Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 71 i Cyclist Australia

LEADOUT New gear

Shimano RC703 road cycling shoe $389.95, bike.shimano.com/en-au The RC703 stands out in the competitive mid-range road shoe market thanks to its integration of Shimano’s S-Phyre fit technology, previously reserved for its pro-level road shoes. This innovation ensures a snug, race-oriented fit that enhances power transfer while maintaining comfort over long rides. The shoe also features a low stack height midsole, which optimises energy efficiency by reducing the distance between the foot and pedal. Coupled with its crossover lacing system, the RC703 secures the forefoot effectively, minimising weight and maximising pedalling stability. Furthermore, the shoe is equipped with a Boa system featuring dual L6Z dials, allowing for micro-adjustments on the go. The breathable synthetic leather upper and surround wrapping design further enhance comfort. Meanwhile, the RC703W variant offers a women’s-specific last,…

Team players No5: The directeur sportif

‘I remember early on, Allan Peiper said to me, “You can do your work perfectly and get the worst outcome and be considered the most incompetent sports director around. Or you can do it all wrong and win a race.” He was right.’ Despite the data-driven decisions that dominate modern road cycling, EF Education-EasyPost’s head DS, Charly Wegelius, has been around long enough to know that there are few things that you can fully control in the world of WorldTour racing. ‘Still, if you ask me the most satisfying aspect of my job, I wouldn’t say victory. It’s the situations where a rider might not have the vision to follow a certain tactic, but you persuade them, and it pays off.’ ‘After the stage I like to debrief as quickly as…

Here comes the summer

Let’s assume you’ve been riding your bike (you have been riding your bike, right?) and have been racking up ‘base miles’ in the legs. You want to take the next step, of course, but any training plan is about balance. ‘Don’t put all of your effort into week one and then fade, in terms of both fatigue and interest levels,’ says cycling coach Richard Shepherd. ‘Pace your training and increase progressively by setting weekly hour goals to guide and motivate you.’ You also need to strike the right balance between volume and intensity. Both are key components of any training plan, but volume is the foundation from which you build. ‘Even if you have a deadline, your plan should prioritise aerobic endurance development,’ says Shepherd. ‘Then you add some more…

3 min

Red rock, blue sky

The desert’s rugged beauty stretches endlessly in every direction from Alice Springs. Out here, the landscape is a dramatic mix of red earth, towering rock formations and open skies. And rock. Rock in various stages of decomposition. Uluru at one end of the spectrum, a grain of sand at the other. And in the middle? Gravel. Whether you’re drawn to the challenge of riding across sand and stone or the allure of hidden gorges and wildflower meadows, Alice Springs’ gravel is raw, remote and ready to test your limits. Debuting in 2024, Rapid Ascent’s Shimano Gravel Muster brings a fresh concept. It’s one thing to race the best gravel the Red Centre has to offer, taking riders from Alice Springs into the outback, but stage racing is about more than…

12 min

Best seat in the house

Human finesse is still yet to be mechanically outdone here, so the final assembly of Fizik’s saddles is often done by hand With a history stretching back nearly 30 years, Fizik is as established as they come, yet it could just as easily not have existed at all. The company is an offshoot of Selle Royal, a saddle manufacturer founded in 1956 and now regarded as the biggest in the world, with more than 80 design patents to its name and a proactive approach to new technology that means it should be able to enter any category it wants. But consumer perception is a funny old thing. Despite a desire to enter the performance market, Selle Royal had become synonymous with recreational cycling, so its team knew they needed to…

8 min

Climb and a half

I thought there was only one way off this mountain: via its famous 21 hairpins. But rather than turning left out of our hotel to descend past the ski lifts and building sites of Alpe d’Huez, we head upwards. Within moments the road has narrowed to a single lane and all around us are green pastures, colourful Alpine flowers and distant mountaintops. We’re here to celebrate perhaps the most famous climb ever to feature in the Tour de France – Alpe d’Huez – but our first port of call is the Col de Sarenne, the Alpe’s lesser-known B-side. The col itself, which we reach just 15 minutes later, is a broad green saddle a shade under 2,000m in height, overlooked by peaks that still bear traces of last winter’s snow.…

