h t s i n b e c o m i n g A u s t r a l i a ' s f i r s t e v e r To u r w i n n e r

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The climb up the Muur was a key part of the Flanders finale in 2011

top half of the Kwaremont climb. If you wanted a convenient metaphor for the priorities of the organisers – the money or the race – you might look no further than the Kwaremont. Andreas Klier, a former runner-up in the Tour of Flanders and the DS in the car of Alberto Bettiol, the winning rider in 2019, said that the hospitality tents had even changed the nature of the climb.

The prevailing southwest wind used to blow across the drag to the top of the Kwaremont, making it a very difficult point in the race; these days the crosswind has been taken out of the equation by the tents. Any big football club knows that the corporate seats bring in more money, but at the cost of atmosphere – the question is, where should the balance be?

Tradition is a funny Nuyens was the unexpected winner thing in cycling, after he outfoxed however. You could say the favourites

that the traditional Muur-Bosberg-Ninove finish was one of the defining aspects of the race, yet the race only started finishing in Ninove in 1973 after more than half a century in various suburbs of Gent. The Bosberg didn’t appear until 1975, and the race took different routes up and over the Muur until settling in 1998. Nothing is ever set in stone in bike racing. hich brings us back to 2011. The resemblance to 2010 lasted for precisely 15km after Cancellara’s attack, before he got a real-life lesson in how things can change, in spite of seeming to be set in stone. The Greek myths teach us that hubris is always punished with retribution by nemesis. In this case Cancellara’s nemesis came in the red and black colours of BMC, along with a mild case of the bonk.

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Images: Getty Images

by sponsors who wanted to bask in the reflected success of winning riders and by generous benefactors, needs a new business model and new sources of money if it is to survive and prosper.

The 2011 Tour of Flanders sat exactly on this fault line between cycling’s past and its present. It happened to be the last held using the ‘traditional’ finale, which climbed the Muur and Bosberg en route to the finish in Ninove. When it was announced that the 2012 race and those after it would feature a new route, based around laps and climbing the Oude Kwaremont multiple times, and finishing in Oudenaarde, purists were outraged.

A mock funeral procession, featuring a coffin carrying, presumably, the corpse of the race, was held on the Muur.

Of course, the decision by Flanders Classics, who own the race, was partly a financial one and a deliberately modernising one. Ninove’s contract for hosting the finish was up, Oudenaarde had bid the most attractive sum to replace it, and - related - there was a dispute about the city of Geraardsbergen, above which sits the Muur, setting up hospitality tents independently of the race. The new structure initially avoided Geraardsbergen altogether and allowed Flanders Classics to establish their own, presumably lucrative, hospitality tents in the fields alongside the

WOMEN'S RACES Trofeo Alfredo Binda Tour of Flanders Flèche Wallonne

WINNER Emma Pooley Annemiek van Vleuten Marianne Vos

The Swiss rider’s Leopard-Trek team missed a feed and it took Cancellara several kilometres to get a bottle, leaving him short of energy. Though the peloton was only about 50 riders strong and most of the leaders were by now quite isolated, seven of BMC’s eight riders had made it.

Nobody else had the numbers or strength to make headway, so they got to work and Cancellara’s lead, which had peaked at over a minute, melted away as he and Chavanel climbed through Geraardsbergen to the foot of the Muur. Just when it seemed the race had gone away, it came back together, and then, incredibly, detonated again under pressure from Cancellara.

As the leading riders made contact, he went away again, pulling a small group clear, then another small group, and then another couple of riders, until eventually, on the approach to the Bosberg, a dozen riders coalesced into a group at the front.

A rolling bar-room brawl ensued: Philippe Gilbert attacked on the Bosberg and went clear, but was chased down in a desperate pursuit. Alessandro Ballan tried next. Then Nick Nuyens, briefly.

Then Geraint Thomas. Then Juan Antonio Flecha. Then Sebastian Langeveld. None could get away; each was chased down.

The crucial attack came with just over three kilometres to go, from Cancellara, chased in turn by Chavanel and Nuyens.

The move simultaneously killed the chances of both Cancellara and Boonen.

Boonen was the best sprinter, but was left stuck with the pursuers while his team-mate Chavanel, who’d spent a huge amount of energy in 100km worth of escape had little chance in the sprint. Cancellara was also vulnerable – not to Chavanel but to fast finisher Nuyens, who’d been hidden for virtually the whole race and was barely mentioned by the commentators until the finishing straight, where he made short work of his rivals.

Nuyens’s victory reminded us that bike races are not always won by the strongest rider and that tactics, patience and a little bit of luck give the sport multiple levels of nuance that wouldn’t exist if it were a pure test of strength. It doesn’t always play well

TEAM Garmin Cervélo Nederland bloeit Nederland bloeit

WOMEN'S RACES Giro Rosa GP Plouay World Championships RR

WINNER Marianne Vos Annemiek van Vleuten Girogia Bronzini

TEAM Nederland bloeit Nederland bloeit Forno D'Asolo

the Swiss attacks, but the victory went not to either of these two, but to Nuyens, who showed a politician’s understanding of his rivals’ vulnerabilities and timing rather than super strength in epic weather.

