title page for A Journey Through the Cycling Year

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Copyright © THE CYCLING PODCAST 2018
Cover photograph © Simon Gill

The Cycling Podcast has asserted its right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2018

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

To all our listeners and
friends of the podcast

CONTRIBUTORS

Lionel Birnie co-presents The Cycling Podcast having covered the sport since the late nineties. He co-founded The Cycling Anthology and ghost-wrote Sean Kelly’s autobiography, Hunger.

Daniel Friebe co-presents The Cycling Podcast having written about cycling since the early 2000s. He is the author of Mountain High and Mountain Higher and The Cannibal, a biography of Eddy Merckx.

Richard Moore co-presents The Cycling Podcast and The Cycling Podcast Féminin and is the author of seven books, including In Search of Robert Millar, Slaying the Badger and Étape.

Ciro Scognamiglio is The Cycling Podcast’s favourite Italian and writes for La Gazzetta dello Sport.

Ashleigh Moolman Pasio, from South Africa, is one of the world’s top cyclists. She was second in the 2016 Women’s Tour and in 2016 and 2017 won the Giro della Toscana Femminile.

Sebastien Piquet is the voice of Radio Tour at the Tour de France and other major races.

François Thomazeau is the former head of sport at Reuters France, the author of several novels and non-fiction books, a musician (recording and performing as Sauveur Merlan), and the owner of a restaurant in Marseille and a bookshop in Paris. He first reported on the Tour de France in 1986.

Orla Chennaoui is a presenter on Sky Sports and co-hosts The Cycling Podcast Féminin.

Fran Reyes is a Spanish cycling journalist with tremendous sideburns and a fine singing voice.

Joe Dombrowski is an American professional cyclist who has ridden for Team Sky and Cannondale-Drapac.

1. A SORT-OF REVIEW OF THE CYCLING YEAR, PART 1

Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe

RM: Where are we, Lionel?

LB: We’re in London, in the British Film Institute Café, on a day when the sky has turned dark.

RM: Hurricane Ophelia. Is it a hurricane or a storm?

LB: Not sure. It started off as a hurricane, but it’s fading …

RM: It’s quite alarming, though. Feels apocalyptic. It feels like an appropriate sky under which to be discussing a sort-of review of the year.

LB: A review of cycling’s last-ever season …

RM: My name’s Richard Moore and I’m with Lionel Birnie …

LB: Hello, Richard.

RM: And Daniel Friebe.

DF: Hello.

RM: We are The Cycling Podcast team and we’re returning to our roots. This is a sort of home fixture, isn’t it, because over the years we’ve recorded a lot from the South Bank. Why did we start recording here? [long pause]

RM: Lucrative sponsorship deal with the National Theatre?

LB: No. Well, it was just a convenient meeting place when we first started. We’re like travelling players, aren’t we – we pitch up and podcast wherever …

DF: Mercenaries.

LB: This is kind of our home venue, our equivalent of The Globe, which is just along the South Bank here. This is where we feel at home.

RM: We do. I think because so much of our podcasting is at bike races, at Grand Tours, where you’re forced by necessity to record wherever you can – it might be by some bins, or in a bar – we’re used to improvising. I think we like to have a bit of background hubbub: coffee machines, people chatting in the background, people staring at you as they walk past because we’re sitting here with microphones. So, anyway, this is the first Cycling Podcast book, a journey through the cycling year. It’s by no means definitive, is it?

LB: Certainly not. What are we going to do? We’re going to listen back to this then type it out and print it on paper? It’s like the anti-podcast.

RM: It is. The whole point of podcasting is that it’s supposed to be quite easy. We’re making quite a lot of work for ourselves. I think the goal of the podcast has always been to focus on where we are rather than to try to cover everything. To take advantage of the fact that we are at races and speaking to some people, and try to bring a bit of the race to the listeners’ ears, and this book is very much in the same vein. The idea is to take you, the listener (and now reader), through the cycling year. We’ll begin where we started the year but we should maybe first do a bit of background into the podcast and into ourselves. We are journalists …

DF: [laughs] Sometimes.

RM: I think we can apply that term to what we do, can we not?

LB: I think the definition of a journalist has evolved and changed so much during the life of the podcast that we can still loosely attach that moniker to ourselves, can’t we?