12 min

Campagnolo Ekar GT

Campagnolo’s new Ekar GT is the Italian brand’s second foray into gravel-specific groupsets. It’s a more affordable yet in some ways improved accompaniment to the original Ekar groupset, which was released in 2020. The headlines are promising. Ekar GT takes the important parts of Ekar – 13-speed gravel-friendly gearing, dedicated 1x-only design, positive mechanical shifting – but refines some key details, while bringing the price down by $535. The economies haven’t hit too hard however, with the most obvious difference being a new aluminium crankset (Ekar’s is carbon) and a more generous 10-48t cassette option (Ekar maxed out with a 10-44t). Total weight has increased from a claimed 2,385g to 2,700g for the lightest setup. The GT stands for ‘Gran Turismo’, by the way, which Campag says ‘stands for those…

Gravel weapon

The Checkmate SLR is a gravel bike designed to meet the needs of riders who seek speed and versatility on mixed terrain. This bike represents Trek’s first foray into the dedicated gravel racing segment, and it promises to deliver a performance-oriented experience without sacrificing comfort. In this first look, we’ll explore the Checkmate’s key features, design elements and overall ride quality. Purpose-built for gravel racing The Checkmate SLR is engineered specifically for gravel racing, making it a notable addition to the brand’s line-up. Constructed from Trek’s 800 Series OCLV carbon, the bike is designed to be lightweight, the frame shedding almost 300g compared to the previous Checkpoint SLR model. This reduction in weight is achieved through careful design and material selection, allowing for a more competitive edge during races. But…

Your tyres are wrong

Like a Catholic repenting their sins, tyres are your one way to cycling heaven. They are the only parts of your bike (we hope, genuflect) that touch the road. They roll, grip and cushion. They underpin how well your bike rides. Admittedly a slow bike shalt not be made fast by tyres alone, but even a thoroughbred will feel like a sluggish old nag with a poor tyre setup. And looking around at so many bikes on the road, I reckon many are simply doing it wrong. Puncture dreams The most important function of a tyre is to hold air, so therefore the best tyres are the most puncture-resistant, right? It’s a logical notion, and it’s why I spent a long time riding Continental Gatorskins. But while Gators are fine…

An Italian classic – remastered

When self-confessed bike nerd Sami Al-Khayat was gifted a mysterious vintage frame just days before he was due to appear at handmade bicycle show Bespoked, he knew he had to do something special with it. Passed on to him by a friend, the old Rossin frame was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked like a Ghibli – one of the Italian brand’s most iconic bikes that won its fair share of Grand Tour jerseys in the 1980s – but it lacked many of the model’s signature details, and featured Columbus Gilco tubing throughout. ‘My best guess is that it was a Ghibli prototype frame,’ says Al-Khayat. ‘It didn’t have the typical Rossin bottom bracket, it lacked bottle cage threads on the seat tube, and it didn’t have the…

Six of the best

WEEK 1 • In Week 1 take a functional threshold power or FTP test – the maximum pace you can ride for one hour – to gauge your fitness. Visit youtu.be/qNqvxdwizac, or scan the QR code left• Rather than aim for a distance, tick off so many hours per week – that will depend on your goals, fitness and available time, but let’s aim for around eight hours across four rides in Week 1.• Do one long ride (for example 3 to 3.5 hours) at up to 75% of FTP.• Do one ride of one hour at up to 80% of FTP that includes some intervals or hill climbing at above FTP.• The other ride should be an endurance session at up to 80% of FTP. WEEK 2 • Week…

2 min

First timers

Electricity fills the air as sports director Matteo Tosatto delivers his pre-Giro d’Italia race briefing. ‘Focus. Stay together. The big objective for us is a win,’ he says. Tudor Pro Cycling’s eight riders are hanging on his every word as he brings up a projected map of the 2024 Giro route and runs through the key stages and stats: 44,650m of elevation, 7,000m down on the previous year. Piece of cake, then. This is Tudor Pro Cycling’s first Grand Tour. Looking around the hotel meeting room, there are Grand Tour veterans and debutants. Matteo Trentin is a stage winner in all three Grand Tours and is about to embark on his 13th in total. Robin Froidevaux is completely new to this. Tosatto says there are eight bunch sprint opportunities in…

