Ride Velo 2016 Highlights

With political turmoil and the sad death of some of the greats of the music, art and entertainment world, 2016 seemed a bit bleak at times. But, as HG Wells once said, “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair of the future of the human race.” So, while the year had its tricky moments, we were lucky enough at Ride Velo to see plenty of adults (and children) on bikes as well as ride a few ourselves. Here are some of our highlights of the year.

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Ride Strong: Conditioning for Cyclists

Yes it's that time of year again where, wracked with guilt for the excesses of the party season, we make our new year's resolutions to get fit and firm. Some of us will be signing up for sportives and endurance cycling challenges, and here at Ride Velo, we're about to book our third Etape du Tour race in the French Alps this summer. So we were very interested when Bloomsbury Publishing asked us to review their latest training guide: Ride Strong Essential Conditioning for Cyclists - what better way to plan our cycling goals for 2017?

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Wiggins Bows Out But Leaves a Tarnished Legacy

As Bradley Wiggins ‘hangs up his lycra’ as The Times put it today you would expect that it would be an opportunity to celebrate his outstanding lifetime achievements as the most decorated British Olympian, breaker of the Hour record and the first Briton to ever win the Tour de France. Sadly, for any British cycling fan, if we’re going to be absolutely honest with ourselves, any retrospective of his career has to be tainted by the TUE revelations that came out this year and the unconvincing stories and explanations behind ‘that package’ delivered to him at the 2011 Dauphiné.

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Happy Christmas from Ride Vélo!

It seems that cyclists love Christmas! Twitter, Facebook and the internet have been bombarded by Christmas messages, videos and pictures from everyday cyclists as well as the professionals.  As we wish you a Happy Christmas from Ride Vélo we bring you a selection of some of our favourites.

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What To Do If You Get Knocked Off Your Bike

The Guardian released a video yesterday which showed Chris Grayling, the minister for Transport, swinging open a car door into the path of a cyclist, knocking him off as a result. Ironically, it was only a few weeks ago that he told the Evening Standard that segregated cycle lanes “cause too much of a problem for road users.” If there had been a cycle lane he’d have been less likely to have knocked the cyclist off.

“Dooring” is a hazard that many cyclists will have had some experience of, either having to swerve to avoid it or actually colliding with a vehicle as in this case. But whose fault is it and what should you do if it happens to you?

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Best Cyclist's Christmas Stocking Fillers

Only 10 sleeps until Christmas, but it's not too late to fill your loved one's cycling stockings. Forget boring bike lights and unimaginative inner tubes, we give you our top selections from a year's hard graft trawling bike shows and reviewing the latest offerings from books to energy boosters. Here's Ride Velo's best little presents for 2016 which are guaranteed to delight the cyclist in your life.  

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Crapper Cycle Lanes Review

Crapper Cycle Lanes makes excellent toilet reading, and not just because of its title. It’s one of those little books that you can flick through absent-mindedly and chuckle over with few if any intellectual demands and little actual reading. It’s mostly pictures of, well, crap cycle lanes.

Eye Books first published Crap Cycle Lanes 10 years ago based on the “Facility of the Month” website pages of the Warrington Cycle Campaign. Since 2001 they have been bravely posting pictures of the worst designed cycle lanes to be found in the land. You know the ones: a lamp post stationed bang in the middle of the path, a two metre stretch of glorious car free space for the cyclist etc. 

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Strava 2016: How Do Your Stats Compare?

It’s that time of year when we look back on what we’ve achieved in our cycling: how far we went, how many metres climbed and what our average speeds were. Yep, the cycling community is over represented by stato - bores who like nothing more than analysing and poring over a set of numbers to gauge performance and set new goals. This week Strava released data on their followers – how do you compare to the rest of the country and the world?

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Tour de Celeb Round-Up Week 2

Channel 5’s TV show Tour de Celeb continues to amuse, frustrate and entertain in equal measure. It follows the fortunes and otherwise of eight ‘celebrities’ as they train for and attempt to complete the 2016 Etape du Tour from Megeve to Morzine in the French Alps.

Like all these shows the term ‘celebrity’ can only be applied in relative terms. I remember Austin Healey as a rugby player, Darren Gough as a cricketer and I think I knew that Jodie Kidd was a model a few years ago. Louie Spence is that camp guy from ‘Strictly’ and Hugo Taylor is from ‘Made in Chelsea’. We then start to get into more obscure territory: Angelica Bell is a TV presenter that I don’t recognize, Amy Williams won a winter Olympics medal in the skeleton and Lucy Mecklenburgh is a model.

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Mark Gunter Cycling Photography Awards Announced

Cycling Tips have announced an exciting new competition for professional, up-and-coming and amateur photographers of cycling sport. The inaugural Mark Gunter Photographer of the Year Awards have been set up to commemorate the life and achievements of Mark Gunter, a widely respected Australian photographer who sadly died after a brave fight with cancer last year, aged just 41.

Mark worked in cycling photography for nearly 20 years and covered the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and the Tour Down Under among other prestigious races. Cycling Australia said that “he built a tremendous career across a number of world, national and local events of all disciplines…capturing the attention of the cycling world through his amazing imagery.” 

