Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Jamie Staff model the new Sky+HD cycling skinsuits to be unveiled at the UCI Track Cycling World Cup in Manchester from 31 October.
Check out the cadence in these videos. Triple gold medallist Chris Hoy is shown here with a time of 19.44 seconds on the Rollapaluza rigs at the Salford Nocture at the weekend:
However, the men’s event winner was fellow Scot Craig McLean, who didn’t make it to Beijing. His time was a record-breaking 18.94 seconds.:
The new edition of by Richard Moore, with a new chapter on Team GB’s ultra-successful Olympics, has revisions on Chris Boardman’s ’secret squirrel club’ equipment store.
However, Moore’s book doesn’t contain the very latest equipment Team GB will be using at all future track meets.
Here’s the first spy shot of the new men’s bike, made in Britain by Pashley. The actual bike won’t be yellow, it will be painted black. Where other nations ride carbon fibre bikes, Team GB is now opting for steel and is eschewing aero equipment.
Performance director Dave Brailsford told Quickrelease.tv:
“Riders like Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins and Victoria Pendleton are now so much faster than riders from America and Australia we thought we’d sportingly level the playing field a bit. All Team GB athletes will be on this style of custom-built bike from the World Cup events onwards. It’s only fair.”
The women’s bike - also by Pashley - will feature a freezer compartment. John Conod of Pashley said:
“The plan was for Victoria Pendleton to dispense cold drinks and lollies to the Aussies as she lapped them.”
[RE-POSTING] I’m in an index. I’ve always wanted to be in an index.
Reid, Carlton 180-6
I come after Queally, Jason and before Road racing…and doping.
The book is . It’s another stonker from Richard Moore, author of . That title won the ‘Best Sports Biography of the Year’ award at the British Sports Book Awards in 2007 and more awards will surely follow for ‘Heroes, Villains and Velodromes’.
According to publisher HarperCollins, the book “reveals how an elite athlete, Chris Hoy, lives, breathes and pushes the boundaries of his sport. How does he do it? And why? What drives him to put his body through the physical and mental hurdles to become the best in the world?”
Moore shadowed Hoy for a year, from the World Championships in Mallorca at which Hoy became a double world champion, through to Hoy’s attempt on the world kilometre record in La Paz, Bolivia. Hoy has won two Olympic Golds so far in Beijing, and is favourite to win a third on Tuesday.
But this book is much more than a biography of Hoy, it’s a dissection of how Britain went from being a pariah nation on the boards through to the world’s all-conquering track team, better even than the Australians, a team so bereft of cycling medals at this Olympics you’d think the team had boycotted the Games.
It reveals the stunning levels of professionalism and dedication that go on behind the scenes at the Manchester velodrome, HQ for British Cycling.
So, how come I’m in the index? It’s all to do with my battle with the UCI in 2005. The gnomes of Aigle had decided to axe the kilo from the 2008 Olympics, a crazy decision when there were lesser track events to chop first or even the road time trial, a race that never attracted the cream of the world’s cyclists.
I created an petition which quickly gained 10,679 signatures including lots of top cycling names from around the world. Along with trackie Julie Dominguez I took the petition to the UCI and met with Pat McQuaid, then UCI president in waiting, now the actual UCI president.
He said some daft things about about the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, and I reported them on BikeBiz.com, grabbing a wifi connection in the dining hall of the UCI’s HQ. We hopped on a train to the Olympic HQ in Lausanne and by the time we got there, the PR man had already read the story and was waiting with an official rebuttal of McQuaid’s statement.
So, the kilo might have gone but that hasn’t bothered Chris Hoy. Team GB’s cyclists are a credit to the nation, and a credit to hard work. Many in the media, while praising cycling’s success at this Games, add that it’s because cycling is awash with cash. The BBC’s James Munroe said:
“Britain are the new Chelsea of the cycling world - with lottery cash in place of Russian roubles.”
What he fails to mention is that Britain’s pro trackies get less wages per year than a Chelsea footballer gets per week. In fact, the wage of one top-flight footballer could pay for the whole British elite track programme and still leave enough change for a brilliant grass-roots programme to bring on the next generation of Chris Hoy’s and Victoria Pendleton’s.
We’re crap at cricket; useless at football. We’re good at cycling. I hope the mainstream media’s current love affair with the sport lasts.
Until the lustre dims, it’s great to bathe in the reflected glory of Britain’s track superstars. I’m pretty sure motorists are giving me a slightly wider berth at the moment. Cyclists, for now, are all heroes. Now, where’s my aero helmet?
Is the following quote from Cycling Weekly, Cycle Sport, VeloNews, Bikeradar.com or Cyclingnews.com?