RM: We have covered the sport for quite a number of years. When was your first Tour de France, Daniel?

DF: 2001.

RM: You were the benjamin,fn1 were you?

DF: I was. I was the youngest man at the Tour. I was younger than any rider by some distance, a couple of years, I think.

RM: 2001? Who was the youngest rider that year?

DF: That’s a great question. I think it was … no, it wouldn’t have been Philippe Gilbert. It was before his time. Was it David Moncoutié?fn2 There was an oath that year, because we were already on about the third ‘Tour of Renewal’. Every year when we started covering cycling there was a huge doping scandal that threatened to pull professional cycling under – and then it really would have been the last podcast, the last season, the last Tour, which seemed possible back then. Anyway, this was one of the ‘Tours of Renewal’. It was supposed to relaunch the Tour de France, and there was a ceremonial oath about ethics and integrity read out on the start line of the first stage by the youngest rider in the race, and a white dove was released. That doesn’t happen any more, does it? Do you not remember this?

RM: No, because my first Tour was 2005. Lionel, you were covering it then …

LB: Yeah, I was at the first of the modern Tours of Renewal …

DF: I thought you were going to say you were at the first Tour then. At the Réveil Matin

LB: I was. And I remember saying to Henri Desgrange, ‘This is going to be quite tough, isn’t it? How am I going to get to Lyon?’ No, my first Tour was the 1999 Tour. I did about a week of it and I thought I knew about cycling before then. I’d been a journalist for quite a few years but it was my first full year as a cycling journalist. I’d been to a few races before but being parachuted into the Tour midway through … everything I thought I knew about cycling at that point turned out to be wrong, really. It was the most bewildering event. And I think even now, what, eighteen years later …

RM: It’s still bewildering.

LB: Still bewildering, exactly. Rich, this year we travelled with François Thomazeau whose first Tour was in 1986 and even he is still grasping at bits of it. There are still corners of the Tour that are a slight mystery to him. You never quite got to grips with it all, because – this is a bit metaphorical – the Tour’s always moving along so it’s continually moving away from you. Just when you get comfortable, you all have to get up and move on again. I think that’s why the Grand Départ is always so bewildering – because you do start to feel comfortable in one place for two or three days and it hasn’t even got started, then the whole show sort of picks up and moves on. Then you can extrapolate the way the Tour works to the whole cycling season: it’s a massive travelling roadshow that kicks off every year … well, the World Tour kicks off in Australia and then goes to the Middle East, after which we all get excited about the cobbled Classics in the spring, and it runs on parallel train tracks, doesn’t it, because while we’re excited about the cobbled Classics the Grand Tour riders are also doing Paris–Nice or Tirreno–Adriatico or the Volta a Catalunya or Tour of the Basque Country. There’s always something to keep your eyes on, and, before you know where you are, we’ve got our heads down and we’re going towards the Tour of Flanders, Paris–Roubaix, the big Monuments … It never stays still.

RM: So ’99 was the first Tour you worked at, Lionel. What was the first Tour you ever saw in the flesh?

LB: Ooh, in the flesh would be ’97. Yeah.

RM: Quite late.

LB: Yeah. When it came to Britain in ’94 I wasn’t allowed time off from the newspaper I worked at. Basically, I’d just come back from a training course and you’re supposed to do six months without any holiday. They wouldn’t allow this now; these were inhumane working conditions! I couldn’t even take a couple of days off to go down to Portsmouth or Brighton, where it came over for a couple of days in 1994. So the first time I set eyes on the Tour was in ’97, I think I’m right in saying. I’d seen other races before but not the Tour de France.

RM: Where did you see it in 1997?

LB: Saint-Étienne. The time-trial that went over the Col de la République. I remember that because there were some Italian fans who were singing sort of football songs for all of their riders. Francesco Casagrande, Marco Pantani … They were handing around a bottle of grappa as well. They were on one side of the road and on the other side of the road, just up from where my dad and I were standing, there was a very well-dressed woman – late middle-aged, I’d say – and she had a cat in a basket. This is absolutely true – every time a French rider came past, she lifted the cat up in its basket and kind of showed the cat the rider. The cat got very excited when Richard Virenque went past, I can tell you.

RM: Daniel, when was the first Tour you saw?

