What's going on in the curly bar world? Road Cycling Digest showcases articles from our sister sites, CyclingTips, VeloNews and Peloton Magazine. In each installment, you might find endurance coverage, power-to-weight ratios, gravel bike tech and, of course, lycra.
Sex Toys, Cybercrime, And Cycling Sponsorship: The Bizarre Tale Of Nexthash
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.
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.
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.
Bossi Strada Ss Road Bike Review: Aero Meets Titanium
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.
Nerd Alert Podcast: The CEO of SRAM Gives Us The Lowdown On The Supply Chain
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.
Men’s Worldtour Kits Of 2022: The Best and The Rest
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.
Here’s What A Quadruple Everesting Does To The Body and Mind
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.
Americans Are Disappearing From The Worldtour, But It Isn’t Necessarily A Bad Thing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bluetooth Switches, Ice Suits, Double Power Meters, and Other Details Of A Pro Zwifter’s Set-up
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.
And make it where people have to complete like 20 captchas with stuff like "select all squares with road bikes." Or, something like "select all squares with a road biker running a stop sign and giving the guy in the car the middle finger."
Give a break to the cycling division, I'm super into mountain bikes and Road bikes, gravel bikes, even abit of bmx. I'm incredibly in love with road bikes though and really like reading these articles, It's like getting a bonus prize with your hobby when pinkbike post's this. it's the first article I clicked on today. there I said it.
"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"
The ability to dump 900 calories into a Zwift race in 50 minutes while your toddler plays in a pen next to you is not comparable to loading up my satcom, raingear and night lights and riding out into mountain lion country solo. I can't get childcare to go ride at night. Have empathy for those of us stuck with Zwift in the winter.
serious? you should be so lucky, I've been on 4 rides in 2 feet of snow this year totaling 60 km's. all of whish 75% was miserable, meanwhile, I logged 216km's on zwift in the last week and a half. which is 216kms I would not have spun my legs if it was not for Zwift. 216 kms of strength building and maintenance to use outdoors. I ride almost everyday when the day lets me but -25 and a blizzard throws a wrench in that plan sometimes. so to gatekeep this guy's obsession is a little ridiculous.
Same here. I have it down to only weekly visits now from several times a day. A few more articles like this and I should be able to kick the habit all together and never come back to Pinkbike ever again.
It is interesting. I use to check out Pinkbike a couple times a day. Now it's once every couple days and just look back on previous articles I might be interested in.
He was doing 65kmh on a flat road on his TT bike and didn't saw a parked bus,somehow.
A security cam captured the crash from a distance,he's lucky to be alive.
@GZMS: LOL almost spat my beer into the screen... I am guessing it is the teardrop helmet though, hard to look up.... apparently in Columbia, busses stop...
Instead of copying and pasting the first paragraph or two from the article, a little summary would be nice. First paragraphs are often just attention grabbing hooks that convey no information. "Hey, I'm a tool guy, I buy a lot of tools" doesn't tell me anything about the tools that he's reviewing. And the one about Egan crashing is just the same copy and paste from the previous article about clothing...
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.
@sarahmoore: Wasn't moaning at you guys, I don't give a shit, it's just an article about homosexuals and i'm fine with that, I was just wondering where all the PB Karens have gone...
I enjoy the snapshot roundups from the roadie side especially when it highlights yet more nonsense from the UCI or well-written articles such as the one about the sham crypto company.
I was surprised by the claim in the Zwift post that the Rocker board is adding power. Everything I've seen on rocker boards states that they eat power, especially sprinting power, for the sake of immersion. I wonder how much of this is a sponsorship thing.
Titanium titanium so light so strong
Titanium titanium you can't go wrong
Titanium titanium Atomic number 22
Titanium titanium we make mountain bikes out of you
I wonder how the UCI will handle transgender female athletes in the upcoming world stages. In the US we've essentially destroyed female sports out of an ironic need to be more equitable in our sports treatments.
This cross promotion spam is SO annoying! If we wanted to see this we would be on cycling tips. Just sell Pinkbike back to someone willing to run a cool functioning website and save everyone having to witness this site being plucked to death like a vulture on a carcass.
If only there was a middle ground between “sees every article on cycling tips” and “never visits the site”. Like, I don’t know, a 3 minute article highlighting the most interesting articles of the past month just in case someone is interested. You could even label it as road content so people who aren’t interested can not click on it.
@jeroenk: I clicked on it and went directly the the comments to spew my displeasure. I’m someone who used to road ride a lot and follows the sport. I’ve been on Pinkbike since 2000, it’s just sad seeing Pinkbike die a slow death.
Or just go outside
youtu.be/Fc4O8Z4mOEc
And I like good ratchets too, so more of that please
This is how the test goes: Is your sponsor involved in kleptocurrencies? IF yes THEN disaster.
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.
It's worth checking in with the lycra crowd, one day they'll give mountain biking something back after all the innovations we've sent their way
The same could be said for me, but I appreciate these digests.