“Surely now Wiggins, Hoy, Romero and Victoria Pendleton are on the cusp of the transition from sportspeople we talk about three or four times a year to major public figures, in the forefront of our thoughts.
It’s a farce that triumphant Olympians entertain a whole country and then retreat to sport’s backbenches. Beyond Olympic gold, this is the prize for Britain’s cyclists.
They can demonstrate the value of investing in sport rather than just pontificating about its uses.
They can show footballers, cricketers and rugby players how much can be achieved by a concerted national effort.
None of the above. It’s actually from - wait for it - the footy-mad Daily Mail. There’s lots of similar coverage in the other tabloids. The broadsheets, of course, have always been a bit more ‘on message’, but to read this in the Daily Mail is something else.
PS
The pic shows one of my daughters with [Sir] Chris Hoy. It was taken at a Revolution event a couple of years back, see video below. Do you think this year’s first event might have a golden lap of honour? Too right!
I can reveal that Team GB trackies are rugged up to their eyeballs. The cyclists are gaining a clear performance advantage from the rugs. One of Team GB’s star riders has admitted the rugs were supplied by a British company.
WADA has not yet said whether it can test for these new, designer rugs. It’s believed only British cyclists have access to these rugs. More on this breaking story as details leak.
Chapeau: Graeme Shaw.
Remember the fuss made over the arrival in Beijing of the US cycling team? They wore face masks in the airport arrivals hall, causing an unholy stink. The athletes have since apologised to their Chinese hosts but a press release reveals that USA Cycling is fixated on air.
“IQAir announced today that they were chosen by USA Cycling to provide all team members with ultra-high efficiency air cleaners. IQAir has been named USA Cycling’s official air purifier supplier to support their competition efforts in Beijing, China.”
“We’ve worked with USA Cycling to create the ultimate performance environment for their athletes,” says IQAir President, Frank Hammes. “These systems represent the most advanced air cleaning technology in the world. They operate at as much as 100 times the efficiency of the products people commonly see sold in department stores as air purifiers.”
Each member of USA cycling has been issued an IQAir HealthPro Plus. The HealthPro Plus is a portable room air purifier used by hospitals around the world to absorb particles as small as the SARS virus, MRSA, and tuberculosis. IQAir also designed special facility sized air cleaning systems for the popular USA Cycling Lounge in Beijing, the cycling team’s logistics center where athletes relax and recuperate between races.
Pat McDonough, Team Leader for USA Cycling, says that the team is already benefiting from their work with IQAir.
“Airborne particles and gases can cause lung inflammation and allergic reactions. This is what causes allergies and asthma in every day life, but it also inhibits absorption of oxygen,” says McDonough.
“These races are often decided by thousandths of a second. By giving our athletes the healthiest indoor air possible, IQAir is helping them to do their very best. It’s all about creating the ultimate performance environment.”
Oops. How long before WADA cottons on and creates a test to discover those athletes breathing in ‘performance enhancing air’?
Unless you’re chief nut-nibbler in Team GB’s Secret Squirrel Club and you’re trying to psyche the competition with tales of hi-tech kit.
Just as with Chris Boardman’s 1992 win on the Lotus superbike, journalists like to talk up the tech aspects of Britain’s success on the track. The fact that we have the best-trained, best-fed and best-tested athletes mustn’t get in the way of a good, ‘it woz the kit wot won it’ story. No doubt this is part of British Cycling’s teamplan: if the opposition think they can only come in second because the Brits have the best bikes, then that’s what will happen.
Take, for instance, today’s puff piece in the Sunday Telegraph. There’s now no chance for other countries to produce copycat kit so British Cycling is drip-feeding the media with tech tidbits. Today it’s the “revolutionary” skinsuit, tomorrow it will be British’s Cycling’s brand-new aero-amazing bar-tape.
Pity the poor sports journalist. After being bombarded with tech-specs there’s bound to be the odd mistake.
“The new equipment, which the team hopes will carry the likes of Mark Cavendish, Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Bradley Wiggins to the medals podium, also includes individually-moulded shoes, [and] a crank that measures each rider’s heart rate,” revealed the Telegraph’s Patrick Sawyer.
Cough a few hundred quid in a high-end Shimano outlet and you too can have “individually-moulded shoes.” Not too sure about a HRM crank: Sawyer probably means a power-measuring crank, but again that’s not exactly top-secret or available only to Britain’s elite riders.
But since when has psychological warfare needed to be accurate?
I’m in an index. I’ve always wanted to be in an index.
Reid, Carlton 180-6
I come after Queally, Jason and before Road racing…and doping.
The book is . It’s another stonker from Richard Moore, author of . That title won the ‘Best Sports Biography of the Year’ award at the British Sports Book Awards in 2007 and more awards will surely follow for ‘Heroes, Villains and Velodromes’.