DF: 1998. I was working on a golf course in France that summer and I went to the start of the stage the morning after Festina got kicked out of the race. It started in Montauban. I can’t remember where it finished but Jacky Durand won the stage in a breakaway.fn3

LB: I thought Daniel was going to say that he’d been doing work experience with the Gendarmerie and that he’d been along to arrest Virenque and Alex Zülle …

RM: All Daniel’s interests colliding there – the golf course and the bicycling. I’m a bit older than you guys, of course, so my first Tour was 1990. It was also my first trip abroad. I was seventeen! No budget airlines in those days! We were on holiday in Annecy and the Tour went nearby. We rode to Albertville and watched it on a climb. I don’t actually know which climb it was.fn4 The stage finished halfway up Mont Blanc.fn5 We waited for a long time. We got there very early – I was just with my dad and my brother – and we watched on the climb as Thierry Claveyrolat came through on his own. He was an RMO rider. I remember the Ray-Bans. Of course, no helmets in those days. He had a very distinctive style. We were standing with some French supporters who all thought it was Charly Mottet because he was the team leader at RMO. I corrected them and my dad was very proud and surprised that I seemed to know more than these French fans. I can still see it in my mind’s eye. I can still remember what Thierry Claveyrolat looked like. He was from very nearby and is dead now sadly, having committed suicide several years later, after his life had sort of unravelled in retirement … But he was a very stylish and exciting climber. I can still see him riding past, and I can still see Greg LeMond behind him in his world champion’s jersey and his Scott bars that continued across the bottom to give him an aero position. Robert Millar was there, his Z teammate, Gianni Bugno … It’s amazing how vivid that first sighting is and how it lodges itself in your brain.

LB: I’d been watching races for so long on TV, since the early eighties, really, because it had been broadcast on Channel 4, but there was something about it that captured me immediately. It wasn’t as though I gradually got interested. It was a sport that was so visually arresting that I wanted to know more and more about it. Certainly in those days it wasn’t that easy to learn about how the whole sport operated. It was a long, meandering journey whereby I read lots of things that informed but also misled me. There are myths about the sport that are still lodged in my brain that I can’t dislodge, like the famous old one about Bernard Hinault winning Paris–Roubaix once and never riding it again, which is actually wrong. I think I read that somewhere …

RM: I think it was in Slaying The Badger, first edition! The myth came from Hinault himself, who said it in an interview, or it was mistranslated in an interview … Daniel, did your love of cycling, if I can call it that …

DF: Tolerance of cycling!

RM: Did your mild interest in cycling not owe something to your interest in languages?

DF: Yeah, I would say so. At that point in my mid-teens my golf career was already going awry. My dad was quite a pushy parent, I think it’s fair to say. Even when he plays golf with me now he gets in a mood if I don’t play well. I’m in my mid-thirties, by the way … So, yeah, I think I was subconsciously looking for something that my dad wasn’t interested in. I’d also been to France on holiday, been to Italy on holiday, and the only thing I was any good at in school was languages. I was very passionate about languages, and the two things … cycling seemed like this secret code that needed to be cracked, and one of the ways to crack it was by speaking French, or Spanish, or Italian or Dutch. So I latched onto it. I also loved the mountains. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when I first sat down and watched a stage of the Tour de France and was absolutely captivated but I can remember glimpses, being on holiday in France and seeing Pascal Lino on TV. That could have been 1992 possibly. This vague awareness of Indurain dominating the sport. Then 1996 was the first Tour that I watched in any great detail. I can certainly remember watching the stage to Les Arcs, which ended up being one of the stages of the decade because so much happened that day. Stéphane Heulot started that stage in the yellow jersey and climbed off and abandoned on the summit of the Cormet de Roselend; you had Johan Bruyneel going off the side of a road and into a ravine; and Miguel Indurain cracked, which just seemed like this incredible watershed. Even I, who had no real depth of understanding of the context, could appreciate what a huge moment this was, that Indurain, this sort of unbreakable robot, had finally been cracked, and no one could quite believe it. After that I was very much infatuated with it quite quickly.

LB: Do you not think that one of the charms of cycling, even now, is this awkward marriage between tradition and innovation? As Daniel was talking there about the 1992 Tour, where Pascal Lino was almost the breakthrough rider, had the yellow jersey, and you were thinking that maybe he was going to be …

RM: Looked incredible on a bike. Very stylish.

