Welcome to Wednesday’s live blog, with Jack Sexty, Simon MacMichael and the rest of the team.
Today’s crazy Vuelta stage the fastest 200km+ bike race in history (+ highlights); US firm in a “Spin” over its claim to have trademarked the word; Doping – a Viz reader writes; Watchdog bans Deliveroo bike delivery + more on the live blog
All today’s news from the site and beyond…
Wed, Sep 11, 2019 18:50
11 September 2019, 18:50
Essential advice as ever from the Viz letters page
11 September 2019, 18:50
At 219.6km, today’s Stage 17 of the Vuelta was the longest of this year’s race – and at an average speed of 50.63kph is thought to have been ridden at a faster pace than any 200km-plus road stage or one-day race in the history of professional cycling.
It’s also the fastest stage in the Vuelta during the past 15 years, eclipsed only by Stage 9 of the 2001 Vuelta as shown in this list provided by Procycling Stats in their excellent livefeed of today’s stage.
https://www.procyclingstats.com/race/vuelta-a-espana/2019/stage-17/today/situation
As you’ll see from the list, stages ridden when EPO use was at its peak in the peloton dominate; there’s only one other stage from the past decade, from Andorra La Vella to Lleida in 2010, when there was a drop of 830 metres in altitude. Certainly, it’s well documented that the average speed of Grand Tours has dropped noticeably since the early 2000s.
A number of factors combined to make today’s stage so quick. As in that 2001 stage, there was a split in the peloton due to crosswinds and today that was followed by a tailwind.
With seven riders in the 45-strong front group, Deceuninck-Quick Step rode hard – and saw Philippe Gilbert take the win in Guadalajara and James Knox jump from 11th to 8th overall. Other teams in the front group had numbers too and an interest in distancing the other GC contenders – not least Movistar, whose quartet of riders included Nairo Quintana who leaps from sixth to second overall.
What we can say with certainty is that today’s stage was quicker than the fastest road stage ever at the Tour de France, which also came around the turn of the millennium, when Mario Cipollini won a 194.5km stage from Laval to Blois at an average speed of 50.4kph.
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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
chrisonabike 6 hours ago
@Rendel Harris "Perhaps lethality should be measured as drivers/cyclists found guilty of causing death per chosen metric, rather than simply numbers killed?" Given the filter of the court system that would a) likely only introduce another source of bias and b) mean the cycling numbers had dubious statistical meaning relative to the motoring ones since after removing e-motorbikes (unless we didn't? But even then...) that is ... one or two in the last 5+ years?
Rendel Harris 6 hours ago
@mdavidford You've made me curious so checked: in Devon and Torbay (in common with many councils, apparently), any project under £500,000 can be internally approved by the Corporate Director for Strategy, Performance, and Sustainability, whereas any project costing in excess of £500,000 needs a full cabinet vote. So it looks suspiciously as though there's been a bit of jiggery-pokery with the numbers to avoid full cabinet scrutiny.
ceppm 6 hours ago
From the screenshots, the software looks very similar to the Coospo CS600. I used it for a tour in Ireland and on the first day, I realised that the map of Ireland wasn't loaded by default. I could see my route as breadcrumbs but not the road or anything else around me. It looked very similar to what you saw when you went off-route. Are you sure you had the map of Scotland in your unit? Luckily for me, at the end of the first day, after tons of searches, trials and errors, I managed to download the map of Ireland into my phone, connect the Coospo to my phone as an external drive and upload the map. Not an easy task but that solved the problem. For the next five days I had a proper map to navigate. Regardless of that, I sent it back. Loading routes into it was a real PITA, the routes the app plotted were terrible compared to Komoot's and it didn't have re-routing.
AidanR 6 hours ago
@Rendel Harris I'm not sure why trips made is a better metric than miles travelled, but yes, that does yield a 9x difference for cars vs bicycles in pedestrian deaths. The real anomaly using that basis, though, are motorcyclists, who are a staggering 72x more likely to kill a pedestrian per trip than a cyclist. That suggests that speed, more than mass, is the real danger. And that young men are the greatest danger of all.
Rendel Harris 6 hours ago
@chrisonabike Indeed, you put your finger on another problem with the fatality statistics in that we don't know in how many of the fatal incidents the driver/cyclist was to blame. If the two cyclist-caused-pedestrian fatalities the pedestrian was drunk and fell off the pavement into the path of the cyclist that could obviously change the lethality ratio considerably if factored in. Perhaps lethality should be measured as drivers/cyclists found guilty of causing death per chosen metric, rather than simply numbers killed?
chrisonabike 6 hours ago
Finally (on cyclists and junctions) cyclists may not be as observant themselves there. While junctions are high-mental-workload spaces (or should be...) for all road users I suspect cyclists - mixing with the motor traffic - are going to be focusing strongly on that for obvious reasons. Which is again why in places which are more advanced in this respect not only are junctions given better designs *, but network-level thought goes in to routes for each mode, the better to minimise the need for interactions. Especially when speeds might be higher. * Separation in space and/or time when modes cross, explicit space for different modes so it's clear who goes where / what to expect...
chrisonabike 6 hours ago
I'm not sure about the "60% of pedestrians killed at junctions are killed by cyclists" number, but i *could* believe it's relatively high. Why? Other "qualitative differences" - "noticeability" and "expectation". In the simplest sense cyclists are smaller and quieter than motor vehicles. (There's a lot of "looking with our ears" when eg. crossing roads believe). But more: in the UK we *expect* cars. We've learned to deal with cars both by formal teaching and daily experience. We know "how drivers behave" - where to expect them. I strongly suspect it's not just drivers "only looking for the motor vehicles". We don't *expect* cyclists. And (if taken at face value) there's a lot of quote anecdata that people are genuinely surprised by them / completely unfamiliar with cyclist behaviour on roads (except "they all jump red lights"...) - "came out of nowhere" / "never saw them" / " they were down the road, then suddenly they were right there" / wasn't expecting them to"...