However, Nuyens’s win told us a lot about bike racing. On a granular level, there was that reminder that a strong head will often trump strong legs. But it also reflected the continuing tension in the sport between tradition and modernity.

The history of the classics is rich with tales of the tough, gritty cobbled races, and the tough, stoic characters who win them.

Yet Nuyens didn’t fit that stereotype at all. He has a degree in media science and communication and his parents worked in the diamond industry. Then again, his grandparents were farmers. Sometimes old and new coexist quite happily in cycling.

Nuyens' victory reminded us that bike races are not always won by the strongest rider with the winner’s peers or the public – Boonen sniffed that Nuyens had hidden away for the whole race, and when the readers of Het Nieuwsblad were polled in 2013 about their favourite editions of the Ronde, the two that received the most votes were 1985, when Eric Vanderaerden won in horrendous conditions, and 1969 when Eddy Merckx won in equally horrendous conditions. In those races, the strongest riders had overcome terrible weather and won alone. In 2011, Chavanel and Cancellara had provided the epic dimension, with the length of the Frenchman’s break, and the sheer force of

Nuyens (c), Cancellara and Chavanel sprint head-to-head

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MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES WINNER Milan-San Remo Simon Gerrans Tour of Flanders Tom Boonen Paris-Roubaix Tom Boonen

TEAM Orica GreenEdge Omega Pharma-Quick Step Omega Pharma-Quick Step

MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Championships RR Il Lombardia

WINNER Maxim Iglinskiy Philippe Gilbert Joaquim Rodríguez

TEAM Astana Belgium Katusha

WINNER Ryder Hesjedal Bradley Wiggins Alberto Contador

TEAM Garmin-Cervélo Team Sky Saxo Bank-Tinkoff Bank

“Right, we’re just going to draw the raffle numbers... Have a safe journey home. Don’t get too drunk” B r a d l e y W i g g i n s m y s t i f i e s t h e F r e n c h c r o w d s w i t h h i s To u r v i c t o r y s p e e c h o n t h e C h a m p s - E l y s é e s

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WRITER Edward Pickering // IMAGE Getty Images

Th e s u m m e r of 2012 wa s a p e ri o d of h a l cyo n d ays fo r B riti s h cyc l i n g . B ut a l o n g with th e g l o ry, th e re h a s a l so b e en a pe rsiste nt m ias m a of ru m o u rs a n d sca n d a l . What d o e s it a l l m e a n?

FIELD OF DREAMS

WOMEN'S RACES Trofeo Alfredo Binda Tour of Flanders Flèche Wallonne

WINNER Marianne Vos Judith Arndt Evelyn Stevens

he very pinnacle of British cycling came at 5:23pm on July 22 2012 in Paris. There, on the front of the bunch as the Tour de France approached the ChampsÉlysées, was the race’s winner-elect Bradley Wiggins, in full cry, leading out Sky sprinter Mark Cavendish, who by the way, was the world champion. Wiggins, who always looked beautiful on the bike, never looked so powerful and confident as in that moment; Cavendish was ready to sprint, tense, full of electricity and potential energy.

The summer sun gave the colours – Wiggins’s yellow, Cavendish’s rainbow stripes - such sharpness and intensity that it felt like the moment was trying to burn itself into our memories. The Parisian sun warmed our backs, while the kid from Kilburn winning the yellow jersey warmed our hearts.

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Wiggins enjoys his lap of honour in Paris before setting off for London 2012

For every good news story, there have been shades of grey and a feeling that the narrative is not to be taken at face value

TEAM Rabobank Orica-AIS Specialized-Lululemon

WOMEN'S RACES Giro Rosa GP Plouay World Championships RR

Not long afterwards, Cavendish and Wiggins celebrated their respective wins – Cavendish the stage, Wiggins the Tour – on the podium midway down the Champs-Élysées.

Wiggins cracked jokes and basked awkwardly but knowingly in the adulation of his public. Newspapers in the UK provided cut-out sideburns in homage. Just five days later, on July 27, he rang the Olympic Bell, cast in bronze for the event, to open the London Games in front of an audience of countless millions while the entire country burst with pride. Five days further on again, Wiggins won a gold medal in the time trial – he’d been beaten by hours in the race to provide the host country’s first gold of the Games by the women’s coxless pairs, but his victory felt like destiny, for Britain and for cycling.

There’ll never be another summer like it, and British cycling will never again know those heights.