LB: And every year, because of the way we consumed the Tour particularly – at twelve-month intervals, really – you had to work quite hard to piece together the rest of the cycling season. Very often, if I’d read about Pascal Lino, for example, I wouldn’t have seen any footage in the UK of him actually racing. But I remember that 1992 Tour – because they were celebrating the European Community, the EEC, they visited all the countries that bordered France, so Belgium, the Netherlands – I know that doesn’t quite border France …

DF: Started in San Sebastián, didn’t it?

LB: Started in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country in northern Spain.

RM: The Channel 4 car was bombed by Basque separatists on the eve of the race.

LB: That’s right, yeah. But what struck me when I first saw the route and realised they’d be going into the Pyrenees on about day two, only a day or so after the prologue, was that it was the first time I’d been unsettled and bamboozled by the Tour de France. In my mind that was not supposed to happen: you were supposed to have nine or ten days of the race before the mountains. It unsettled me. And I think as we look at the way the races have evolved in recent years and continue to evolve, there’s always a sense of uncomfortableness about things that are too different and veer too far from tradition while on the other hand the sport is desperately trying to innovate and create new events. I’m thinking about the Hammer Series, for example, which is really ripping up what we think we know about road racing and trying to inject something different into it.

RM: It’s interesting that Daniel talks about languages. Even those of us who are not quite as proficient in languages as Daniel is … it’s still one of those things that attracted me to the sport, because it did add an air of mystery and intrigue and indecipherability, I suppose, that keeps me interested. One of the ways the sport is trying to move forward and change is by embracing the English language. Certainly since we started the English language has become ubiquitous in professional cycling, which makes our jobs easier on one hand but on the other you feel the sport has lost something, especially when you see Italian teams with English slogans on the side of the bus.fn6 Also at the Giro itself you hear a lot of English – the official commentary and so on – and to me that’s not what the Giro should be.

LB: It’s another example of the contradictions that exist within professional road racing: the desire to be an international sport and yet you go to certain pockets and it’s incredibly parochial. You go to the Belgian Classics, the Flemish Classics, and there’ll be as big a crowd around the bus of a Belgian Continental division team as there will be … I mean, some of the big teams are completely ignored because they don’t have any Belgian riders. They’ll be getting ready almost in anonymity. In a region like Flanders, particularly, there’s such an identification with their heroes. Eventually they warm to people from the outside, but you have to do something special in their races. Peter Sagan, for example, could win the Tour de France but it’s winning the Tour of Flanders and the world title that makes him a star here. There are sorts of tiers and layers of acceptance in places like that and other places too.

DF: I think it’s easy to forget how quickly the globalisation has happened. We’ve mentioned this before particularly when analysing performances and determining the reasons why in real or gross terms performances have improved or, well, kept pace with what we consider to be the disgraced performances of the 1990s. The gene pool has become so much wider and can get a lot wider still. We see smatterings of riders from all over the world now but it’s not as cosmopolitan as other sports, football for example. That said, you compare it to twenty years ago and you see how much more international it is. You look back at the era we’re talking about, the mid-nineties, and the Giro would have seventeen Italian teams out of twenty. Italian riders generally wouldn’t do the Tour in the late-nineties or early nineties. That’s been one major change since we all started following it, I think …

RM: We were going to kick off by talking about where we started our season, and Daniel you did go to one of the new races in one of the new territories.

DF: Yeah, I was at the Abu Dhabi Tour. First time I’d been to any of the Gulf races, which have been around for well over ten years now. From a racing point of view, it wasn’t particularly thrilling but what it did do was set up what I thought was going to be a real ding-dong, a great battle in 2017 between the established powers in sprinting – Cavendish, Kittel and Greipel – and the emerging talents, or particularly Caleb Ewan, given that he was there and Gaviria was not. Looking back now on the year in its entirety that was a slight disappointment; we’ve spoken before about how this rivalry, or what had the potential to be a fantastic rivalry between Cavendish and Kittel, has never really crackled into life. It’s almost been a case of shadow-boxing for several years, during which their best periods have not coincided. In Abu Dhabi I think they had one stage win each and Ewan had one, too. So everything was shaping up for that duel to happen between Cavendish and Kittel in particular, but Cavendish ended up having a really poor season, for health reasons primarily. He had the Epstein–Barr virus early in the season then he crashed at the Tour de France. That’s actually one of the enduring disappointments of the last few seasons in professional cycling for me – that it’s been such a moveable feast and changeable cast of characters in that particular discipline of sprinting. It’s a part of cycling that lends itself to rivalries but we’ve not really seen them too much in the last few years.

