Welcome to Thursday’s live blog, with Jack Sexty, Simon MacMichael and the rest of the team…
Live blog: Strava cuts ties with Relive, says new updates violate contract; road.cc’s John puts BBC straight on how bikes stay upright + more
All today’s news from the site and beyond…
Thu, Jul 11, 2019 18:07
SUMMARY
11 July 2019, 18:07
Froome experiencing major FOMO ahead of Tour's toughest stage
Massive FOMO today
Won my first @letour stage on La Planche des Belles Filles in 2012. What I wouldn’t give to be there racing it today
Please smash it @TeamINEOS https://t.co/3QVjDxbcEb— Chris Froome (@chrisfroome) 11 July 2019
That’s ‘fear of missing out’ if you weren’t aware, as stage six heads towards the place where Froome won his first Tour de France stage back in 2012.
11 July 2019, 18:07
Peter Sagan double-header
Sagan was back to his best yesterday, taking stage five in emphatic style – and once more gave something back to his eyewear sponsor 100% by donning one of their ski masks.
In other Sagan news, here he is convincing us the world is flat thanks to the Specialized range of e-bikes. The man can do no wrong…
11 July 2019, 18:07
Sir Dave Brailsford plays down rumours that he's set to step down as Ineos cycling team manager to take on wider role for the company
Ineos CEO Jim Radcliffe is known to be an admirer of his new cycling team’s general manager, and it was reported yesterday evening in the Telegraph that Brailsford could be set for a new role that would see him oversee all of Ineos’ sporting interests – which is growing at an alarming rate, having just purchased French League 1 football club Nice.
However, the Guardian reports that Brailsford was dismissive of the rumours when speaking to press before yesterday’s Tour de France stage, saying he doesn’t want to leave cycling completely: “You are constantly looking for things to challenge you and push you on. I don’t want to leave cycling, I love it too much, but equally I think this could be quite a challenge and it feels really invigorating.”
Brailsford is already set to be involved in Eliud Kipchoge’s second attempt to break two hours in the marathon , which is being organised by Ineos and will take place in Austria this October – do you think Brailsford will be tempted by a new challenge, and would the team be as successful without him?
11 July 2019, 18:07
Huge doping probe by Europol results in 234 arrests and 3.8 million substances seized
A big investigation by Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, has led to a huge seizure of doping substances and led to 234 arrests, according to their press release. In all the bust shut down 17 organised groups, stopped operation at nine underground labs and seized 3.8 million doping substances and counterfeit medicines. Mario Thevis, head of Europol’s doping analysis lab in Cologne, said: “We learn from the case that obviously there is a big market. Only if there is a large market will imports and structures of this kind be built.“
It follows on from Operation Aderlass, when a number of pro cyclists and cross country skiers were caught in raids across Germany and Austria. No names in cycling have been implicated yet, but we’ll update if there are further developments.
11 July 2019, 18:07
Sagan's dad is pure gold
Well, @petosagan if we don’t see you on the start line bright and early, we know where you’ll be! #TDF2019 @BORAhansgrohe pic.twitter.com/6Ops3w1qn8
— Le Tour de France UK (@letour_uk) 10 July 2019
After three world championships and 11 stage victories at the Tour de France, it’s (sort of) lovely to see Peter Sagan’s old man acting like a complete loon celebrating his son’s twelfth TDF stage victory!
11 July 2019, 18:07
Adam Blythe rides today's brutal TdF stage finish on a Brompton - and pops a wheelie
How do you make a devastating climb look easy? Wheelie your way up… @AdamBlythe89 tackles La Planche des Belles Filles in the stage six recon finish #TDF2019 #TheBreakaway pic.twitter.com/mizH7BRwhs
— Eurosport UK (@Eurosport_UK) July 11, 2019
11 July 2019, 18:07
Dylan Teuns victorious on brutal stage 6 summit finish
Victory for @dylan_teuns!
Victoire pour @dylan_teuns !#TDF2019 pic.twitter.com/ySZiNdNMP7— Tour de France (@LeTour) 11 July 2019
Behind him, Geraint Thomas made up some time over other GC contenders with a very strong finish on the savage gradients and Giulio Ciccone put himself in the yellow jersey – full story to follow.
11 July 2019, 18:07
Strava vs Relive continued
With both sides blaming the other, Strava have made a new statement in response to Relive’s, standing by their view that Relive broke API terms by using the data of Strava members. Here’s the statement in full:
“We have strict standards for how our API partners utilise our member data. We deeply respect the trust of our member community and expect our partners to do the same.
“Relive’s current use of Strava member data violates our API agreement and we have ended its integration with Strava. We are disappointed that Relive was unwilling to make the changes necessary to comply with the agreement.”
11 July 2019, 18:07
The BBC tries to explain how a bicycle stays upright - and road.cc's John Stevenson points out where they went wrong
With bikes in the news after Channel 5’s portrayal of us cyclists as lawless killers, the BBC has gone after a bit of cycling-related website traffic with an article that asks the question ‘How does a bike stay upright?’
