“Signing the lifelong contract was a mere formality”: Wout van Aert gets Visma-Lease a Bike logo sunburnt on his thighs; Chris Froome says he’ll be “back on the bike in no time” after breaking collarbone; Evenepoel debuts moustache + more on the live blog
SUMMARY
“Police are failing to respond to a spate of bikejackings in London's Regent's Park. Good. Last month, on one day alone, three bikes worth thousands of pounds were stolen. Excellent.”
Egan Bernal spotted back on his bike on Col d’Èze, six days after breaking his collarbone
When they say pro cyclists are a different breed, they really mean it, because who in their right mind goes back to riding within six days of breaking a collarbone?
The Colombian sustained the injury after a mass crash at the Clásica Jaén just last week, but he was pictured yesterday on a training ride at the Col d’Èze, a climb often used in Paris-Nice, hopefully indicating that Bernal could very well be on his path to recovery and racing again soon.
The Ineos rider had enjoyed a fantastic start to the 2025 season, ending a drought of 1354 days without a win by first winning the national time trial championship, and then a few days later, doubled up by winning the national road race championship as well.
Just this weekend, Chris Froome also suffered a fractured collarbone after a crash at the last stage of the UAE Tour, many suggesting it could be his final race and casting doubts over hopes of ending his career at the Vuelta.
Vuelta back on the cards? Chris Froome says he’ll be “back on the bike in no time” after breaking collarbone at final stage of UAE Tour
Taking social media posts at face value is never a good idea, but all things considered, Chris Froome doesn’t look too bad in an image posted by the four-time Tour de France on Instagram after he fractured his collarbone in the crash at the final stage of the UAE Tour.
After the crash, Froome was taken for surgery in Dubai, and he’s now shared a picture with a wristband saying ‘Fall Risk’ and a song choice of ‘Clumsy Situations’. The 39-year-old wrote: “Accurate. Back in the mend again,” before thanking his doctors.
Even better, the 39-year-old British rider added that he’ll be “back on the bike in no time”, thus quelling the doubts over whether we had seen the last of him at the UAE Tour, in what would surely have been a rather unceremonious end to a living legend’s career.
With Froome keen to ride the Vuelta a España one last time before calling it a day on his career, he should easily be able to get himself back to speed with the Spanish Grand Tour six months away. Whether he’ll be considered good enough by Israel-Premier Techto line up at the start in Torino on 23 August is a different topic altogether…
“When you get your first KOM…”: Timothée Chalamet x Strava crossover
If you missed Hollywood’s golden boy, Timothée Chalamet’s speech after winning the award for best performance by a male actor in a leading role at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards for his outstanding turn as Bob Dylan (Ryan would tell you all about it) in the movie A Complete Unknown, it was one for the ages.
And the meme-able material (doesn’t every single interaction in this unserious panopticon-ish world need that these days?) of the speech, in which Chalamet declared his intent for “pursuit of greatness”, has been utilised by… Strava’s Instagram account.
What a world we live in!
Remco Evenepoel’s training is in full-flow now, with a very questionable moustache choice
After the dooring incident with a bpost van driver in which the double Olympic gold medallist suffered serious injuries, Evenepoel was recently spotted back on his bike. Fans would be glad to know that the Belgian seems to be back in full training mode now in his home country. But there’s a catch.
In his off-time, the Quick-Step rider seems to have grown a very questionable moustache, for reasons that pass me by. Maybe he’s going for a Timothée Chalamet look?
OMG MOUSTACHE ALERT !!! 😱 www.instagram.com/stories/remc…
— allergy-al.bsky.social (@allergy-al.bsky.social) 24 February 2025 at 17:08
The cycle lane is completely pointless if cars are just using it as a parking bay": Concerned cyclist asks for barriers to prevent school run issues but told enforcement only carried out "when resources allow"
“Thanks for the lead-out”: Mathieu van der Poel helps teammate take Strava KOM from Filippo Ganna over Spanish climb
It’s been quite a few weeks for Mathieu van der Poel. Since winning the Cyclocross World Championships at Liévin earlier this month, the Dutchman has been training with his team Alpecin-Deceuninck in Spain ahead of the spring classics.