According to Greek mythology, the Elysian Fields - the ChampsÉlysées - were where the righteous and the heroic went to enjoy a blessed afterlife. In the Aeneid, Virgil describes how Aeneas travelled to the underworld and met his dead father in Elysium, and Aeneas’s descendants would build Rome and the Roman Empire.

You don’t have to be a historian to know that the Roman Empire, like all empires, eventually fell, and the years since 2012 have changed the sport’s outlook on the achievements of that summer.

There was no blessed afterlife for the heroes of 2012. f course, not everybody is a fan of Team Ineos. Even Wiggins’s Tour win for Sky was not universally admired, especially outside the UK, where fans were not surfing the same wave of patriotic pride as the Brits.

2012 was year zero in the team’s

Images: Getty Images (Romandie)

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WINNER Marianne Vos Marianne Vos Marianne Vos

TEAM Rabobank Rabobank Netherlands

domination of the Tour, and the more aesthetically inclined cycling fans were left cold by their calculating style and their method of buying strong riders to ride defensively. There has been little romantic about Sky and Ineos’s approach to racing, and the journalist Lionel Birnie at the time compared their 2012 Tour as being like an engineer’s diagram, when some fans just want to enjoy a beautiful oil painting.

That’s all fine. Some fans like unpredictability and exciting racing while others are more excited by the feeling of winning. It might not be hugely engaging to watch a line of Ineos domestiques dragging the dwindling front group up mountains in the Tour, but it’s probably more bearable if it’s your men doing it.

But these are all questions of taste. A lot else has changed since 2012. Since Wiggins’s win, British riders have won five more Tours, and Team Sky, now Ineos, six. But it’s not just the fact that it’s almost become routine for Brits to win the Tour de France that has changed things. Chris Froome’s wins were arguably superior to that of Wiggins on a purely sporting level, but the novelty, timing and surprise were all part of the alchemy in 2012, while Froome never captured the imagination of fans in the same way as his former team-mate.

Geraint Thomas’s boy-next-door demeanour recaptured some of the magic in 2018, and the Welsh fans embraced him as much as the nation as a whole had done with Wiggins six years previously, but it wasn’t quite the same.

If the decade 2010 to 2020 is to be summed up in cycling, it has indisputably been the decade of Sky and of the rise of British cycling.

But that rise came at a cost, which is still being counted. For every good news story – Wiggins, Froome,

BRITISH SUCCESS

Thomas, Bernal, Ventoux 2013, the supertuck descent, the running man, six yellow jerseys and, let’s not forget, two red and one pink, the last of which was taken in one of the most audacious GC attacks ever – there have been blurred edges, shades of grey, cover-ups, scandals and a general feeling that the Sky, Ineos and British cycling narrative is not to be taken at face value. The hiring of Geert Leinders; the wholesale sacking of riders and staff who turned out to be incompatible with the team’s stated – and naive – policy of zero tolerance on past doping infractions; Jonathan TiernanLocke’s bio-passport; the Fancy Bears leak of Wiggins’s grand tour TUEs, which included details of his usage of triamcinolone; mysterious jiffy bags; Gianni Moscon’s racist conduct; the saga of Froome’s salbutamol test, a result later overturned by the UCI; allegations of bullying by Shane Sutton; the ongoing Dr Richard Freeaman story; the discarding of athletes who didn’t make the grade; the blurred lines between Team GB

and Sky in the early years. These stories have been first denied as issues then explained at convoluted and sometimes contradictory length. There’s enough plausible deniability in every one of these, and dozens of other smaller stories, for it to be theoretically possible that Sky/Ineos and Team GB have been nothing but blameless, at best a little naive. But there has been so much smoke around the team that it’s hard not to conclude that at some points, there have been fires.

hen they started out in 2010, Sky were mocked for some of their ideas – a beacon on top of their team bus so that riders could find it after a stage, overthinking their research into weather conditions for prologue starting times, erecting an opaque wall around their TT warm-ups which prevented fans from seeing the riders... Later ideas like the team sleeping in campervans were kiboshed by race organisers. But their philosophy, and it has contributed to their

Wiggins is held aloft by his Sky team-mates on the Champs-Élysées

success significantly, has been to break down every process into its elements and painstakingly improve them. The phrase ‘accumulation of marginal gains’ is so cheesy that it is only really used ironically these days, but Ineos still apply the philosophy, even if they talk about it less. Of course, there’s nothing marginal about the gains acquired by buying genuine grand tour contenders and burning them up as domestiques, but the team has the funding to do everything obsessively, so they do.

Sometimes they have been given credit for things they didn’t even invent themselves. Theirs was not the first mountain train – US Postal’s reputation will never recover from the doping revelations, but they refined the tactic of riding on the front up the climbs a decade before Sky. A lot was made of Wiggins and Froome sitting behind a line of domestiques deep into the finale of sprint stages, but Cadel Evans did exactly that with his BMC team when he won the Tour in 2011.

