Road Cycling Digest: Aero Meets Titanium, Pro Zwifters, Quadruple Everests, & More

By: Iain Treloar / CyclingTips

Cycling sponsors come from all sorts of places – grubby governments, benevolent billionaires, bike brands. Often, what they’re advertising is pretty mundane – construction firms, alcohol-free beer, luxury showerheads.

Rare is the team sponsor that invites deeper scrutiny.

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By: Dave Rome / CyclingTips

Hi, my name is Dave and I have a tool shopping problem.

I know many people say they are tool addicts, tool nerds or the like, but I really have a tool problem. I’ve spent far too much on tools for well over a decade now. And it was quite a few years ago that I just started buying duplicates and overlapping tools out of simple curiosity.

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By: Matt De Neef / CyclingTips

Feeling a little down about how few kilometres you rode in 2021? Wishing you’d spent a little more time in the saddle? Well, you might want to look away now.

As 2021 became 2022, Twitter account @velofacts mined the Strava pages of hundreds of pro riders to find out how many kilometres those pros had covered in 2021. The numbers are quite something.

Topping the list of male pros was Australia’s Richie Porte (Ineos Grenadiers) who, between racing and training, covered 37,643 km for the year over the course of 441 rides and 1,217 hours in the saddle.

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By: Dave Rome / CyclingTips

All-rounder road race bikes of the modern era are continually moving to truncated airfoil shapes and integrated cabling, and the result is a market full of bikes that can be tough to tell apart. And if a Bossi Strada SS flashed past, you’d probably think it was yet another carbon fibre road race bike, albeit with a fancy metallic paint.

However, if you managed a closer look, or if you were able to ting the frame with a flick of your finger, you’d quickly realise that Bossi’s Strada SS is metal. Titanium, in fact. It’s a performance road bike that is unquestionably unique to the young Australian brand and perhaps defies what most expect from a titanium frame – especially once you hear that Bossi owns its own moulds for this frame, a phrase that’s often only heard in relation to carbon fibre.

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By: Abby Mickey / CyclingTips

If you’ve tried to buy anything bike-related over the last couple of years, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that no one has anything in stock — like, ANYTHING. But why is that? Has the pandemic really disrupted global production that much on the supply side, or is it that so many more people are trying to buy stuff on the demand side?

James and Dave sit down with the CEO of SRAM, Ken Lousberg, to get the inside story from one of the biggest players in the industry to get the full story. You won’t want to miss this one.

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By: Iain Treloar / CyclingTips

The most important battle of the early cycling season is waged not on roads but on moodboards. Graphic designers and team sponsors agonise over the placement of PNGs, integrate the most evocative fades, and send their designs off to the UCI for a final thumbs up.

Sometimes things turn out beautifully. Quite a lot of the time, it’s a copy and paste job from the year before. But eventually, when you replicate that process 20 or so times, at some point early in the year – after the customary embargoed EF kit holding everything up – there’s a WorldTour peloton worth of new season kit to rank.

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By: Matt De Neef / CyclingTips

You’ve probably heard about Everesting: climbing the height of Mt. Everest (8,848.86 metres / 29,031.7 feet) by bike (or other means) by completing repeats of a given hill.

Thousands around the globe have completed the challenge, both in the real world and virtually, and the arms race for fastest-known times has attracted some of the best riders in the world (CyclingTips’s own Ronan Mc Laughlin still holds the overall record).

Completing a single Everesting is hard enough for most riders, but as is the way with any endurance challenge, there are some who view a single Everesting as a warm-up. Dozens of people have completed a Double Everesting, a select few have done a Triple Everesting, and at the time of writing, three extraordinary athletes have completed a Quadruple Everesting.

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By: Peloton Magazine

The state of U.S. road cycling seems to live in a perpetual state of waiting for the future to arrive. While there might not be current results flowing in, fans are always told just to wait for the new kids to arrive and turn into world-class contenders. But, in lieu of that narrative, here are some facts: nearly 10 percent of 2021 WorldTour riders currently without contracts for 2022 are American (from the United States), and in 2022, only 13 Americans will be present in cycling’s top flight, the lowest total since 2008. Even worse, the U.S. presence in the WorldTour is in the midst of an undeniable downward trend.

So, I decided to dig into this to see if there is indeed a trend of decreasing U.S. representation in the WorldTour, along with tracking historical results, and, most importantly, what this all means about the near-future prospects for U.S. cycling.

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By: Brett Horton / Peloton Magazine

Decades before television and radio, advertising was often limited to newspapers or small handbills. With advances in printing, posters not only emerged but exploded on the visual scene in the late 19th century, seemingly limited only by budget and imagination. Concurrently, the cycling craze was in full swing, and the two quickly became a perfect fit. Graphic artists became overnight celebrities as the art form flourished. Broadly looked at as the “people’s art,” posters adorned what often looked to be every available inch of open wall space from Paris to Milan to New York.

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By: Tim Schamber / Peloton Magazine

Ride long enough and you’ll no doubt notice some things you would change about your equipment or the riding experience. The only hang-up is that, sometimes, those products and solutions don’t exist…yet. That’s why we came up with some products of our own.

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By: Paul Maunder / Peloton Magazine

Heroes are from another world, aren’t they? They come to us through the radio, television and the internet. Unless we are unlucky enough to meet our heroes, they remain purely in sound and image. It’s a leap of faith for us to decide that they really do exist in the same world as us, a leap we don’t always want to take. It’s kind of nice to think that they really are otherworldly. Yet our heroes are human. They do come from somewhere. And it can be closer than we think.

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By: Sadhbh O'Shea / VeloNews

The UCI is busy banning again, and it has forced yet another women’s team to change its 2022 jersey at the last minute.

Spanish Continental team Bizkaia-Durango is the latest forced into a late change in colors after the UCI decided its scheme would make it too similar to its WorldTour leader’s jersey.

The team has said it submitted a design identical to the one it has used for several seasons.

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By: Andrew Hood / VeloNews

Colombian doctors confirmed a “favorable evolution” in the wake of two surgeries. Police interviews also confirm that Bernal was riding in a tucked position on his time trial bike, and he did not react to warning cries from teammates moments before the impact.

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By: Ben Delaney / VeloNews

Matt Gardiner is the founder of the Zwift racing team Saris | No Pinz. While as many as 50,000 riders around the world are on Zwift at one time, few are as all-in as Gardiner. He’s logged 105,000km in the game, he runs a team that competes in Zwift’s Premier League, and he starts and finishes most of his multi-hour rides and races before the sun comes up.

He has built out his indoor set-up with gear to maximize power output, minimize body temperature, optimize team communication and interaction with the game, reduce humidity, and maximize the fun.

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