And after winning every cyclocross race he participated in the 2024/25 season, Van der Poel was seen taking it easy yesterday as the lead-out man for his 29-year-old teammate Sam Gaze, who took the KOM on the climb from Tarbena to Coll de Rates from Filippo Ganna.
Leadout 🇳🇱 Mathieu van der Poel is back! 🔥🚀
📹 @LucGrefte https://t.co/Q9AvJnhzMB pic.twitter.com/WjB2DE4EX7
— Domestique (@Domestique___) February 25, 2025
The Kiwi mountain biker rode the 5km long, 5.6 per cent gradient climb near Calp in nine minutes and 54 seconds, beating Ganna’s time by 16 seconds. He also became the KOM for the ‘Tarbena last 3km’ segment on Strava, once again beating Ganna by 14 seconds this time.
Ganna had only very recently claimed the KOM award for himself on the prestigious climb that’s become a favourite training ground for several pros, beating Remco Evenepoel’s previous time by one second in February.
Even Tadej Pogačar was there back in December, setting a blistering pace on albeit a different segment of Coll de Rates, riding the 6.4km 5.5 per cent climb at an average pace of 31.2km/hr.
The social media account Velofacts calculated Gaze’s average power during the ride to be around 504 watts. He captioned his ride on the popular activity and ride-sharing app as: “Thanks Mathieu van der Poel for the lead out.”
Other names in the top ten, besides Ganna and Evenepoel include Giulio Pellizzari (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe), Toms Skujins (Lidl-Trek), and Ilan Van Wilder (Soudal Quick-Step).
Van der Poel’s season kicks off with the Tirreno-Adriatico in March, following which the former world champion will take on the Milan-San Remo, Ronde van Vlaanderen and the Paris-Roubaix.
Meanwhile, this becomes the second ‘trophy’ to be taken away from Ganna in the span of two weeks, after the Ineos rider’s win at the now-infamous stage of the Volta ao Algarve was written off due to an organisational mistake which saw most of the riders take the wrong turn and end up on the other side of the finish line route.
UCI announces gravel championships will not take place in Nice, citing “organisational difficulties”
The UCI has announced that the 2025 World Gravel Championships won’t be taking place in Nice as previously planned, due to difficulties in organising the race on 18 October, specifically.
In a press release, pro cycling’s governing body said: “The UCI and the City of Nice acknowledged the difficulties of organising the event in the capital of the French Riviera on that date, and in view of various constraints, technical and regarding the calendar, it was mutually agreed not to organise the 4th edition of the UCI worlds for gravel in Nice.
“The UCI is currently studying various options to find a new organiser and a new venue. These, along with the date for the event, will be announced as soon as possible.”
Jonas Vingegaard spotted riding ultra-short 150mm cranks at Volta ao Algarve
> Jonas Vingegaard spotted riding ultra-short 150mm cranks at Volta ao Algarve
“Signing the lifelong contract was a mere formality”: Wout van Aert gets Visma-Lease a Bike logo sunburnt on his thighs, as fans joke about rider getting logo tattooed
Wout van Aert’s commitment to Visma-Lease a Bike is well-known amongst most cycling fans. After all, the 30-year-old Belgian did sign a “lifelong” contract with the team in September, tying him down to the Dutch side for the rest of his professional career. But does he love the team so much that he would get a giant tattoo of their logo on his thigh?
It’s all in jest, as fans have been joking about the bizarre sunburn that the mercurial all-rounder has emblazoned on his thigh, most likely due to the shorts being somewhat permeable to sunlight on the areas where it’s not black.