11 min

May the road rise to meet you

There is a phrase in the Irish language, In Éirinn tá Neart – ‘In Ireland there is strength’, and it’s hard to think of a more apt description of the TransAtlantic Way. To tame every corner, every climb, every cliff-clinging road of this event takes the deepest resolve and resourcefulness. Over the course of this week-long, self-supported expedition, riders will not only be required to climb the equivalent of Everest three times over, they’ll find themselves sleeping under Gaelic football stands, foraging for food and sheltering in hedges, all in the name of conquering Ireland’s wildest roads. Setting out from Derry under the shadow of the Peace Bridge, riders pedal from the tip of Donegal, past the Gaeltacht, through Connemara and around the Ring of Kerry before a final push…

9 min

Revolutions and evolutions

The wheel may be a 5,000-year-old invention but designers are still finding ways to make it lighter, faster, safer and more stable. In recent years, the focus for road bike wheels has been on making the switch from rim brakes to disc brakes. Before that, it was all about refining rim shapes to make them more aerodynamic. Now the market is looking at perfecting the interface between tyre and rim while squeezing out every drop of performance gains in terms of grams shaved and watts saved. Manufacturers are also taking a hard look at their environmental impact and exploring ways of making their products sustainable as well as desirable. Cyclist talked to some of the industry’s leading figures to get an insight into the main changes that are happening in…

9 min

Giant TCR

They say you’re never more than six feet away from a Giant employee in Taiwan. Certainly, when I visited a few years ago for this very magazine, my first interaction after immigration was with a guy in a Giant-embroidered polo, who told he was moonlighting with Uber in between assembly line shifts. They also say you’re never more than six feet away from a Giant-made bicycle, such is the scale of its manufacturing empire; and if that weren’t enough, the bike you’re riding now is probably Giant-influenced. Is that top tube sloping, that main triangle quite small? Yep, that’ll be ‘compact’ geometry, dreamt up in the mid-90s by British visionary Mike Burrows, and made famous in the bumblebee colours of Spanish team ONCE. The bike ONCE rode was the Giant…

7 min

Merida Silex 10K

Merida is among the world’s largest bicycle manufacturers and creates bikes for many well-known brands along with its own headline range. Its original Silex gravel bike was released in 2017 and was a rebuttal to anyone who imagined the firm’s immense scale might result in timid design. It featured radical mountain bike-inspired geometry that was longer and slacker than anything from other mainstream makers, but it suffered from builds based on narrow tyres, while the bike’s gangly looks didn’t help matters either. As a result, the Silex at first didn’t gain the traction managed by some of its competitors. This most recent redesign, however, sees the bike gain a rugged profile to match its already capable handling. It arrives on wide 45mm tyres and, in the case of this top-end…

6 min

Making good great

‘The instructions I gave our design team when it came to revising the original Ostro basically amounted to “just don’t screw it up”,’ says Factor owner Rob Gitelis. ‘We wanted to improve aerodynamics but only if we didn’t have to do it at the expense of the Ostro’s other characteristics, as we were happy with aspects such as stiffness, handling and weight.’ If the brand’s claims are to be believed (and given how transparent Gitelis and Factor’s director of engineering, Graham Shrive, have been about how the bike was developed and validated, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to believe them) it is a case of mission accomplished. Factor says the Ostro 2 saves 0.055 in the bike’s coefficient of drag, which is meaningless to most people, so to put it in…

Q&A Richie Porte

Cyclist: How is life different now that you’ve been retired for a few years from your professional career? Richie Porte: A lot less stress. And more time at home with the kids living back in Australia, which is, you know, a massive part of bringing up the kids and is the kind of life we wanted for them. I don’t miss a single thing about it. I’m thankful for everything I got from cycling, but I don’t miss the stress and living in Europe, and I guess being told what you can and can’t do. I don’t miss any of that for a second. Cyc: What drew you to gravel racing after your professional career? RP: I’m in a good position that I still love riding my bike, which is a big…