RM: Where did you start your season, Lionel?

LB: The first race I did was Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, which was a sort of hors d’oeuvre before the Lionel of Flanders.

RM: How could we forget the Lionel of Flanders? A series of podcasts you did for Friends of the Podcast in the spring really getting under the skin of the lesser-known Flanders Classics.

LB: Yeah, the races that build up to the Tour of Flanders, so that’s the Dwars Door Vlaanderen, the Grand Prix E3 Harelbeke and Ghent–Wevelgem, all of which have a very similar but distinct character and there’s a story behind each of them.

RM: They are a precursor to the big cobbled Classics – the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix – but was there anything that you saw there that had an impact on the bigger races to come?

LB: Well, Philippe Gilbert got into the winning break at Dwars Door Vlaanderen with Yves Lampaert of Quick-Step, the eventual winner. There was another Quick-Step rider in there too … Who was that? [Pause] Oh, of course, it was Philippe Gilbert!

RM: He was wearing the Belgian champion’s jersey, though …

LB: Ah, yes, that’s right, because in my mind’s eye I could see them going past on the cobbles but I couldn’t remember who the second Quick-Step rider was. That’s the advantage of transcribing this conversation for the book. We can cut all this out.fn7 Anyway, Gilbert was second at Dwars Door Vlaanderen and at the Grand Prix E3 Harelbeke and then he went on and absolutely crushed the Tour of Flanders. It was sort of Fabian-Cancellara-at-Paris–Roubaix-esque wasn’t it? The Tour of Flanders was also notable for the crash where Peter Sagan caught a flag or a bag …

RM: It was a jacket.

LB: That’s right, it was a jacket. It was on the Oude Kwaremont at a crucial time in the race. Gilbert had already gone away and Sagan was in this chasing group with Greg Van Avermaet and Oliver Naesen and he was riding extremely close to the barriers to try to avoid the cobbles. They had to try to keep that gap close. Sagan was hugging the barriers, he caught his handlebars and he went down and Van Avermaet went down as well. Van Avermaet had won Harelbeke and Ghent–Wevelgem …

RM: And he went on to win Paris–Roubaix …

LB: The Tour of Flanders hinged on those two moments – Gilbert’s attack and the Sagan crash – and the great unknown is whether Gilbert would have stayed away had that crash not happened. In ten or fifteen years’ time when we look back and review the decade’s Classics, Gilbert’s performance will be one we look back at as a crushing performance and it will be forgotten, perhaps, that he was considerably aided by the fact that powerful chasing group all hit the deck.

RM: I read a fascinating interview with Gilbert recently where he talked about his strategy, with being away on his own like that with so long to go. He said he didn’t just ride it as a time trial, flat out, he knew the wind conditions and the roads so he was able to give himself a bit of an easy ride at certain points but, when he knew they would be chasing hard behind, he would hit the gas a bit because he knew that psychologically if the chasers were riding hard and not closing the gap, they would be broken. I mean, on paper three men chasing one guy, when the differences between them are minute, you think, how can it be that they can’t close the gap, but the difference is that the chasers are having to measure their effort in a way that the one rider up front isn’t. And so, the riders behind are not necessarily riding flat out. They are playing a game too, because they are doing as much as they think they need to do while also holding something back in the event that the leader is caught and they get a chance to go for the win.

DF: It was a major resurgence for Gilbert. A lot of people had written him off and he was maybe unfairly bracketed with other riders who had gone to BMC and found themselves in a bit of a comfort zone, getting paid a lot of money and experiencing a downturn in results. He’d certainly had that downturn in results when he went to BMC but everything you hear from guys around the peloton suggests that he’s always been a very hard worker and he continued to work hard but what didn’t suit him at BMC was more the style of racing. BMC are quite prescriptive about how their leaders ride – or they have been in the past – surrounded by domestiques all the time, with not that much room for improvisation, and that is Gilbert’s strength. That very prescribed style of racing is definitely not his strength and Quick-Step enabled him to go back to his roots as a real racer, I think, and he seemed to revel in that. Part of that was that he was able to do the Tour of Flanders, which he’d had to skip for a few years because Van Avermaet was in the same team at BMC.

