all words by Mike Franchetti
The lumpy one-day classics keep coming with the calendar’s oldest Monument arriving on Sunday afternoon. Despite often falling to the bottom of the excitement rankings, it was the first one-day race I attended live and an event I’ll always look forward to. Moreover, this year I feel I can genuinely get behind four of my
La Fleche Wallonne is potentially great, potentially boring, and potentially rubbish. The conclusion to last year’s race was brilliant as we saw master (Valverde) and apprentice (Alaphilippe) duke it out on the Mur and a phenomenal underdog victory. The ‘apprentice’ now returns at an ugly short price (8/11) and I find it hard to back
The Grand Tours keep coming. I can’t remember a season where the gap between the Giro and the Vuelta felt so quick. The Vuelta holds no surprises. The route is spiky and comes to a head in the final week. The field is packed with a mixture of big name GC riders seeking redemption and
The Tour of Poland is one of the oldest races on the calendar but has changed a fair amount over the years and attracted a crop of major stars since 2005. You might recall the 2011 race which saw Marcel Kittel rise to prominence and a 21-year old Peter Sagan confirm his star potential. In
The 100th edition of the Giro d’Italia starts this Friday. There’s not much more I can say that I haven’t said multiple times before; it’s an excellent race, it’s my favourite race, and it absolutely monopolizes three weeks of the year.
After a weekend of ludicrously brilliant racing, yesterday’s Vuelta stage brought the GC showdown to a lull and today’s rest day allows for a longer pause for thought. Tomorrow racing resumes with – surprise, surprise – a summit finish on the Alto Mas de la Costa. You could argue the stage won’t play a role
There were plenty of big rides at this year’s Giro d’Italia as the race lived up to its billing as one of the best races on the calendar. There were eight Maglia Rosa wearers, seven bunch sprints, six days of Dumoulin, five summit finishes, four German winners, three near-misses for Kruijswijk, two more wins for
In September 2014 Elia Viviani took the Coppa Bernocchi in what would be Cannondale Pro Cycling’s last victory. Three weeks earlier Alessandro De Marchi had climbed to Vuelta success for the team’s final Grand Tour win and the only one of the season. The campaign had few real highs with sporadic Peter Sagan and Viviani vitories
Just Pro Cycling 