However, overall, Sky/Ineos’s obsessive, expensive attention to detail has been imitated by every serious team. Movistar have experimented less happily with stacking their roster with grand tour contenders; Jumbo-Visma have done the same with more success so far. As the team enters the 2020s with as big a budget and with ambitions as big as ever, perhaps Ineos’s biggest win has been the change they have forced on to the peloton as a whole.

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B R I TA I N ’ S G R A N D T O U R W I N S RIDER Bradley Wiggins Chris Froome Chris Froome Chris Froome Chris Froome Chris Froome Chris Froome Chris Froome Geraint Thomas Simon Yates

RACE TOUR DE FRANCE VUELTA A ESPAÑA TOUR DE FRANCE TOUR DE FRANCE TOUR DE FRANCE TOUR DE FRANCE VUELTA A ESPAÑA GIRO D’ITALIA TOUR DE FRANCE VUELTA A ESPAÑA

YEAR 2012 2011 2013 2015 2016 2017 2017 2018 2018 2018

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MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Milan-San Remo Tour of Flanders Paris-Roubaix

WINNER Gerald Ciolek Fabian Cancellara Fabian Cancellara

TEAM MTN-Qhubeka Radioshack-Leopard Radioshack-Leopard

MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Championships RR Il Lombardia

WINNER Dan Martin Rui Costa Joaquim Rodríguez

TEAM Garmin-Sharp Portugal Katusha

L A N C E A R M ST R O N G

IN A LONELY PLACE I t w il l s o o n b e a d e c a d e s i n c e L a n c e A r m s t r o n g c o n f e s s e d h i s s i n s, b u t w h i l e t h e fa l l e n c h a m p i o n h a s r e - e s t a b l i s h e d h i s w e a l t h a n d b u i l t a n e w m e d i a p r o f i l e, h o w m u c h h a s r e a l l y c h a n g e d ?

WRITER Jeremy Whittle // IMAGE Gett y Images

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mma O’Reilly is sitting in a room above a pub in Brighton in Sussex, describing the decadelong stress pains in her chest and shoulders that suddenly lifted on the night that Lance Armstrong confessed to doping. O’Reilly, one of the first of the Armstrong inner circle to break ranks and reveal the truth about the Texan, was long isolated in classic whistleblower’s no man’s land, caught between her former workmates and those who wanted to exploit her secrets to bring down the champion. That, as O’Reilly now acknowledges, was a lonely place.

On one side, Armstrong and his team manager Johan Bruyneel, doing everything to make her life hell; on the other, journalists pressing her on her obligation to the truth while, she felt, making promises they couldn’t keep.

In the end, however, it was not O’Reilly, or any one voice in the wilderness, but the power of the crowd that overwhelmed Armstrong. It was the steady drip-drip of allegation and rumour, the whispers that became screams, the numerous investigations and exposés that finally culminated in the USADA report and his televised confession.

Armstrong’s carefully weighed-up reveal to Oprah Winfrey on January 17, 2013, was a damage limitation exercise that sent a tsunami through cycling, antidoping and the sports media. Blunt, blank and monosyllabic, the seven-time Tour winner burned his reputation in just a few minutes as he answered in the affirmative to every single one of Oprah’s questions on his use of PEDs, throughout all seven of his Tour de France wins.

While it wasn’t Frost-Nixon, the Oprah confession was also a media sensation

that spawned a post-Lance industry. It sent his long-suffering detractors into a vengeful and zealous frenzy, spawned books and documentaries, chat shows, lecture tours and Hollywood premieres, and it left the doping deniers who’d backed him slipping into the shadows, pretending to have never known him.

Armstrong was rounded on and condemned. Now, it was he who found friends hard to find. Yet O’Reilly, once labeled an alcoholic and a whore by Armstrong, was surprisingly forgiving, as was Christophe Bassons, whose promising career was driven over a cliff by the bullying American at the 1999 Tour.

Forgiveness was much harder for others, particularly Greg and Kathy LeMond and Betsy and Frankie Andreu, who had suffered financially by speaking out and who had long railed against Armstrong and those who supported him.

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GRAND TOURS Giro d'Italia Tour de France Vuelta a España

WINNER Vincenzo Nibali Chris Froome Chris Horner

TEAM Astana Team Sky Radioshack-Leopard

WOMEN'S RACES Trofeo Alfredo Binda Tour of Flanders Flèche Wallonne

WINNER Elisa Longo Borghini Marianne Vos Marianne Vos

TEAM Hitec Products Rabobank-Liv Giant Rabobank-Liv Giant

Armstrong admits to doping during his career on TV to Oprah Winfrey

Forty-something Lance is peak Lance, grizzled, spat out by the machine, kicked down the road, older and wiser and now back on prime time sports as NBC's analyst And me? At first, as I sat and watched Oprah, I felt for him, disarmed after all those years as ‘Robocop’ by the crack in his voice, the occasionally brimming eyes, the face tight with shame and humiliation. For once, he seemed alltoo human. The camera caught Oprah’s pained look, as if she was watching a once-magnificent beast, brought to its knees, thrashing in its final moments.

