Monthly Archives: June, 2009

Kristian House of Rapha-Condor won, Chris Froome was man of the match and there was plenty of sunshine. That's the British Champs in a nutshell, it really was a great day.

Gavin Shirley (Nevis Cycles RT) made the trip to the Scottish Borders today, and went away with the win in the Edinburgh Road Club promotion, the Lothian Flyer Road Race, narrowly edging out two fast Vets, Chris Brown (Stirling BC) and Steve Nutley (Fife Cycling 2000).

Scottish bike racing; let's face it, no matter how well you do in the Super Sixes, or how quick you can go around West Ferry, you're going nowhere if you stay in Auld Scotia.

This is the first in a series of articles in which we explore racing in Belgium, and chat to a few guys that "have done it the hard way", outside of "The Plan", and on their own. To kick us off, we caught up with Rapha Condor star Dean Downing between Tour Series criteriums.

It took Arthur Doyle (Dooleys) just 51:33 to join the likes of Billy Bilsland, Graeme Obree and Jason MacIntyre on the roll of honour for the Scottish National 25 Mile Time Trial Championship on a warm but windy Sunday morning on the fast dual carriageway of the A90 Laurencekirk by-pass.

On the home straight now! 80 something miles and 3 category three climbs today! Not too hard we hoped, especially after the last few days. But boy were we in for a surprise, here at the Tour Nivernais Morvan!

Ross Creber delivered the win for the dominating Endura Race Team in the 44th edition of the Davie Bell Memorial Road Race. Team mate and reigning Scottish Road Champion, Evan Oliphant took 2nd, narrowly edging out visiting James Sampson of the Candi TV — Marshall’s Pasta team.

The fourth stage of the Tour Nivernais Morvan was the queen mountain stage, a very tough 161kms of narrow winding roads. With three major climbs each around 10km long and many short 1-3km climbs not classified a hard day was on the cards.

After yesterday's baptism of fire in 35 degrees heat, the Scots boys were more at home today in the Tour Nivernais Morvan; the temperature had fallen to 15 degrees and it was pouring with rain.

Organiser Isobel Smith is certainly hoping the recent run of fine weather continues for her race on Sunday morning, the Scottish National 25 Mile Time Trial Championship 2009.

Iain Sim (Glasgow Couriers) took a good win today ahead of some very fast riders who are building form for the forthcoming National 25 Champs. A relatively small field this evening at the Bishopton Community Hall, with quite a few riders deciding not to start - most likely due to the unsavoury weather conditions and a major delay on the M8 westbound.

A Dooley's RT team is currently racing in France, taking up an invitation to the Tour Nivernais Morvan in central France, an important event for elite riders, and a very hard 5 stages in 4 days.

It's not everyday that we have the African champion racing on Scottish roads so when we met Dan Craven of Rapha/Condor after his fine third place at the recent Drummond Trophy, we thought we'd better make the most of it.

"Lang Whang" is Auld Scots, it means 'long way' - it's fair to say that Endura's Gary Hand was in the break for a lang whang and he won the finishing sprint by a similar margin from wanderer returned, Alex Coutts (I looked at his jersey but the team name looked like Greek to me).

What's happening at Plowman Craven, but I guess we should say 'Madison', now? With Scots professionals Evan Oliphant and Ross Creber on their books, we thought we'd best find out what's going on.

find it hard to believe, but VeloVeritas is three years old today, and so to celebrate, I've carried out a complete overhaul of the site over the last number of months, bringing the design more up-to-date, and changing the layout to make it much easier for you to find the articles you're looking for, or discover something of interest whilst you're just browsing. Welcome to the new VeloVeritas Design! For us though, one of the biggest things is that we're now able to update the site from wherever in the world we happen to be - which means you'll be reading the same timely updates that we've always tried to deliver, but we will be much less fraught in bringing them to you!

The Edinburgh Nocturne, Scottish cycling's finest hour of the year? Or an unexciting, unprofessional procession? You may have heard about our friend Viktor, we rely on him to voice the more traditional viewpoint, shall we say.

"Super Grinta," Denis, Roma and Ignatas Konovalovas. That was what the Gazzetta said about Danilo after the Vesuvio stage; "grinta" is the quality of physical and mental toughness that the true greats have - "Super Grinta" - great expression.