(Warning: While scrolling through the photos to see the sunburnt leg, any food-ingesting activities are discouraged — let’s just say there’s a video example of what can happen when cyclists eat 100g of carbohydrates every hour)
Maybe he needs a quick read of this essential road.cc guide…
> Cycling survival — how to avoid sunburn & stay comfortable
Of course, Van Aert isn’t the first rider to suffer a bad case of sunburn. At the time we published our own guide to staying safe in the sun (all the way back in 2014), Chris Froome had shared an image of his heavily sunburnt back — thanks to Team Sky’s lightweight, aerodynamic mesh skinsuit, that failed to factor in sun’s UV rays.
EF Education–EasyPost (Garmin−Sharp back then) team boss Jonathan Vaughters had tweeted jokingly: “Aha! We’ve found his weakness. Now on to manufacturing motorized ultra violet ray guns for the TdF.”
Remember, when Twitter was good? And so were Ineos/Team Sky?
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@darnac Richard Virenque and his French Festina colleagues didn't exactly get a free ride in '98.
That said - there are no shortage of delivery riders in my part of Edinburgh riding "clearly illegal" machines (because throttle being used at speed so almost certainly not EAPCs). OTOH I'm slow and they're not all blowing by me; so in practice perhaps less drama? I think the problems tend to be limited by "most delivery riders don't make much money". Indeed I believe the most common scheme is for several people to *hire* a bike together and then ride the heck out of it in shifts. The really high-power ebikes are (currently) more pricey. So ... i guess it's harm minimisation by capitalism? (Not that the sellers care even enough to eg. pass on "you can't use this on the road mate"). The real "looks like a motorbike to me" ones seem to be limited to those presumably on more profitable errands than delivering groceries. Or scrotty yoof - I'm guessing of the local "dodgy families". But maybe that changes around eg. Chelsea or Sloane and it's a plague of racing rahs?
If anyone wants to do something to help, the Cyclists' Defence Fund is appealing for donations. Can't post a link without ending up in comment purgatory, but easy enough to find if you just google (well, easy enough to find how to donate to the CDF; the specific appeal related to this case is a bit harder to find, but "cdf appeal e-bike" seems to work for me. If you go through the appeal page, you get a free mug featuring Dave Walker's drawings).
@jackcycles 1. No evidence that the rider was a delivery driver or carrying a "silly blue delivery bag"; 2. There is no legal requirement for bicycle delivery riders to have insurance any more than any other cyclist; 3. People who want illegally fast ebikes don't rent £6K Terns, which are difficult and expensive to hack to exceed 25 km/h, when they can get a cheap bike and conversion kit for about £400 that will do silly fast speeds. 4. Re bike shop owner dragged down the street by an ebike, I'll take things that never happened for $500; 5. Are you Nigel?
I don't think jackcycles has provided any evidence that the bike shop owner dragged onto the pavement didn't then continue down the footway on the wrong side of the road way over the speed limit through a red light two-abreast and run over poor wheelywheely in his wheelchair again.
@tomlew Where is the evidence for /your/ claim that existing EPO tests can reliably detect doping at far below minimum effective doses (you didn't say "reliably", but that seems a sensible qualifier - without that, you do not have an effective test)? WADA actually funded research into developing tests for microdosing of EPO. I don't know the background as to why, but I have to assume they did so because of problems with the prior tests in detecting microdosing. E.g., I think this paper is reporting on at least some such research (some of the work cited is simply the prior work of various subsets of the authors): Wang, G., Durussel, J., Shurlock, J. et al. "Validation of whole-blood transcriptome signature during microdose recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEpo) administration." BMC Genomics 18 (Suppl 8), 817 (2017). DOI: 10.1186/s12864-017-4191-7 In the background it notes of the direct test for EPO microdosing: " The main limitations of this direct approach are a variable and short detection window and low sensitivity. … Despite these advances, important limitations in detection of the direct approach have prompted a paradigm shift to the indirect identification of the effect of the prohibited method and/or substance. " And on the Athlete Bio-Passport (ABP) approach: "For example, the application of the ABP failed to reveal any evidence of rHuEpo microdosing (i.e. 20–30 IU∙kg−1 body mass rHuEpo twice weekly for 8 weeks) in 10 healthy male subjects [11]. In addition, the haematological parameters of the ABP may be confounded with factors such as altitude exposure, since hypoxia may affect the blood variables and vascular volumes [12, 13]. " And of course, all the top elite athletes (and their domestiques in cycling) are doing regular altitude camps, which - aside from the direct benefits on RBC - has the side-effect of making ABP data basically inadmissible (a useful side-effect IF you're doing blood doping). Despite the ABP not being able to detect micro-dosing, there is a clear effect on at least some blood values in the micro-dosing data (MDS). See Figure 3 and read the section "Haemotological analysis" on the MDS. So... TTBOMK: 1. micro-dosing definitely has an impact on blood values - you can see it in the data there, and I definitely felt it (I was one of the subjects in the MDS). 2. Neither direct tests nor ABP can reliably detect EPO microdosing, according to that paper - and WADA believes it too, because they funded at least some portions of the work described in that paper (they funded at least the MDS portion). Repost: Replace my direct link to the paper published on Springer with the text of the citation and the DOI (search that and you'll find it), to appease Road.cc's overzealous filtering.