Good question, you might say, and it is. But unfortunately the article doesn’t get even close to answering it, and makes at least one serious error while failing to reach that destination.
After quite a lot of waffle about the gyroscopic effect of a spinning wheel, the piece concludes that this isn’t actually what keeps a bike upright as it rolls along. It cites Dr Hugh Hunt from the University of Cambridge, as having built bikes with extra, contra-rotating wheels cancelling out the gyro effect of the wheels on the ground. Turns out they’re still stable.
Rider skill, the article concludes, is what keeps a bike upright, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that you can push a riderless bike off down a slope and above a certain speed it will keep going.
As well as failing to explain what keeps a moving bike upright, the Beeb repeats common misconception about wheels. It says: “when you sit on the bike, the axle pulls down on the rim and acts like an arch … you are, in effect, hanging off the rim of the wheel.”
Except you’re not. If that was how wheels worked, then the upper spokes in a loaded wheel would have higher tension than when not loaded. A few minutes with a spoke tensiometer reveals that they don’t change, but in fact the tension in the lower spokes reduces.
This matters because it implies something important about building wheels: high tension is good. If the tension in a spoke drops to zero, the nipple is free to turn, allowing the wheel to go out of true. If several spokes end up with zero tension, the wheel can collapse because the spokes are no longer holding the rim in place.
A good wheelbuilder therefore builds with as much spoke tension as the rim can take, and well-designed rims have sturdy spoke beds to take the load from the nipples. If spokes increased in tension when a wheel’s loaded none of this would matter, but observation confirms that under-tensioned wheels quickly develop problems and high-tension wheels don’t.
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Jack is group editor across road.cc, off.road.cc and ebiketips, overseeing all three sites in the F-At Digital group to make sure everything’s up to scratch. He’s been writing about cycling and multisport for over a decade, arriving at road.cc via 220 Triathlon Magazine in 2017. He worked across all areas of road.cc including tech, news and video, and also contributed to ebiketips before being named editor of road.cc in 2021 (much to his surprise). Jack has been hooked on cycling since his student days, and currently has a Trek 1.2 for winter riding, a beloved Bickerton folding bike for getting around town, and an extra beloved custom Ridley Helium SLX for fantasising about going fast in his stable. Jack has never won a bike race, but does have a master’s degree in print journalism, and two Guinness World Records for pogo sticking (it’s a long story).
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Latest Comments
slc 3 hours ago
@chrisonabike Ah yes, the Monmouth Pl pump track. Apparently there is a bingo card of annoying bike infra features and someone was keen to get a full house. The good planners of Bristol were clearly envious and copied the design on Whiteladies Road this year
chrisonabike 4 hours ago
Also "if there is going to be cycle infra anywhere, it should be in the park". Having cycled in Bath a couple of times I can see where he's coming from (thinking about child and elderly relatives). I understand this as "this town's motor traffic is so out of control that even proper cycle infra (the whole raison d'être of which is 'motor traffic') doesn't make me think my relatives would be safe". That's pretty sad.
chrisonabike 4 hours ago
@slc when I last visited, it was more like humps - for the cyclists that is! Up and down at the "creative" bus stop "bypasses" (eg. on Monmouth Place). Edinburgh might be jealous with their "trap you in a "protected" bike lane when the bus pulls into it" efforts. Both are pretty hopeless.
chrisonabike 4 hours ago
Even Uk efforts to *improve* safety for all vulnerable road users neatly feed back to also dissuade vulnerable road users. Again improves those safety numbers... This happens because these are never allowed to "inconvenience" motoring (or - can't allocate too many thousands for that because this big road already costs millions). So rather than reduce and/or move the motor traffic, the "safer infra" becomes uninviting and inconvenient (see "wait 5 minutes at the lights", "dodgy underpass" and "concrete trenches in the sky" overpasses).
chrisonabike 4 hours ago
@belugabob seems the threads have got out of sync (as my browser shows 'em), but yes. A great way to improve the cycling KSI stats is to have no cyclists. Guaranteed zero cyclist KSIs! The UK hasn't got there (yet) of course, but along with reducing cyclist numbers another proven way is to reduce the interactions between cyclists and motorists. That has happened both in NL and also in most of the UK - but ... a bit differently here. The roads have become so uninviting to most that what cycling there is increasingly takes place in parks, along canals, or in people's garages. Good for those road safety figures though. And as long as we keep pointing at them (to the exclusion of anything else), we could keep "winning the argument"... all the way to having nobody travelling outside a motor vehicle - or outside at all. And think how many lives will be saved!
eburtthebike 6 hours ago
@wtjs "My only objection to the anti-helmet propaganda involves the notion that wearing a helmet makes the wearer more likely to suffer a collision and consequent head injury." I've never heard anyone claim this, perhaps you could post a few examples? What is demonstrably true, is that cyclists who wear helmets have more collisions, but no-one claims that they always involve the head. Given the levels of pro-helmet propaganda over the last thirty years, your claims of anti-helmet propaganda are risible. And I'm being very, very polite. "I resort to common sense to dispute this." No you don't. You merely assert something without evidence, and anyone resorting to the 'it's common sense' argument has already lost.