chrisonabike 6 hours ago
A key one is "speed" as obviously injury is strongly related to that, and the 20-30mph region is where IIRC "mostly injured" crosses over to "mostly killed". Cars would be expected to be at higher speeds, for more of the time. That may be reduced in some places however eg. congested rush hours, and where "mixing" may be most likely the environment may cue lower speeds (narrow streets).
chrisonabike 6 hours ago
Stepping back, given that humans operate both cars and bikes maybe a *qualitative* "what differs" might be instructive? (Putting to one side for a moment what may be mostly a motornormative prejudice: that drivers are in some way "more responsible". Variations "more to lose because they've paid for a car" / "but trained and licenced" / "more accountable because number plates" / "only (man)children and crims who can't afford cars cycle" etc).
Rendel Harris 6 hours ago
@AidanR I wonder how it would change the stats if one looked at deaths per trip? According to the NTS the average person makes 15 cycle trips a year and 357 as a car driver, so 23x more driving trips than cycling ones but 182x the pedestrian deaths so by that calculation cars are 8x more lethal. Take out the 20% of car trips on motorways and you have one death per 51M trips motoring and one death per 487M trips cycling, so motoring becomes almost 10x more lethal. I know one can make statistics do anything one wishes by changing the metrics but that figure seems a more realistic approximation of relative lethality to me. All this of course is before we count all the other deaths caused by motorists that cyclists almost never cause, i.e. motorcycle riders, car passengers etc, almost five times the pedestrian numbers, cars then become 50x more lethal than bikes...
16 thoughts on “Today’s crazy Vuelta stage the fastest 200km+ bike race in history (+ highlights); US firm in a “Spin” over its claim to have trademarked the word; Doping – a Viz reader writes; Watchdog bans Deliveroo bike delivery + more on the live blog”
I wonder if the cyclist being
I wonder if the cyclist being deliberately run over with life changing injuries will generate the same level of outrage as the cyclist head butting the pedestrian?
burtthebike wrote:
It definitely won’t. And it’ll be more to do with gang warfare than hatred for cyclists.
Obligatory call for cars to be fitted with number plates to allow them to be traced when they leave the scene of an acc… oh wait! Not that having number plates is a requirement for car drivers anymore. I often see cars driving around London without plates fitted.
srchar wrote:
My first thought, too.
Hey – maybe we’re looking at ‘headbutting cyclist’ incident all wrong… Maybe there was a previous conflict at a bridge club or something, rather than their being total strangers
brooksby wrote:
My thought too. There was clearly a close passing of the cyclist & pedestrian. Did the cyclist have right of way? Did the pedestrian say something highly offensive to the cyclist? I have no idea but there is more to this than the video shows.
burtthebike wrote:
Tricky one, it might because it was a 17 year-old, but then maybe not because it was only a cyclist… or maybe it will because perpertrator was a yoof… or maybe not because he was in a car… or maybe it will because he fled the scene.
Or the 4×4/little shit story
Or the 4×4/little shit story from yesterday.
So an American corporation
So an American corporation “owns” the rights to an English word? What’s next, no more spin cycle for washing machines?
Philh68 wrote:
the whole , spinning, is only ‘spinning’ if you are ‘spinning’ with a trainer, trained in ‘spinning’ who’s paying the American corporation, for the privellege of calling his ‘spin class’ a ‘spin class’ thing, has been going on for many years. It’s nuts, but that seems to be the way of the world now. Soon, you won’t be able to go for a ‘shit’ without someone claiming a copyright infringement, if this carries on.
Judge dreadful wrote:
they could market a toilet under the brand name Pooloton which bland beautiful people could sit on in their vast apartments in front of the landscape windows, laying some massive cable without even their t-shirt getting sweaty.
Philh68 wrote:
No, in broad terms an American corporation has the right to use an English word to sell goods or services in specified classes in a particular geography for a limited period of time. I assume their registration doesn’t cover washing machines. What I don’t understand is why the owner of the “spinning” trademark is taking action for use of the word “spin”, which they don’t appear to have a registration for. Maybe this will turn out like the Roubaix debacle, where Specialized got heavy handed over a cafe using the name until Fuji bikes pointed out that actually Specialized didn’t own that, they did.
I’m not sure what I think
I’m not sure what I think about the Deliveroo judgement.
I never actually believed that a kid on a MTB could deliver to a fleeing bank robber or to the ISS – I’d assumed it’s what used to be called “artistic licence” – so I wouldn’t have taken on face value that they could deliver “anywhere”…
I mean – Domino’s don’t deliver to my village even though there’s a branch in the next town 4 miles away, so I wouldn’t imagine Deliveroo would either.
brooksby wrote:
Dont assume anything with advertising… Red Bull lost a case based on someone who said that he was not given wings as promised.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/29550003/so-red-bull-doesnt-actually-give-you-wings.
Oh, and the rolling bib shorts into the jersey video… genius!
PRSboy wrote:
+1 on that!
CygnusX1 wrote:
That’s the way I’ve been doing my t-shirts when I go on holiday for the last few years, takes up less space than folding and gives a nice tight bundle. I bought a couple of t-shirts when I was away recently and folded them like this on the shop counter.
Redvee wrote:
I’ve recently started using fold and roll for most of my tshirts etc that go away into a drawer, avoids getting creases that get compressed by the weight of others above, and it’s much easier to find the one you want when they’re layed out visibly rather than in a stack. Keeping the bib shorts inside the jersey is a minor stroke of genius though.
I’d be most happy if they
I’d be most happy if they change their name to “America corporate fitness giants are a bunch of c*nts”