Grab yourself a coffee, get comfortable, and buckle up for a hell of a ride.
This investigation was more than six months in the making and tells the story of notorious cycling personality Aaron Brown, aka UCI Overlord. We hope you like it.
#longreads
Hello world! As one our first acts, here's the trailer for the Netflix Tour de France series. We found it in a bin out back.
It's excellent!
Please sign up if you want to find out what else is in our bins.
We're privileged to work with Kate, and even moreso to be able to publish her fantastic story on EC. Why is a cycling site publishing a story about auto racing? Because it's also about bike racing, and how power and wealth shape sports journalism.
hello everyone. Thank you for your kind words and support regarding my piece about F1. Thanks to a few days of negotiation, the piece can now be read in its entirety at
@escapecycling
, a publication I care deeply about and where I am editor at large.
Good lesson from
@MarkCavendish
for all the young bike racers out there: always hang onto your bars as long as possible. Helps protect your wrists and sometimes collarbone. And keeping the bike close may have saved a few other riders from going down as well.
I mean, you'd be mad too if you'd won two races in the past three weeks at the same time as your vaunted GC leader finished 30th at the Dauphiné and YOU were the one they left off the Tour team.
The UCI is banning angled-in brake levers in 2024 with plans to first 'restrict' and eventually 'regulate' the 'extreme inward inclination' of brake levers.
This Tour de France presentation, we witnessed a turtleneck duel for the ages. Light and shade. Yin and yang. Burgaudeau and Vingegaard.
Who wore it best?
It's hard to imagine now, but as a kid Jonas Vingegaard was ... pretty bad at bike racing. What changed?
@cmbell310
talked to teammates and friends who were there from the start to find out.
Do you really think Primož Roglič would win the Giro with a cathartic comeback on the next-to-last day and we wouldn't ask
@derailleurkate
to write about it?
Sepp Kuss's Vuelta a España win has unlocked a new confidence. He wants more opportunities, as long as they don't come at the expense of who he is and what got him here.
"I didn't know how I was going to get home. I didn't know how I would afford food. I didn't know if I was going to be living under a bridge next month. That was my experience racing on Zaaf."
An Escape exclusive:
BikeGrid is now here!
- You have nine guesses to fill out the grid.
- Select a cyclist for each cell that meets the criteria for each row and column.
- A cyclist cannot be used more than once. A rarer pick will earn you more points.
- new grid each day!
You may have noticed a smorgasbord of helmets on display as
@TrekSegafredo
took on the Paris-Nice TTT.
For
@ronanmclaughlin
, TT race days are like Christmas, only better. Here's his rundown of what's going on in this pic 👇🧵
The elite women are right now competing for the gravel world title, but you wouldn't know it thanks to the UCI's decision to forgo live coverage. We ask where they get the audacity:
All pro riders come from somewhere, writes
@CaleyFretz
It's a quite basic truth that we nonetheless often forget. The places they come from helped make them who they are, and in turn, the good ones return the favor. From Sepp Kuss's parade in Durango:
"We want to be able to trust those we put our faith and emotion into and we hate dominance because it makes us feel like we can’t."
@derailleurkate
on the season Jumbo is having.
And finally, maybe we're biased because she writes for us, but we think no one captures the emotion of a bike race better than
@derailleurkate
, and no race produces emotions quite like Paris-Roubaix. Pair the two? Buckle up, it's a ride:
Tragedy out of Australia. According to reports from multiple Australian media outlets, recently retired pro cyclist Rohan Dennis has been charged in connection with the death of his wife Melissa Dennis, née Hoskins, herself a former pro.
Update! 500 members to go! We're so close.
We want to mark that occasion. The legendary individual who gets us over our target will get member number 13 (we’ll even turn it upside down for you) AND will get upgraded to a lifetime membership.
More here:
9 months ago
@NathEarle
was almost killed when a truck driver crashed into him. Last week, in his second race back, he won the Tour of Japan – a truly amazing comeback.
Ellen van Dijk shared some amazing news this morning! The current ITT World Champion is expecting her first baby in September! Congratulations Ellen!
👇🧵
🚨 At Strade Bianche, viewers noticed Kristen Faulkner appeared to be wearing what looked like a blood glucose monitor as she rode to third. These devices are not permitted to be worn in competition.
The UCI has now confirmed to
@EscapeCycling
that it is looking into the matter.
Our crew is working on a bunch of Paris-Roubaix Femmes stories, but ICYMI here are some of the stories we did in the leadup.
First up,
@abimickey
's prescient interview with Alison Jackson, who did, in fact, ride the race like a cowboy.
She just won a stage of the Giro Donne, in her first ever WorldTour race, at just 20 years old. So who is Antonia Niedermaier?
@WMNcycling
#GiroDonne23
Cost to enter
@ronanmclaughlin
in a Belgian kermesse: €17
Amount
@iamjonnylong
lost betting on Ronan: €10
Re-discovering a love for racing kermesses: priceless
Saturday's stage 20 time trial features a gondola, 18 percent gradients, no follow cars, and mandatory (that's right) mid-stage bike changes for anyone on a TT bike. In short, vintage Giro d'Italia.
"To go from 80 km out seemed like too much to ask for, too much space in which anything at all could happen."
@derailleurkate
on Tadej Pogačar's called-shot victory at Strade Bianche.
Even after 140km at the head of the race, Giulio Ciccone sped up the horribly steep finishing climb faster than most of the Dauphiné GC contenders. The man's on fire.
When
@wadewallace
set out to create a list of 50 of the most influential people in American cycling, it turned out to be a larger, harder task than he'd anticipated. Among the hundreds of nominees, who made the list? Read on:
In a post-GCN+ world, streaming bike racing gets a little weird. Fortunately, there's our handy guide to who's showing what, where, how much it'll cost, and ways to save some cash.
"The two crashes I saw today were because of stupid moves. Maybe sometimes it’s better to pull your brake and survive another day than take down 25 riders." - Matteo Trentin 👀