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Tribute to Tom Simpson

On this day, 30th November  1937, Tom Simpson was born in Haswell, County Durham, the youngest of six children. The son of a coal miner he went on to become an Olympic medalist, World Champion and the first Briton to wear the fabled yellow jersey of the Tour de France. And of course he is still remembered to this day for his tragic early death on the Giant of Provence, Mont Ventoux. Exhausted, dehydrated and his condition exacerbated by amphetamine and alcohol consumption on the day, his body gave up.

‘Major Tom’ is revered as one of the greatest British cyclists of all time, the man who led the way for other Britons to make it as professionals on the continent. But, as William Fotheringham’s excellent 2002 biography of Simpson, Put Me Back On My Bike, revealed, he admitted to taking banned drugs and attempted to fix races with bribes and murky allegiances. How is it that a former doper and race fixer is held in such high esteem to this day?

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Halfbike Review: Feel Like a Kid Again

There was a time when the Australians said that us Brits were only any good at sports that involved sitting down, which explained our Olympic success at both rowing and cycling. I wonder how we’d fare then if there was a competition for the Halfbike because, get this, it doesn’t have a saddle.

The Halfbike is an invention created by a pair of architects called Mihail Klenov and Martin Angelov, both passionate cyclists who shared “a vision about urban mobility and how it can be applied to the contemporary city.” They launched it on Kickstarter in 2015 and raised a million dollars in funding. Wow!

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Café du Cycliste Josette Jersey Review

When we went to Nice earlier this year for a bit of spring cycling in the sun we decided to pop into Café du Cycliste to meet their boss, Rémi Clermont. We’d been fans of the brand for sometime, but being able to see all of their products in one building certainly set the heart racing. As we composed wish lists of the Claudette and Francine jerseys, not to mention the very cool Antoinette blue and white striped bib shorts, I also came across the Josette jersey which looked rather different to any of the road wear stuff I’ve come across before.

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Wiggins' Six Day Triumph Hailed by Maurice Burton

As a former Six-Day racer who rode with Gary Wiggins in the 1970s, Maurice Burton felt that he couldn’t miss the opportunity of seeing Gary’s son, Sir Bradley Wiggins, take part in his last race at Ghent this weekend. 

The former national champion and owner of De Ver Cycles in Streatham in South London, said, “I saw an online article about Bradley riding his last Six-Day. He said I’ve trained really hard for this. And it made me think, although I really need to be in the shop selling bikes and trying my best at this time of year, I thought, you know, I better go to Ghent. Because there’s a lot of history behind all of this, and I was there when Bradley won the tour on the Champs Elysées, and I thought I needed to be there.”

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Ned Boulting's Bikeology Show

Like a one-man TopGear, or should that be a two-wheeled Top Gear? Ned Boulting's Bikeology Tour reached the giddy heights of Eastbourne on Sunday. Boulting is that affable biking bloke we love to listen to while watching skinny men in lycra suffer and sweat their way round the Grand Tours. He's written some great books as well, so there's no arguing about his wit and intelligence. But a stage show? Boulting's moving up a gear...

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Bunker Research by Max Leonard

Max Leonard, author of Lanterne Rouge: the Last Man in the Tour de France and the Rapha City Cycling Europe guides has just received an award for his latest book, Bunker Research. The British Book Design and Production Awards made him the winner of the Self-Published Books category.

Max is a contributor to Rouleur Magazine and has worked for Rapha and Strava as a writer. The idea for Bunker Research came about when he was researching and writing another book about cycling in the mountains. Speaking to Lecool Magazine, he explained how he came across these “weird concrete cubes and metal domes overlooking the roads or up on ridges, and I became fascinated.” He discovered that they were fortifications built before the Second World War to protect France from Mussolini.

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Jens Voigt at Rouleur Classic

Jens Voigt is one of those cycling warriors whose career had enormous longevity. Like Fabien Cancellara, Tom Boonen and Adam Hansen he was, until his retirement in 2014, one of the old guard of the peloton, a work horse with a massive engine, huge work rate and an indomitable will to survive. He rode in 17 editions of the Tour de France in a professional career that really began when he won the ‘Peace Race’ in 1994 in Germany. Although he wore the Yellow jersey twice, he was never a GC contender, more of a breakaway specialist who could win the occasional stage through aggression and toughness. 

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Rouleur Classic Highlights

The Rouleur Classic moved to a new home this year in the Art Deco splendour of Victoria House in Bloomsbury Square. Having set the bar so high last year we were intrigued to see if "The world's Finest Cycling Exhibition" could pull it off a second time round. The opening night kicked off with copious amounts of complementary refreshments which were appreciated, not only by the punters, but by the Rouleur staff headed by Ian Cleverly. The night was hosted by Ned Boulting who interviewed some star speakers including Sir Dave Brailsford (launching the new Team Sky/Castelli kit), Christian Proudhomme and Jan Ullrich.

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Dr Hutch In Conversation

Not many people who take up a new sport at the age of 22 go on to be National Champions at it. But that’s exactly what happened to Michael Hutchinson (AKA Dr Hutch) who went on to win National Time Trial Championships for 13 consecutive years and he still retains one unbroken record. A fascinating character, who has had a column for Cycling Weekly for 10 years and written four books, we had the pleasure of an hour or so in his company when we covered topics as diverse as penny farthing racing in the nineteenth century to Team Sky’s TUE crisis. But how did he go from Cambridge Law graduate to National Time Trial Champion to an award-winning author? (Damn him!)

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