eburtthebike 6 hours ago
@Rendel Harris "I do try not to enter into discussion with you on this Bert, because I know you will never change your stance one iota, but I’ve crashed a motorcycle at around 35 mph and hit my head on the kerb hard enough to compress discs in my spine and tear neck ligaments but above the neck I came away with nothing worse than a mild concussion." That's BURT not Bert, and as for someone who will never change their stance, kettle, meet pot. Thanks for your anecdote, but as I'm sure you're aware, anecdotal evidence is evidence of absolutely nothing. That's the same as all those hundreds, if not thousands, of cyclists holding up a broken helmet claiming that it saved their life, when the death rate of cyclists does not fall with increased helmet wearing. "If you’re going to tell me that I could’ve done the same thing without a helmet on and walked away with the same injuries I’m going to have to say that’s nonsense." As you ought to know by now, wearing protective equipment influences behaviour. If you weren't wearing a helmet, would you have taken such risks? The answer, as I'm sure you know, is no. The evidence you provide does not prove that motorcycle helmets are effective in a direct impact at more than 16mph, it shows that helmets can reduce damage by being a sacrificial layer, not an impact absorber. You might be interested in the evidence about when helmets were made obligatory for motorcyclists in the UK: the deaths of motorcyclists fell immediately. But someone did a rather more rigorous analysis, and found that the helmets became magically effective between 10pm and 2am. Clearly they weren't magic, so something else was more likely to be the cause of reduced motorcyclist deaths, so what happened at the same time? The breathalyser. So motorcyclists and drivers weren't driving drunk, and the reduced deaths were nothing to do with helmets. The same effect has been observed in USA states, which were obliged to bring in motorcycle helmet laws or lose federal funding. The death rate didn't drop. Some of those states then withdrew the helmet law, amidst predictions of dead motorcyclists piled up on every corner, but the death rate in those states didn't rise. PPE for victims in a road scenario is largely irrelevant, as shown by the data, because those with more protection take more risks, and drivers take more risks around those perceived to be wearing protection. What really works is reducing risk, by segregation and making those posing the danger take more care. That is what has been shown to work, not more protection. Perhaps Rendel, we should all drive tanks? EDIT "Again, it’s clearly nonsense to say the helmet hasn’t worked when someone’s walked away from coming down headfirst on the tarmac from a height at high speed." I've just watched the video, and the vertical drop appears to be about 1.5m, so well within the capabilities of the helmet in a direct collision. The horizontal speed is irrelevant to the impact.
mdavidford 6 hours ago
Mmm - it does seem to be perfectly fine as is, apart from the odd bicycle causing havoc, of course.
slc 7 hours ago
Bath's transport problems could be most effectively resolved by the introduction of some gentle curves https://youtu.be/CTQ-YljDT0I?si=VVccex3AJWDTLFhp
Rendel Harris 8 hours ago
@Nigel Garage I suppose it's typical for an accountant to imagine that numbers explain everything. Numerous factors account for the Netherland's higher death rate per capita, the primary one being that 45% of the population cycles daily and cyclists, as we all know, are more vulnerable than car drivers. You can pretty much guarantee that if nearly 30% of trips made in Britain were made by bike, as they are in the Netherlands, our casualty figures would be higher. The fatality risk for cyclists in the UK is almost ten times that for car drivers/passengers, as it is in the Netherlands. I'm sure a beancounter like yourself can figure out that means that if cycling goes up, fatality numbers go up too. The UK frequently scores well on per capita road deaths because as a population we rely so heavily on cars rather than the more vulnerable forms of transport. You, with your strange autophilia (or is that autoeroticism?), probably imagine that's a good thing, but anyone with the wellbeing of the populace and the environment at heart does not.
5 thoughts on “Live blog: Strava cuts ties with Relive, says new updates violate contract; road.cc’s John puts BBC straight on how bikes stay upright + more”
that peter fella is gold for
that peter fella is gold for our sport
You can link the following
You can link the following with Relive.cc too:
Endomondo, Garmin Connect, Runtastic, Suunto, MapMyRun | Walk | Ride | Hike & Polar Flow.
Redvee wrote:
i read it as “Relieve” and was thinking “top spots to pee while you’re riding- that’s brilliant”
“If that was how wheels
“If that was how wheels worked, then the upper spokes in a loaded wheel would have higher tension than when not loaded. A few minutes with a spoke tensiometer reveals that they don’t change, but in fact the tension in the lower spokes reduces.”
This doesn’t make sense. First part of the sentence says the tension doesn’t change, then after the comma says tension reduces. If you are going to criticise other people’s errors make sure your correction makes sense!
pruaga wrote:
I think it’s meant that the tension in the upper spokes doesn’t change whereas the tension in the lower spokes does change.