“Were you a bully?” she asked him quietly, as if she recognised that an appetite for performance enhancement was one thing, but a desire to ruin other people’s lives to protect your own secrets was something much darker.

“Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly.

For some people, Armstrong’s confession played well. The direct responses, the darting anxious eyes,

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the sense of disbelief and detachment from the monster he had become, allied to memories of ‘good’ Lance, cancer survivor and charity hero, triggered some sympathy. For many, it seemed as if cycling had, in one fell swoop, been cleansed of its sins. Now the sport could move on. But for others it felt like a complete sham and a disappointment.

“This is gonna be a long process for him,” Betsy Andreu said on CNN, “but he’s approaching it the wrong way.”

Armstrong’s downfall took the pressure off, for a while. Scepticism towards Team Sky in 2012 and 2013 was waved away with indignant outrage at the unfairness of being tarred with the same brush. “We are the one picking the pieces up and having to convince people,” Bradley Wiggins protested in 2012.

Confessing to Oprah, as often with Armstrong, was a pragmatic business decision. “I was going to get sued by everybody,” he told me when we met in Austin in 2015. “I was going to get deposed and they were going to ask those questions a thousand times. That’s why I did it.

I’d rather do that, bad as it was, or bad as it ended up, somewhat on my terms.”

Even when confessing his sins, Armstrong was still prioritising his own needs. “My business manager, Bart, has a perspective on the Oprah interview that I think is pretty spot on,” he said. “He says that for the diehard cycling fan Oprah didn’t say enough, didn’t burn anybody or name names, but that for most people, it was way too much, because all they heard was blood bags, EPO, doping.

“It was either not enough or too much,” Armstrong said. “In the end, everybody was pissed off.”

THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION Now, the revelations of 2013 seem a long time ago, the cheating of Generation EPO almost innocent in its nature. With so many other reputations tarnished and tainted by doping revelations during the intervening years, Armstrong has been cut a lot of slack. List the many other scandals from Russia, to FIFA, to Salazar, and Armstrong’s misdemeanours have been put into context. Even now, he remains probably the world’s most famous cyclist, instantly recognisable, followed by millions on Twitter and still grudgingly admired by many.

The redemption story, the years of introspection and therapy, the lines around his eyes, the salt and pepper hair all of that probably makes him even more rounded and marketable than ever before.

Forty-something Lance is peak Lance, grizzled, spat out by the machine, kicked down the road, older and wiser and now back on prime time sports as NBC’s expert analyst during the 2019 Tour.

That, in itself, is a contradiction. Asked by numerous journalists, including NBC,

WINNER Mara Abbott Marianne Vos Marianne Vos

if he thinks cycling is cleaner, he almost always shrugs and says something like: “I’m too distant from the sport.”

It’s a change of perspective from that day in Austin, when the battered-andbruised Armstrong was disarmingly blunt. “We now know all these guys operate the same - the UCI, the IAAF, FIFA,” he said of doping scandals. “They’re sitting on this stuff thinking, ‘If we nuke this, our sport is burned to the ground.’”

Such a cynical perspective might not sit so well with a resurgent media profile, founded on The Move, his increasingly popular podcast. The reality of course is that his name, his infamy and his notoriety, remain box office. Meanwhile, O’Reilly, Bassons, Betsy and Frankie, Filippo Simeoni - the ‘little people’ in the Armstrong saga - carry on running their small businesses, watching him rebuild his empire.

Armstrong has always been smart.

Before he negotiated his settlement with the government, in the whistleblower’s lawsuit taken out in conjunction with Floyd Landis, he scouted around for The 2005 Tour de France was the last investments, to of Armstrong's safeguard his and his seven wins

TEAM Exergy Twenty16 Rabobank-Liv Giant Netherlands

“What I did at the Vuelta has never been done before... That’s the best result cycling has seen in a long, long time”

family’s future. Now, a speculative early stake in Uber has become a fortune that is on a par with anything he earned during his racing days. It’s an amount that makes the $5 million settlement look like loose change. Armstrong described the multimillion dollar windfall - estimated to be in the region of $50 million and by others to be more - as “too good to be true”.

Personally, I’m fine with families being saved, although it would be good to know where the initial investment funds, presumably past career earnings, came from. But then I never agreed with the lifetime ban. To me, that ban was effectively based on his bad behaviour, not on his doping. The entire Russian sporting community has just been handed a mere four-year ban by WADA for what was effectively state doping.

How can Armstrong’s case be worse?

Yet the Armstrong story was never only about doping, but instead, like those of Harvey Weinstein and Prince Andrew, about power and the abuse of power.