6 min

A moment in time Ullrich triumphs for Germany

Less than 10km from the top of the climb to Arcalís, Jan Ullrich finally made his move. It was Stage 10 of the 1997 Tour and he had been biding his time. He had spent most of the race looking out for his teammate Bjarne Riis, who was riding in defence of the title he had won the previous year. Despite Ullrich and his Deutsche Telekom team holding the line that the number one-wearing Riis was their main man, most observers could see it was actually the rider wearing number eight who was by far the strongest in the race. It was a difficult stage. At 252km long and taking in five major climbs, including the final 18km drag up to the Arcalís ski station, it was one of the…

Finding the line

There have been many excellent books about how ageing athletes can coax extra performance from their veteran biological architecture, but none ask the fundamental question: just because we can, does it mean that we should? Several decades ago, I was in a criterium where I pushed so hard that I blacked out in front of the spectators and rode straight into a fence. Not ideal, but I was young and able to bounce back and race the next day without a second thought. I had found my line. Around the same time, I took an extended trip to the Hawaiian island of Maui, where a friend was working as a chef. I helped a bit, but mostly I rode my bike around, transfixed by the dramatic countryside. Maui is dominated…

Kitzbüheler Horn

A horn can be a musical instrument that emits a clarion call of joy or a warning to all around. Or a horn can be a weapon used by bulls and goats to gore their enemies. Or, if you’re a cyclist, a horn can be a climb so steep, so unrelenting, that it feels like a stab to the legs and a klaxon to the self-esteem. The Kitzbüheler Horn in the Austrian Tyrol is just such a climb. It may not look too threatening from the chocolate box town of Kitzbühel that lies at its foot, but the bucolic scenery hides a collection of unrelenting switchbacks that wind upwards for nearly 10km at an average gradient of over 12%, with spikes at over 20%, to just shy of 2,000m. The…

7 min

Cycling history in six items

It has only been a few months since Dries Mombert landed his dream job at the KOERS Museum of Cycle Racing in the town of Roeselare in the heart of Flanders. A former cycling journalist for Het Laatste Nieuws (the last story he filed was a report from the 2024 UAE Tour Women), when Mombert saw the advert for a publiekswerker at the museum he decided to do everything possible to get the job. And who can blame him? What cycle-sport fan wouldn’t want to spend their days among this fine collection of cycling memorabilia, sharing their knowledge with visitors from all over the world? Set over multiple floors, KOERS is housed in Roeselare’s former arsenal. Opened in 1903, the building has been used variously over the years to accommodate…

12 min

Trek Madone Gen 8

In my formative years as a bike enthusiast (and maybe my early days as a reviewer), I launched into every new product release with enthusiasm, swallowing the claims of light and fast, comfortable and aero with ease. These days, things aren’t always so exciting. As companies search for marginal gains and novel ways to differentiate themselves in a somewhat homogenous and near-perfected market, a new bike’s release can be somewhat underwhelming. All sausage and no sizzle, as they say. However, sometimes there is a genuine change to a model, an altered way of thinking to mark a shift in a company’s approach to bike manufacturing and what they can offer customers. Trek’s new Madone is that change and it is something every bike fan can appreciate and be excited by.…

6 min

Kask Protone Icon

I’ve been riding Kask’s Protone Icon for the better part of 12 months now, and until I sat down to write this review, I really hadn’t thought much about the helmet for about 11-and-a-half of those months. Such is its comfort, low weight and use in all seasons, I haven’t thought about any other helmets either. Like many bike riders, I have multiple helmets for different conditions, ride type and (dare I say it) fashion choices. With my Protone Icon, I don’t need to make any decisions – it is the Kask every day on road or dirt. The Protone was released in 2014 to great fanfare, with the legendary Team Sky said to have played a major role in its development. The helmet was light, well-ventilated and, apparently, aerodynamic.…

3 min

Life lessons from the pros

Physically and physiologically, I have as much in common with the typical professional bike rider as Danny DeVito does with Brad Pitt. Yet I’ve often wondered if I could learn any practical tips or techniques from the likes of Pog, Rog, Jonas or Remco that could benefit me on my regular, non-competitive rides. It seems to me one of the core skills of being a professional rider is being able to ‘live’ on a bike – being able to conduct all the usual domestic drudgery the rest of us have to contend with, but while hurtling down a French Alp at 90kmh. They eat, drink, dress, disrobe and even have toilet breaks without having to dismount. For a variety of reasons, I find this incredible, admirable and, frankly, utterly bizarre.…