The Italian who races on instinct rather than power data will pay an emotional visit to his home town of Messina next week The Giro d’Italia begins on Friday and Vincenzo Nibali is not going to win it. We should probably be clear about that at the outset. Nibali has won it twice before, in 2013 and 2016, but that was a younger and hungrier man.Now he is 37, has not won a race of any real repute in three years and missed a big chunk of training time after catching Covid earlier in the year. When Nibali says his main goals are to ride for his Astana-Qazaqstan teammate Miguel Ángel López and hopefully pick up a couple of stages,...
The soft power objective of Israeli sport is for us to focus on a cycling team or a visit by Lionel Messi rather than PalestineIn the summer of 2020 a group of five cyclists from Ramallah were out on a ride when they were stopped by a group of Israeli settlers. According to Reuters, on discovering the cyclists were Palestinian, the settlers began hurling stones at them. Four escaped into a nearby field. One, Samer Kurdi, lost his footing and was repeatedly beaten with a metal rod, suffering serious injuries. It is not known if any arrests were made.For Chris Froome and his colleagues on the Israel Start-Up Nation pro cycling team, the roads of the occupied West Bank were...
It’s time to ditch the old cliches and to change the way we think about Olympic athletes, who are humans rather than robotsChris Boardman signalled the shift when he summed up British Cycling’s performance at the Tokyo Olympics: “Fewer medals but a better story.” What could he mean? We all know sporting performance pushes forward. Innovation never stops as athletes look deeper and search further to raise their game. The new territory this time is fresh vocabulary, human stories and different thinking.The Paralympics are poised to begin, the Beijing Winter Olympics follow next year, with Paris 2024 not so far away. Olympians of different ages and from different nations are challenging us to shift our mindsets and broaden the lens...
The run of Olympic Games when one British gold medal followed another in seamless style appear to be at an endOn a day that looks to have marked the end of Great Britain’s dominance of track cycling at Olympic level, there were symbols aplenty that the world has moved on, beyond the bald facts of the medal table. Dramatic crashes involving the men’s and women’s team pursuit squads closed the run of Olympic Games when one British gold medal followed another in seamless style, the hallmark of the track action in Beijing, London and Rio.In all the chaos, the sprinter Jason Kenny became Britain’s most decorated Olympian with his eighth medal in total, a silver in the team sprint, putting...
Poor tactics and lack of risk-taking sum up how it has gone badly wrong for Dave Brailsford’s Ineos GrenadiersIn sport, failure can be relative. If Team Ineos were to conclude their 2021 season on Sunday, when the Tour de France ends in Paris, they would be entitled to look back with some pride at a string of stage race wins in May and June that included the Giro d’Italia and the Tours of Romandie, Switzerland and Catalonia, and the Criterium du Dauphiné, the prime warm-up race for the Tour de France. Dave Brailsford’s team dominated those races, taking the Giro in straightforward style and scoring a 1-2-3 at Catalonia.The problem is that in modern-day cycling, success or failure relates largely...