Armstrong curated and fuelled a toxic star-culture of complicity and deference - remember the zipped lips gesture? - that rendered him almost invulnerable, as long as he retained the

Chris Horner on defying convention to become the oldest grand tour winner aged 41

power to decide the fate of his critics and line the pockets of his sponsors. Was he scapegoated by a sport that desperately needed to improve its image and be cleansed of its sins? Probably.

STRONG-ARMING THE ENEMY The biggest question, is his contrition genuine, remains unanswerable. Only he knows. There have been clues, however.

In the spring of 2019, I finished assisting Jonathan Vaughters, Armstrong’s former team-mate, with his autobiography on racing, his descent into doping and, crucially, his decision to come clean.

Vaughters had been highly influential in bringing other ex-Armstrong associates to Travis Tygart and USADA’s table when they pulled together all the damning testimony that blew the myth apart.

Knowing how bitter the long-standing feud between the pair was, I felt sure that Armstrong, even all these years later, would react negatively to my involvement.

But I also felt that all that contrition and self-searching, might ensure that bygones would be bygones. I was wrong.

It came mid-July, during the 2019 Tour.

“You write this JV book?” Armstrong emailed bluntly, out of the blue.

“No, he did,” I replied. “I helped with the editing.” There was a pause.

“Who’s the publisher?” he asked before adding a little pointedly, “And more importantly, the legal counsel?”

Now that tone I knew oh-so-well. There you are, back again, Big Tex, I thought, putting the frighteners on the little people.

How’s the therapy working out for you?

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Images: Getty Images, Offside Sports Photography (right).

WOMEN'S RACES Giro Rosa GP Plouay World Championships RR

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THE 10 RIDERS OF THE DECADE

IN AN ERA OF AMAZING PERFORMANCES, SOME RIDERS STILL STAND OUT ABOVE THE OTHERS. WE PICK THE 10 RIDERS WHO DEFINED THE DECADE Images by Getty Images*

PHILIPPE GILBERT Has won every monument except San Remo, along with the Worlds, making him the one-day rider with the broadest palmarès. Now stands just that Primavera victory away from cycling immortality, and one of the greatest ever achievements in the sport

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CHRIS FROOME The grand tour rider of the decade, with four Tour wins plus a Giro and two Vueltas, putting him joint fourth on the all-time list. His assets: climbing, time trialling, improvising and never giving up. But he was also bolstered by the most efficient grand tour-winning team in history

ALEJANDRO VALVERDE Even in his late 30s, he won big titles: his 2018 Worlds win capped a career in which he dominated the Ardennes, with four Liège wins and five at Flèche. Also a perennial high finisher in the grand tours, with 19 top 10s in total, plus three Catalunya and two Dauphiné wins, and five victories in his home Ruta del Sol

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MARIANNE VOS Undisputedly the greatest female rider of the century and arguably of all time. The stats speak for themselves: she’s one good season away from breaching 300 wins, and she has more than twice as many victories as any other current rider. An illness-hit 2015 is the only blot on her palmarès, but doesn’t at all detract from the Dutchwoman’s greatness

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MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Milan-San Remo Tour of Flanders Paris-Roubaix

WINNER Alexander Kristoff Fabian Cancellara Niki Terpstra

VINCENZO NIBALI One of just two current grand tour winners to also have won a monument. Nibali is one of only seven riders to have ever won all three of the Giro, Tour and Vuelta, and he’s also taken wins in Milan-San Remo and Lombardy. The Italian is obviously strong, but also adds an element of tactical finesse to his wins which makes him one of the most entertaining riders in the peloton

TEAM Katusha Trek Factory Racing Omega Pharma-Quick Step

MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Championships RR Il Lombardia

WINNER Simon Gerrans Michał Kwiatkowski Dan Martin

TEAM Orica GreenEdge Poland Garmin-Sharp

GRAND TOURS Giro d’Italia Tour de France Vuelta a España

WINNER Nairo Quintana Vincenzo Nibali Alberto Contador

TEAM Movistar Astana Tinkoff-Saxo

“Everyone watching on TV knows what happened. I came down the Stelvio on a bike on the same roads as everybody else.”