RM: He was at BMC for five years, potentially his best years, his early thirties. He’s not had the sort of results during his time at BMC that he had in his last year before he joined them, or this year, when he’s been phenomenal, so you wonder how many riders are in teams, or have roles within teams, which don’t suit them.

LB: So, Rich, where did the Buffalo start his season?

RM: The Buffalo trotted off to Paris–Nice, primarily to talk to Mat Hayman about his win at Paris–Roubaix in 2016 for a Friends of the Podcast special episode. That was really great because it was a chance to do something that we don’t often get a chance to do and that’s sit and watch a race with a rider as they talk through how it happened. I think it was your idea, wasn’t it, Lionel?

LB: [nods]

RM: At Paris–Nice I did a few other interviews. On the first night I bumped into Richie Porte, who had been following the story with his former team, Team Sky, over the winter, and felt aggrieved because he felt some of the coverage and various controversies had been, in his words, sensationalised and he was very keen to give us an interview and explain what he thought about Team Sky with the Bradley Wiggins TUEs and so on. His team, BMC, weren’t too keen for him to sit down and talk about Team Sky and their woes, they wanted him to focus on BMC but he went off-piste and spoke his mind, as Richie Porte often does.

It was an interesting race for Porte because he had started the season very well and as the season went on he showed that he could go to the Tour de France as a real contender. What was interesting for him at Paris–Nice was the strength of Team Sky. The theme of the season was that [the controversies] didn’t seem to affect them, from Strade Bianche and Milan–San Remo with Michal Kwiatkowski, and Sergio Henao at Paris–Nice, then Chris Froome winning the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España, they had their best-ever season. They looked really formidable.

At the other end, there was Cannondale-Drapac, who I spent quite a bit of time with at Paris–Nice because I was booked into the same hotels as them. It was interesting observing their body language at breakfast because there was almost a sense within the team of defeat. You could even pick it up at breakfast. Riders who normally are quite cheerful and upbeat were shuffling in, not making eye contact and looking at their feet. I did speak to some of the riders and they did say that there was a sense within the team that things were not going right. At that point they had not won a World Tour race for a year-and-a-half and they would not win one until May at the Tour of California and then of course at the Giro d’Italia with Pierre Rolland. But it was really palpable that feeling of a team that was in a downward spiral and the ultimate metaphor was that during Paris–Nice their bus broke down and they ended the race in a white mini-van with windows and seats. Watching the riders in Nice getting changed out the back of a car, it was …

LB: Old school.

RM: It was but you felt this was a team really at rock-bottom and, coincidentally or not, it was a team that almost went out of existence but there was a sense that this was a team that was really on their uppers.

LB: You mentioned Cannondale as a team that struggled to get results for a long time but the one thing that stood out for me during the spring particularly was the concentration of power in the hands of so few teams. When you look at the races from January up to the Tour de Romandie in late April, early May, which is the last of the spring races before the Grand Tours get underway, Richie Porte of BMC won the two stage races that book-end that period, that’s the Tour Down Under and the Tour de Romandie. His BMC teammate Greg Van Avermaet dominated the cobbled Classics, although Quick-Step also had some success there with Gilbert winning the Amstel Gold race as well. In the Ardennes, Alejandro Valverde of Movistar won both Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège – he also won three big stage races and then Team Sky made it four teams that really dominated the entire spring. Back twenty or thirty years ago it wouldn’t be too surprising if a few teams or riders dominated to such an extent but I think now, with the diversity and supposed strength-in-depth in the peloton, I think it tells us something about the concentration of wealth and talent in relatively few teams and when those teams and riders get on a roll they can win a lot of races in succession and dominate certain phases of the season.

