Saturday night saw Dave and I make our way to the Spokes Limits team presentation for 2017. It was deja vu with the weather and the venue. The presentation of riders however showed a significant change from last year. There were fewer riders and a number of new faces. Most noticeably Grant Martin having moved on to join his brother at Raleigh GAC.
The 2013 Season has started for the Bicycleworks u23 team, writes Lindsay Gordon. New faces have arrived into the nine man team with new additions Kevin Barclay, Steven Lawley, Gus Gillies and Duncan Ewing. The rest of the team stays the same with Douglas Shaw, me, Andrew Cox, Callum Wilkinson and Craig Dale completing the line up.
Tour Doon Hame final stage winner, Endura's New Zealand National Elite Road Champion, Jack Bauer took time, just a few hours after his win, to tell VeloVeritas how it was done.
The Scottish Season starts and VeloVeritas begins it's coverage of the Scottish season this Sunday, with the Hugh Dornan Memorial race on the Rosneath peninsula.
We're starting a bit late but "day jobs", flu, gum surgery and Het Volk have all played their part in keeping us away from Scotland's lay-bys.
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...
Doug Shapiro wasn’t the first American to ride the Tour; that was Jonathan Boyer; or the second, that was Greg Lemond. But he was the third to do so; and not just in any old role – as a domestique for Tour, Vuelta and Worlds winner, Joop Zoetemelk as part of the mighty Kwantum Hallen team. Here at VeloVeritas we thought that he must have a good tale to tell...
Great racing today to Morzine-Avoriaz, and whatever Astana pay Paolo Tiralongo (Italia) and Daniel Navarro (Espana), it's not enough. Tiralongo has been around a long time, third in the Baby Giro in 1998 he turned pro in 2000 and arrived at Astana this year after three years with Fassa, three with Panaria and four with Lampre.
Three times the cross country mountain bike event has been in the Commonwealth Games (introduced in 2002, it didn't feature on the programme in Dehli four years ago) and three times Canada have topped the womens' podium. This time it was the turn of Catharine Pendrel, who took control of the race midway round the first of five laps and wasn't challenged again, soloing to a 70 second win over her teammate Emily Batty, with Australian rider Rebecca Henderson third a further 12 seconds back, after a race-long battle with Batty.
The Champ Rolls On... I can remember seeing the photos from the presentation of the teams at the start of the race and thinking how embarrassing it was for the Garmin team to be doing their bow down to Thor thing while he held up a warhammer. I was clearly completely wrong!
I had a great dream last night after day four; I won a mountain stage of the Tour, I was on my way to the press conference when I woke up - maybe just as well, knowing my luck it would be one of my ex-wives asking the questions. Four days down and two to go, the racing wasn't too intense; there are a lot of 'tired laddies' on that track.