Nairo Quintana responds to accusations of taking advantage of a neutralised stage at the Giro

TOM BOONEN Built his career as a bunch sprinter, but the Belgian’s true talents lay in the cobbled classics. 2012 was his high point, with wins in E3, GentWevelgem, Flanders and Roubaix, and he’s the joint or sole record holder for wins in every one of those races. Also took a Worlds win in 2005, and a green jersey in the 2007 Tour

MARK CAVENDISH Far and away the most successful sprinter the sport has ever known. The wins have dried up a little in the last few illness and injury-hit seasons, but 30 Tour stage wins, along with a world road race title, 15 Giro stages and three Vuelta stages, plus a grand slam of grand tour points jerseys cannot be argued with

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WOMENS RACES Trofeo Alfredo Binda Tour of Flanders Flèche Wallonne

PETER SAGAN His career is probably around halfway done, and he already has a Flanders and Roubaix win to his name, along with a record-equalling three Worlds victories. Comes into his own at the Tour de France, where his unique consistency has gained him a dozen stage wins, seven green jerseys and 64 top fives out of 135 stages

FABIAN CANCELLARA Shared roughly the same number of classics wins as Tom Boonen, but it was the quality of Cancellara’s wins that stood out. His solo wins in Roubaix and Flanders were indisputable demonstrations of the strongest rider in the race crushing the field. His Milan-San Remo and four World TT titles proved his versatility

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WINNER Emma Johansson Ellen van Dijk Pauline Ferrand-Prévot

TEAM Orica-AIS Boels-Dolmans Rabobank-Liv

WOMENS RACES Giro Rosa GP Plouay World Championships RR

WINNER Marianne Vos Lucinda Brand Pauline Ferrand-Prévot

TEAM Rabo-Liv Rabo-Liv France

ALBERTO CONTADOR The doping ban and stripped titles mar his record, but Contador remains one of only two riders in history, along with Bernard Hinault, to have won each grand tour at least twice. Faced with Chris Froome, he couldn’t find the dominant form of his earlier career, but his aggressive style of racing won him many fans

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T I TA N S Alberto Contador was on e of Ch ris Froome’s most dangerous rivals.

Now retired, the Spaniard talks to Procycling about their differences, why Froome is so strong, and why power meters should be banned INTERVIEW: Alasdair Fotheringham // IMAGES: Getty Images

PRO CYC LI NG : What people remember the most about you is how you fought against Chris Froome...

ALBERTO CONTADOR: To be honest, I fought more against a team than an individual, I fought more against Sky than Froome, unlike when I was battling, say, against Andy Schleck.

It was me against fighting against their philosophy of racing. Sky’s way of racing forced me to change my training methods; from 2014 I started training at altitude and I got a lot of wins that year.

Do you think the fact that Sky had so many financial resources gave them an unfair advantage?

One thing is undeniable: this is the same situation as Barcelona or Real Madrid in football. The more money you have, the higher quality riders you can buy. It doesn’t just depend on that. You’ve got to have the resources and the right preparation. But if you can put in eight top-level riders for the Dauphiné and eight top-level riders in the Tour de Suisse at the same time, you will have a line-up for the Tour that’s absolutely outstanding and even be leaving a large number of amazing riders on the bench for July.

Other teams struggle to find eight great names for the Tour and maybe include one or two run-of-the-mill riders just to make up the numbers.

And if you could have signed one Sky ‘support’ rider from Froome, who would it have been?

[Thinks for a long time]. Richie Porte.

When he was in Sky there were days he was going better than Froome.

Wout Poels is another one, and wkhuh#duh#vr#pdq|#lq#Vn|#0#Plfkdô## Kwiatkowski, Geraint Thomas… but I’d sign Porte.

Would you agree that when Sky has been on the back foot, their weakest point has been strategic rather than physical? Like when Froome was caught out in the 2013 Tour in the Pyrenees or during your attack at Formigal in the 2016 Vuelta?

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Contador (l) was a constant attacking thorn in the side of Chris Froome

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WINNER John Degenkolb Alexander Kristoff John Degenkolb

Image: Offside (Giro d’Italia)

I think Sky’s biggest handicap was that initially their knowledge of racing successfully was based on what the British had done on the track. They lacked tactical knowhow for road racing scenarios, and sometimes the gaps in that knowledge remained unplugged for a very long time years, even. Of course they had some riders who were old hands at road racing, but some of them were not so experienced.

With time, they’ve gradually covered those gaps and it’s now very rare for Ineos to get caught out.

Another weak point of Froome’s is the cold. But he’s been a rider who’s mainly targeted the Tour, where it’s nearly always hot, and that’s been to his advantage.

When Froome’s in difficulty, is there anything that tells you he’s on the back foot, or vulnerable?

In 2015, Contador won his final grand tour, the Giro, beating Astana’s Aru and Landa

In retirement, Contador has been an outspoken commentator on the sport

TEAM Giant-Alpecin Katusha Giant-Alpecin

MAJOR ONE-DAY RACES Liège-Bastogne-Liège World Championships RR Il Lombardia

No. In that particular area, Froome is one of the strangest riders I’ve ever come across.

When he is going up a climb, often he gets dropped early on but little by little he fights back. I remember in Ancares in the Vuelta in 2014, Joaquim Rodríguez attacked, then Alejandro Valverde went for it and I opted to stay with Chris as he fell back behind.