RM: It also links somewhat to the point I was making about riders in teams and roles that may not suit them, conversely you see teams with different line-ups riding in the same way and winning. I was thinking of stage 2 of the Vuelta, to Grand Narbonne, with the crosswinds. Yves Lampaert won the stage for Quick-Step, Matteo Trentin helped set it up. It was almost identical to what Quick-Step did at stage 3 of the Giro but with entirely different riders. I think about this in relation to team time trials as well, where a different line-up representing BMC or Quick-Step or Orica or Sky, can finish in the top four for every team time trial in a Grand Tour. And that is interesting too, there’s a DNA in a team that means a different cast of riders can produce identical results because they ride in a certain way.

RM: For this book, we have written diaries about the three Grand Tours which tell the story of the journey we are on as much as the race itself but the Giro this year was much anticipated because it was the 100th Giro …

DF: I thought you were going to say because the food’s great …

RM: There’s that as well. The food is wonderful, isn’t it. This year the Giro was entirely on Italian soil, starting in Sardinia and finishing in Milan. Daniel, did the Giro do what the 100th Giro would have set out to do?

DF: As a race it took a lot of time to get going but this is increasingly the way the major tours are going because the organisers are trying to stack as much of the action towards the back as possible. At the same time, we think, and we have seen over the last few years, we hope that because of the way cycling has cleaned itself up, the riders don’t have as many bullets, or as powerful an armoury, as they used to have in terms of attacks and in terms of the energy they can expend. They tend to try to keep their powder dry for as long as possible in order to put in what are going to be decisive attacks. That often means waiting until the last couple of stages. It was pretty cagey until the last few stages. That was maybe a slight flaw in the way the course was designed. I think Mauro Vegni, the director of the Giro, is slightly undecided in the same way that Christian Prudhomme and the Tour de France are slightly undecided about the way to go. Do they fully embrace short, spectacular stages, what you might consider gimmicky stages, or do they stay faithful to the traditions and heritage of the race? Not just in a sporting sense but the Grand Tours are supposed to represent a journey and provide a snapshot of a country. I am not entirely sure they are clear on that yet. The Grand Tour that has the strongest identity at the moment is the Vuelta because it seems to know exactly what it is and what it wants to do and is very confident about the direction it wants to go in.

So at the Giro we had Quintana, Pinot, Dumoulin and Nibali battling it out for almost the entirety of the three weeks and there were various points when it looked like any one of them could have won. Dumoulin was a surprise, though. He came into the season being quite cagey, as he has been for the past couple of years, always under-promising but over-delivering. He was saying he wanted to be top five or top ten and then he goes and contends for the win. We gave his team Sunweb a bit of flak – we weren’t alone in suggesting that his team was not particularly powerful in that race. They had come in with quite an inexperienced team but because there were so many riders in contention, Dumoulin was able to use those other teams too, by surfing the wheels and taking advantage of the work the other teams were doing and the lack of a strong team did not become a major issue for him until very late in the race, the last couple of days, and by that point he was home and dry.

LB: You mention the Giro showcasing the country, because I did the first two weeks from Sardinia to Sicily then across the bridge of the foot to the heel and then snaking up the middle to Bergamo in the north. What struck me about that journey was how gradually Italy changes. Every day felt like yesterday but if you thought back three or four days it felt like a slightly different country. So by the time we got north it had crept up on me how much Italy had changed. It struck me the people were friendlier in the south. They were sunnier and more gregarious in the south. Sicily was obviously terrifying because I thought the mafia were lurking round every corner and might take an interest in our gleaming white Maseratifn8 and think we were big-time players or something. The food was also much better in the south.

DF: That’s a big call! We could do an hour-long podcast on just that topic. The food is much better in the south?

LB: I think so, yes. I think the quality and simplicity. It’s much less pretentious. In the north there’s a sort of culinary complacency …

DF: As you inch closer to France, it gets more complacent …

LB: We were unfortunate when we reached Bergamo because I was looking forward to a traditional dish of polenta but we had been invited for a pizza by the Giro’s press office people so we missed out on that.

DF: Lionel’s got a mental filing cabinet of every meal he’s had.

RM: I bet you couldn’t tell us who won the stage that day.

LB: I could actually because it was Bob Jungels but I remember that because the winner’s press conference was in the Bergamo chamber of commerce or something and the room we were in had this amazing stained-glass image on the ceiling, with the light coming through, and that stuck in my mind.

