Endorsed by Pope Francis, this one-man team is in here ‘to cultivate a spirit of altruism, generosity and community’When Rien Schuurhuis rolls out for the men’s road race at the UCI Road World Championships on Sunday, he will bring a novel and some might even say holy presence to the most-significant one-day race on the global cycling calendar.Schuurhuis will cut a lonely figure in a peloton of almost 200 cyclists, from a few dozen nations, but for the first-time in cycling history the Vatican City will be racing for the sacred rainbow jersey. Continue reading...
The route is designed to be more open, with more climbs amenable to attacks, and power meters could be banned. But there is little to cause Team Sky sleepless nightsIn yet another attempt to make the Tour de France a more open race, which will be seen as a further move to break Team Sky’s domination, the organisers are to push for the abolition of the use of power meters. The ubiquitous device which helps a rider to gauge his effort by recording power output as he rides also “annihilates the glorious uncertainty of sport”, according to the Tour organiser, Christian Prudhomme.It remains unclear whether this will be put in place for the 2019 edition, which looks particularly mountainous and...
French campaigner called a political machine benefits from anti-British backlash after scandals to easily defeat Brian Cookson in UCI presidential election“A political machine,” wrote the respected French journalist Jean-François Quénet of his fellow countryman David Lappartient, a man who, it seems, has never lost an election, rising seamlessly through French local and two-wheeled politics to simultaneously hold positions of power in the Morbihan region of Brittany and world cycling. His victory over the incumbent Brian Cookson in the UCI presidential election on Thursday is, just the latest in a long list of political triumphs.However, the scale by which he drubbed the Lancastrian – 37 votes to eight – points to a massive backlash against the former British Cycling head, who...
The UCI president breaks his silence over the Fancy Bears hack and TUE revelations to insist ‘it’s clear, as far as I can see, no rules have been broken’As the planet’s finest cyclists battled through Doha’s searing temperatures and eerie crowd-free calm at the world road racing championships, Brian Cookson could be forgiven if he was starting to feel the heat too.Amid the furore over the three therapeutic use exemptions (TUE) granted to Bradley Wiggins in 2011, 2012 and 2013, then the claims made by the former Sky rider Jonathan Tiernan-Lock about the powerful painkiller Tramadol and, finally, the mystery medical package delivered to Sky on the day Wiggins won the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011, increasingly uncomfortable questions have...