@Paul J That might be asking a bit much, given that links to road.cc's own site are falling into the black hole.
@tomlew Sigh. I typed out a long reply to you, including a link to a very relevant paper (which itself references a number of other relevant studies), and it's got lost in Road.cc's blackhole of a moderation queue - cause I linked to a scientific paper. Road.cc - can you please check the mod queue, and can you also please whitelist comments that reference URIs to major scientific publishing platforms? Thanks.
@Surreyrider Well, quite - plus there's the video coverage of the event, which doesn't show him making any obvious mistake, but rather shows the whole train of riders going wide through the corner and him getting cramped for space - not unlike many other crashes where there's no suggestion that lack of sleep was an issue.
@Rendel Harris I think there is a line in there about specific riders having broken anti-doping rules or could so - meaning they essentially have a whole lot more leeway to test.
8 thoughts on ““Signing the lifelong contract was a mere formality”: Wout van Aert gets Visma-Lease a Bike logo sunburnt on his thighs; Chris Froome says he’ll be “back on the bike in no time” after breaking collarbone; Evenepoel debuts moustache + more on the live blog”
Police to be allowed to
Police to be allowed to search properties without warrant for stolen phones in England and Wales
Also applies to other geo-tagged items, so in theory if you’ve got an airtag (or similar) in your bicycle the police should be more willing to help you recover it if it’s stolen.
Tom_77 wrote:
Some news coverage did mention bikes.
the police should be more
the police should be more willing to help you recover it if it’s stolen
Should be, but won’t be. They should do something about vehicles without MOT since October 4th, reported on 26th November and I know where the driver lives, but they haven’t and they won’t.
That’s a weird one. According
That’s a weird one. According to the DVLA it was only registered in March 22, so it isn’t due an MOT until next month – even though it is showing as expired in October…
I thought it must have a
I thought it must have a special requirement for MOT. But, as a consolation prize:
Outside Garstang Library-MOT expired 19th November. It was outside the library when it was reported 15th January. There are hundreds of these round here
“London’s 20mph limits ‘not
“London’s 20mph limits ‘not making buses slower’“
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1xz042y3o
So if 20mph limits, in London and Wales, are not having significant impacts on journey times…
What is?
Could it be the volume of motor traffic, where the biggest differences seen are between school term/holidays and Xmas Day?
Chris Froome says he’ll be
Chris Froome says he’ll be “back on the bike in no time”, but is he good enough for Israel Premier Tech?
Probably even someone of Froome’s v questionable moral standard is good enough for IPT. IPT = genocide apologists.
UCI, please boycott Israeli apartheid! IPT, stop sportwashing Israeli genocide!!
Now now, it’s just
Now now, it’s just coincidence that it has ‘israel’ in the name, this isn’t actually sports washing. The guy who owns it, does, admittedly aim to promote Israel through the team (in his how words) but this is definitely not being used to improve the image of a genocidal nation. Absolutely not.