Anyway, back to the Giro. I don’t want to pollute the podcast book with a football analogy but Sunweb were like Leicester City when they won the Premier League. Every day in the mountains we expected it to be the day when Sunweb fell apart but it didn’t happen. They didn’t have the strongest collection of individuals but when they worked together they used their resources very well. One of my last stages on the Giro was the one to Oropa, another stunning climb with a beautiful monastery up there, and obviously famous for Marco Pantani’s heroics back in the Nineties. That was the day when Dumoulin won, when everyone had expected others to put him on the back foot, but what was striking to me was how tight-knit the Sunweb group was. The first few riders waited for the last ones before setting off back down to where the team bus was parked so they could all have a little moment of celebration together. That was the moment when I started to think that Dumoulin might be able to do it.

DF: I think [Sunweb are] really good at making targets but also setting long-term plans, often plans that go beyond the length of riders’ contracts. With Dumoulin a couple of years ago they had been talking about a four-year plan or a five-year plan to get him ready to contend in major tours. Just to broaden it out, the question about teams, it’s a theme not only in the Giro but how important are teams at the Grand Tours? There’s such a high premium now on not just winning Grand Tours but pretty much any position in the top ten. So the old canons about the responsibility to work falling on the team of the race leader, or the rider who is highest up the general classification, does often not apply now because there will always be someone who will take it on themselves to pull. We’ve seen it numerous times in recent years where there’s been a dangerous move down the road and a few guys have looked at each other as if to say, which team is going to pull? And there will always be a team that will pull and so guys [race leaders] who do not have a particularly strong team have often got away with it.

LB: As it was the 100th Giro, Rich, you started by asking whether it was what the country of Italy and the race organisers would have wanted as a great celebration of the race, well, they had only one stage win and they had to wait two weeks for it before Vincenzo Nibali won in Bormio. Nibali was third overall and didn’t really ever look like repeating the last-week heroics of 2016 but he gave it a reasonable shot at times. No days in the pink jersey either for Italian riders. It was a race that celebrated Italy but didn’t necessarily celebrate Italian cycling.

DF: Can I throw in something, gratuitously, that I found out the other day about Italians and the pink jersey? In 1971 the Giro started with a team relay race and Vincenzo Torriani the race boss decided that all the riders in the winning team should wear the pink jersey the next day. It was Salvarani, Gimondi’s team.

LB: I think I did know that.

RM: For me one of the big surprises, perhaps the surprise of the season, was that the Hammer Series got a pretty positive response from us.

LB: I was dead against it. I don’t like anything new.

RM: Oddly, you do like the idea of innovation but the reality of this, I wasn’t sure … one would almost think you’d had cocktails in the desert with …

DF: … Graham Bartlett.fn9

LB: I think I’m the only one of us who hasn’t had cocktails with Graham Bartlett.

RM: I haven’t.

LB: No, I think it was good to see something new. Last year we made an episode looking, well, only three years into the future [laughs]. You don’t need a very big crystal ball for that, do you. How will cycling look in 2020?

RM: What were we thinking?

LB: It was the kind of woolly thinking the UCI calendar department are sometimes guilty of. But now the Hammer Series is underway, on the one hand it’s asking a question that nobody’s really asked: what does road racing need other than stage racing and one-day racing? And yet when you look at the whole menu of races on the World Tour, it’s clear there is room for some kind of innovation. Certainly the hilly Hammer Series stage, won by Carlos Betancur, was a great watch. It was like Twenty20 cricket. The action was condensed into under two hours. It was exciting.

RM: The team time trial was a great watch as well.

LB: Um, yes it was, but by accident rather than design, with the coming together of the teams at the finish, they were lucky …

DF: Not sure about that. I think the nature of it will dictate that a lot of them are like that, because of the nature of the pursuit …

LB: Well it’s designed to be like that to, to come down to …

RM: So you’ve contradicted yourself there. You said accident rather than design. And we’ve done the equivalent of waiting in a doorway, with leg outstretched, and watched you fall flat on your face …

LB: I meant they got lucky in the sense that it could have been a right mess, it could have been a shambles, but actually there was an element of pursuit to it …

DF: It could’ve been like that scene in Anchorman when the four news crews fight in the courtyard …

LB: