Off-season? What off-season...

Good morrow to you all, fair cycling enthusiasts, I hope this missive finds you well? More than two weeks (a fortnight, to those of you reading in the UK) has elapsed since I last wrote one of these things, a plan that seemed at the time to be a sensible strategy – eschewing the pressures of producing weekly content during the road off-season – after all, how much can really happen in two weeks?

Yes, well. That’s not turned out to be a completely perfect idea after all. Let’s just say, two weeks is a long time in sport, whether or not said sport is actually functioning in its regular format.

For a start, road season wasn’t exactly over, despite the final Monument of the season having been done and dusted – there were a couple of stragglers (Tour de Langkawi, I’m looking at you), and we’ll get to those later.

Then the baton-pass from road to other formats of cycling occurred in a flurry of activity – with some more rainbow jerseys, no less, as we experienced the delights of the UCI Track World Championships in France, along with the opening cyclocross World Cup fixtures, and the Chrono des Nations, which doesn’t really fit neatly into any box other than ‘some fast people do a time trial.’

And besides that, there was plenty of other news, including a bit of sport-washing, a few transfers, and the small matter of a couple of Tours de France revealing their 2023 routes. Onward, to the news type stuff!

Ooh la la, it’s the Tour de France

Let’s begin with the 'sports people wear actual clothing', montage-riddled, slick and shiny bit of fluff that is the Tour de France route presentation, shall we? Who am I kidding, I bloody love it. It’s a chance to practice my French (although I didn't catch much beyond 'C'EST BLING!') and to try and work out who’s who as various pros from the sport parade across a stage in order of importance, and it’s always surprisingly difficult, to be honest. They are all FABULOUS though – Tadej Pogačar looking spiffy in a checked suit, David Gaudu appearing as his alter-ego Clark Kent, and Annemiek van Vleuten causing me to break out in spontaneous swooning, not to mention the vision that was Marion Rousse.

The montages are next level, and I found myself once again marvelling at the absolute treats we were rewarded with this past July, before the routes for 2023’s Tour de France Hommes and Femmes were revealed.

The key takeaways from the presentation:

Tour de France – just 22km of time trialling, the least since the discipline was introduced in the 1930s – four summit finishes, including a return of the Puy de Dome, and the Col de la Loze – a lot of bumpy stuff, yet still plenty of opportunities for the sprinters.

Tour de France Femmes – two mountain ranges: the Massif Central and the Pyrenees – a summit finish of the Col du Tourmalet – a time trial, in the final stage (the same distance as the men) – an even longer, more record-breaking stage than this year, at 177km – and no gravel.

Initial reactions? I'd say the women’s route looks more ambitious and varied than this year's, but that Annemiek van Vleuten will once again be the favourite – although it’s hard to see in what world she wouldn’t be. The final stage time trial will offer a chance for GC contenders to win back some time although, after the time gaps that will inevitably open up on the Tourmalet stage, it may be too little too late.

As for the men’s route, it strikes me as somewhat less dramatic than recent years, but a Grand Départ in the Basque Country should certainly ensure things get off to an animated start. The time trialling element has been dramatically reduced, presumably in an effort to ward off Remco Evenepoel although to what end I’m not sure. The Giro d’Italia, by contrast, has over almost 70km against the clock. On the plus side, it will appeal to climbers who don’t have a great time trial; the likes of Miguel Angel Lopez, Ben O’Connor and Enric Mas, the latter of whom has risen to the best form of his career of late and will seek to challenge the dominant pairing of Vingegaard and Pogačar. More on that in the New Year.

RESULTS ROUND-UP

It already feels like an age ago, but the road season wrapped up and for the sake of completion, let’s report those final few results.

Marc Hirschi capped a fairly anonymous season with a win at the Veneto Classic. Ivan Ramero Sosa won the GC at the Tour de Langkawi. And apparently, Neilson Powless won the Japan Cup. Ellen van Dijk and Stefan Kung won at the Chrono des Nations, two victors who frankly, I couldn’t be happier for.

And that, as they say, was that.

Track shenanigans

The UCI track World Championships was a star-studded affair this year, as those with eyes on Paris 2024 begin their Olympic cycle by accruing points at these crucial lead-up events.

There are far too many results to report here, and if you'd like to cast your eye over the list of victors I would urge you to check out the UCI website, however I will mention just a couple of the highlights…

Filippo Ganna followed up his demolition of the Hour Record by breaking the 4km individual pursuit world record. However even his phenomenal power was not enough to bring his Italian team over the line first in the team pursuit, where the British boys took victory. The four, including Ganna’s aero advisor Dan Bigham, rode a perfect race to take gold. Bigham was joined by Ollie Wood, and Ethans Vernon and Hayter (the latter pictured below, apparently doing a football celebration. I had just assumed he felt like superman with the rainbow stripes on).

There was plenty of drama in both the sprint and endurance events, with my personal favourite races the simple, cut-throat drama of the elimination race and the mad, hand-holding chaos of the madison ('the one where they shoot each other' according to my 9-year-old daughter). All in all it was a fabulous event and whetted the appetite for the track season to come.

In Muddier News…

The cyclocross season is well and truly underway, with more riders joining the ranks to race the World Cup which returned to European soil last weekend.

Not before a final fixture on the other side of the Atlantic though. The Fayetteville course which played host to the World Championships in January was a familiar sight and produced similarly exciting racing on 16th October, and although on paper the results suggested a familiar outcome, the racing was anything but predictable.

Fem van Empel and Lucinda Brand once again went toe-to-toe, with Annemarie Worst in close behind them in a hard-fought women's race. The men's race was as good a head-to-head as you're likely to see all season, with a narrative to match, as former Pauwels Sauzen-Bingoal rider Laurens Sweeck took on former team mates Eli Iserbyt and Michael Vantourenhout in a full-blooded grudge match that went right down to the wire, almost resulting in Sweeck's first World Cup victory. It was not to be however, as Sweeck, now riding for Crelan Fristads, lost out on the line to Iserbyt.

In Tabor the following weekend the ranks swelled with riders coming fresh from mountain biking and road racing, but the results remained the same. In the women’s elite Puck Pieterse pushed Fem van Empel close on her first foray into cross, setting up what should be a mouth-watering season of battles between the two. Shirin van Anrooij also made her season debut and finished 30 seconds down in 7th spot, but with a full road season in the legs she may take a little longer to get into her stride.

In the men’s race Eli Iserbyt continued his rampant early season run of form, beating Lars van der Haar this time to make it 4 wins from 6 races (the other two being second places).

Hot off the press – Iserbyt notched up another victory in today's first round of the Superprestige at Ruddervoorde, with Denise Betsema taking victory in the women's elite. Next up, a World Cup fixture at Maasmechelen in Belgium, the debut of the venue hotly anticipated as something new for the riders - more on how that went next time.

Transfer news

It’s been another couple of weeks of moving and shaking in the transfer market, with a number of riders switching teams or extending contracts, and a number of teams announcing they are all set for 2023. A few of the most significant include the return of Luis Leon Sanchez back to Astana, the move of Mikkel Honore from QuickStep-AlphaVinyl to EF Education-EasyPost, David Dekker sprinting from Jumbo Visma to Arkea-Samsic, and a swathe of new signings for Movistar including EF’s Ruben Guerreiro, who had a strong season, particularly at the Giro d’Italia.

Bitesize chunks of news, YUM!

• Movistar have leaped into the murky pool of sport-washing with their latest investment partnership with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis already sponsor Team BikeExchange-Jayco, and are the fourth nation state to invest in cycling, with Bahrain, UAE and Israel all sponsoring teams. With the Saudis dipping into many sports, with heavy investment in F1, their recent takeover of Newcastle United, and the new golf competition they are funding, it's almost as if they don't want us to notice the other things going on in their country...

