I haven't written on this blog for a while. The reason for this was that I was kind of getting tired of whining on about bad luck, hard times and other problems. No one wants to read that and no one cares. So I decided to keep calm and hang tight till good news come along. Writes Tomás Swift-Metcalfe.
Hi, my name is Tomás Swift-Metcalfe. Tomás is Portuguese, the Swift element is Irish, and Metcalfe is English. I'm a "Euro-mongrel", but I'm very much at home in Portugal.
The first big mountain stage of the Tour has exposed the form of the riders who have intentions of finishing on the podium in the race. The best five in the race to date have been Wiggins, Evans, Nibali, Froome and Van Den Broeck (VDB). Bizarrely, Chris Froome is probably the best in the race right now: he completely cracked Cadel Evans AND (briefly) dropped his own team leader.
Hey everyone, Ian Field here - it's great to be here on VeloVeritas! Well, after a really good opening race to the season recently it was always going to be difficult to back it up seven days later - and so it proved.
This year saw edition 105 of the Six Days of Berlin, VeloVeritas had the good fortune to be there helping soigneur Kris look after Messrs. Germain Burton (GB), Daniel Holloway (USA), Mathias Krigbaum (Denmark) and Mark Stewart (Scotland). Here’s a selection of images from under the largest unsupported steel roof in Europe on the site of what used to be the Berlin STASI Headquarters.
World 200 metres flying start record holder, Nicholas Paul’s recent Worlds kilometre 59.791 silver medal behind Jeffrey Hoogland’s 58.418, winning ride jogged my memory regarding ‘Kilo Kings’ from Trinidad & Tobago. A decade ago I caught up with Gene Samuel who took Worlds Kilometre bronze in 1991…
"Ooooohhhhhhh!" The moan echoes around the bar; these boys are aficionados, they all know that solid Astana Dane, Michael Valgren Andersen isn't coming back - he timed his jump to perfection, there was that fatal second or two of hesitation among the frozen men behind him and he was gone, en route to win Het Nieuwsblad 2018.
The last time we spoke to young Englishman, James Shaw he'd just won the junior edition of Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. Recently he's followed in the footsteps of Adam Blythe and Dan McLay by signing for Lotto's U23 'feeder' team. High time we had another word with him, we thought to ourselves...