First we caught Purito [Rodríguez], then we caught Valverde and a kilometre from the top, I attacked and I could win. It’s a very

WINNER Alejandro Valverde Peter Sagan Vincenzo Nibali

TEAM Movistar Slovakia Astana

different style to mine, but obviously it gave him some excellent results.

I remember in the 2013 Tour or Dauphiné I’d attack because I thought he was having an off-day and then he’d end up catching me and dropping me. The first time he did that to me I wasn’t so upset, but the second time he turned the tables on me again, I told myself not to fall into the same trap.

People tend to distinguish between the ‘Team Sky method’ and the ‘Alberto Contador method’ by saying Sky raced a lot with their heads and you raced a lot with your heart. But what you might call your comeback win after your ban, at Fuente Dé in the 2012 Vuelta a España, was a victory where strategy mattered a great deal and you used your teammates like Sergio Paulinho wisely...

Well it wasn’t that planned; that was something I thought up in a minute flat in the race itself. The stage was going flat out and Garmin, I think, were really killing

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“That was nice. Something to tell the kids.

‘Your dad was sh*t at Paris-Roubaix, but he was leading the main group at one stage’” Bradley Wiggins didn’t get the win at Roubaix, but went on the attack on the cobbles in his last race for Sky in 2015

GRAND TOURS Giro d’Italia Tour de France Vuelta a España

WINNER Alberto Contador Chris Froome Fabio Aru

TEAM Tinkoff-Saxo Team Sky Astana

THE DECADE IN DEPTH

STANNARD GANGS UP ON QUICK STEP One of the golden rules of cycling is that riders working together should beat an individual. Another golden rule is that a team who has the fastest sprinter in a group should work to ensure a sprint. One last golden rule is that you don’t beat Quick Step on the cobbles in spring.

So when the situation with an hour to go in the 2015 Omloop Het Nieuwsblad was: three Quick Step riders, Tom Boonen, Niki Terpstra and Stijn Vandenbergh, away and clear with Sky’s Ian Stannard, the question was, could Stannard at least salvage a podium place?

Quick Step held all the cards. Maybe Terpstra could attack and force Stannard to chase, setting up Vandenbergh for the counter. Or vice versa. Either way, Boonen could sit on Stannard and easily outsprint him. However, they should have been more cognisant of the fact that the three Quick Step riders had to ride hard for most of that final hour, to hold off a committed pursuit behind.

“Then things went kind of bananas,” Boonen would later tell Procycling.

With 5km to go, Boonen attacked, which was tactically the wrong thing to do. Stannard covered, then Terpstra attacked. This time, Vandenbergh accelerated, which was even more tactically the wrong thing to do. This meant that all three Quick Step riders had just fired a bullet, on top of already being tired, and sensing opportunity, Stannard attacked. Only Terpstra, a slower sprinter than the Brit, could follow, and Stannard duly tucked him away in the sprint. Sometimes bad luck comes in threes.

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us all at the front. My legs were hurting like hell but I thought, okay, if my legs are hurting, how bad are everybody else’s?

We got to the climb where it all kicked off and I decided I’d have a go. I’d already told my team-mates to get in the break, I bridged and it worked out well. It’s true that when I did those kinds of attacks, I did them on instinct but I also knew that on climbs of 10 per cent or more, I had a wattsper-kilo ratio that it was hard to equal. So if I could go for it that hard on a climb that difficult, I knew I’d break up the entire race.

Given you took that win at Fuente Dé in 2012, and then closed out your career with another summit win in the Angliru, did it feel like you had come full circle?

It was the end of a career that every professional dreams of having. For the fans, too, it wasn’t just about the Angliru in that year’s Vuelta. Every day, even on the transition stages, where there was the remotest opportunity to try and break up the race, I took it. That’s cycling and that’s what people want to see. It’s been two years since I retired, but people still come up to me in the street and thank me for that Vuelta - they enjoyed it so much.

As for the Giro d’Italia, after a first week of injuries and crashes was 2015 the toughest of your grand tour wins?

It was the one where I had to fight the most individually because the team wasn’t very strong and there were plenty of days when there’d be 40 or 50km left to race and I’d be isolated. It took a lot of concentration Astana were very strong with Fabio Aru and Mikel Landa and I had to keep my eyes open all the time. The stage up the Mortirolo was where I was on the limit; I think it was the hardest day I ever had in my career.

Then on the last day in the mountains, when both Landa and Aru went on the attack, it looked like you were going to lose the Giro at the last minute.

I didn’t have a bad day physically, I was really suffering from allergies. It had been a very windy, cloudy, overcast day and my breathing was seriously affected by those conditions. I just couldn’t get past 80 per

cent of my full power level, but fortunately, although it looked like I was cracking, I knew if I could keep going at 300 watts, it would be hard for them to make up four minutes on me. The weather was always important for me in other ways: when I attacked it was nearly always rainy or it had rained the day before.