• Mark Cavendish's reported move to the newly turbo-powered B&B Hotels is on hold after a press conference where he was due to be announced was cancelled after key sponsors reportedly pulled out - the future remains uncertain, both for the team and for Cav.

• British continental side Ribble Weldtite have sadly folded due to a lack of sponsorship, hammering yet another nail into the coffin of the British domestic scene, which teeters on the brink of oblivion, with just three teams remaining.

• Some personal news – I'm very proud to announce that I'm part of the writing team for this year's Road Book cycling almanac. It's a stunning volume that I have loved reading in recent seasons and it's an honour to be a part of it for this year's edition – I have written an essay on the 2021/22 cyclocross season which I hope will both entertain and inform, regardless of your level of prior knowledge of the discipline. You can order your copy of the Road Book here.

Final Thought: A Season of Highlights

It’s inevitable that we spend the off-season looking back on the moments that made the 2022 road season so memorable, and we weren’t short of them this year. I will be posting some reflective pieces in the coming weeks, and in anticipation of this I asked my Twitter followers for opinions on their moment of the season – specifically the moment that made them stand up and shout. These are the moments that make sport worth watching – gasping in shock or wonder as something happens that simply defies belief; the unexpected, the baffling, the downright audacious action that will stay with us long after the bikes have been hung up for the off-season break.

I could offer several answers to the question – I'm a reasonably demonstrative sports viewer even in the quieter moments – but there was one for me that rose above all others and was without question the moment of the season. It was stage 11 of the Tour de France, when Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard teamed up to break down the defences of Tadej Pogačar. It was so unexpected and yet so inevitable, so early in a stage that would be so brutal later on, that I rolled back on my chair and clasped my hands over my mouth in pure shock. So enamoured was I by how the stage unfolded I dedicated an entire post to it on my site, which you can read here.

Many chose the same moment, on Twitter. Many, many more chose different moments – Matej Mohorič’s death-defying descent from the Poggio to win Milan-San Remo; Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig’s incredible stage win, and subsequent characteristically emotional interview at the Tour de France Femmes; Remco Evenepoel’s mega-watt attack at Liege-Bastogne-Liege; Annemiek van Vleuten’s surge for the line in the face of injury to take the rainbow stripes in Wollongong.

It was, all in all, a fantastic reminder of a wildly varied and thrilling season – a longer piece will follow on this subject, when I have a chance to gather my thoughts during the off-season. And it also made me smile, as many responded with indignation to Dan Martin’s suggestion that racing has become ‘quite boring to watch’ in an interview with the Guardian to support his recently released autobiography. I love the guy but quite honestly, he’s missed the mark on this one; one scroll through the thread was enough to know that this season has once again, been one for the ages.

The Last Word

This time of year always sees me shifting gears, both in terms of my career focus but also my natural rhythms, with the change of seasons and the arrival of the darker nights – while half of me is ready to hibernate, the other half is slowly building to an irresistible crescendo of Christmas excitement.

Road racing takes up an alarming proportion of the year – February to October – leaving just three months to reflect and recollect, take some time away and some mental space from the sport. Yet it feels like a lot longer than just one quarter of the year is fallow, in terms of actual racing. Maybe because of the anticipation of Christmas, and the fact that we have cyclocross to keep us ticking over, and the off-season is so full of kit reveals, random bits of news and training camp footage that we never really feel very far away from the world on two wheels, even though we yearn for the return of the cobbles of Omloop which spells the start of the season 'proper' (Etoiles de Besseges has entered the chat).

All this to say, I'm treating this newsletter as a reason to stay in touch with the news, as well as to stay in touch with you fine folk, and am hoping that checking in every couple of weeks will enable us to stay connected through the cold, dark winter (or the hot, sunny one if you're in the southern hemisphere). With that - I'll see you in a fortnight!

Cheers,Katy

PS As always, your support is greatly appreciated - if you'd like to contribute to the coffers with coffee, you can do so at ko-fi and receive my eternal gratitude in return.