According to publisher HarperCollins, the book “reveals how an elite athlete, Chris Hoy, lives, breathes and pushes the boundaries of his sport. How does he do it? And why? What drives him to put his body through the physical and mental hurdles to become the best in the world?”
Moore shadowed Hoy for a year, from the World Championships in Mallorca at which Hoy became a double world champion, through to Hoy’s attempt on the world kilometre record in La Paz, Bolivia. Hoy is one of the top hopes for Olympic Gold in Beijing next month.
But this book is much more than a biography of Hoy, it’s a dissection of how Britain went from being a pariah nation on the boards through to the world’s all-conquering track team, better even than the Australians.
It reveals the stunning levels of professionalism and dedication that go on behind the scenes at the Manchester velodrome, HQ for British Cycling.
So, how come I’m in the index? It’s all to do with my battle with the UCI in 2005. The gnomes of Aigle had decided to axe the kilo from the 2008 Olympics, a crazy decision when there were lesser track events to chop first or even the road time trial, a race that never attracted the cream of the world’s cyclists.
I created an petition which quickly gained 10,679 signatures including lots of top cycling names from around the world. Along with trackie Julie Dominguez I took the petition to the UCI and met with Pat McQuaid, then UCI president in waiting, now the actual UCI president.
He said some daft things about about the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, and I reported them on BikeBiz.com, grabbing a wifi connection in the dining hall of the UCI’s HQ. We hopped on a train to the Olympic HQ in Lausanne and by the time we got there, the PR man had already read the story and was waiting with an official rebuttal of McQuaid’s statement.
Moore’s book recounts this tale and also re-interviews McQuaid at the Aigle HQ. Interestingly, where we were able to access minutes of UCI management committee meetings in the HQ’s library, Moore wasn’t able to put his hands on them.
He writes: “Management committee meetings are no longer available for open public inspection. I wonder if they were removed after Reid’s visit?”
Moore said he feels some sympathy for McQuaid as “he doesn’t come across as self-important” but he doesn’t think he’s the real power at the UCI:
“The impression I’m left with is that many of the decisions he defends might not be his in the first place; he appears not to be fully in power, as his predecessor, Hein Verbruggen, certainly was. Indeed, it is rumoured that Verbruggen - now a high-flying member of the IOC - still wields considerable power in the UCI. And there appear to be other powerful people at the UCI, less high-profile, operating in the shadows. The lack of transparency is shocking.”
Arise Sir Chris Hoy, Sir Bradley Wiggins, Dame Victoria Pendleton, Sir David Brailsford, and Dame Rebecca Romero. Your nation salutes you.
There’s nothing like success to make Britain’s mainstream media report on sport. And that’s exactly what cycling success usually gets: nothing.
This time it’s different. Team GB dominated the World Track Championships, winning half of the gold medals. Even the dimmest sports reporter can now see that a golden glow is on the cards for the Beijing Olympics.
Critically, of the ten track events that will be contested in Beijing, Britain won gold in eight of them in Manchester.
‘Queen Victoria’ was on the front page of The Sunday Times yesterday and she’s now the blue-eyed girl of British sport but the whole British team has been lauded over the last few days.
Performance director Dave Brailsford - already a legend to other sports administrators - is being talked of in revered terms by reporters, wondering over his entrepreneurial gifts.
Should cycling win a hatful of golds in the Laoshan velodrome in the summer, it’s not fanciful to imagine that Brailsford, and many of his world-beaters, will be triumphantly honoured by the nation.
Counting chickens before eggs have hatched? Maybe, but never before has Britain had a bunch of athletes so well prepared for an Olympic Games.
Every meal, every gel, every scoop of maltodextrin, every watt of required power, every hour of the next 130 days has been planned out for Team GB’s riders.
No wonder that the British media is an awe of cycling.
And with BBC2’s excellent coverage of the World Championships - Jill Douglas, Hugh Porter and Jamie Staff were superlative - the public is getting a glimpse of what we’ve always known: track cycling is super exciting.
The UCI may have bowdlerised many parts of the sport but track cycling remains the thrilling spectacle it has always been. Riding the boards was invented in the late 19th Century to showcase cycling and it was then a mainstream sport, attended by tens of thousands of spectators.
The Madison event is so called because it was developed at New York’s Madison Square Garden, now a world-class sporting arena but originally built to house a velodrome.
Over the weekend, a number of non-bikie friends who know I’m into cycling have commented on their enjoyment of watching the World Championships on telly. New people are now watching. Britain’s successes have been reported on the main BBC news programmes, attracting viewers to the BBC2 coverage.
My non-cycling friends have all reported being “surprised” at how exciting the cycling was. Yet who wouldn’t be thrilled at watching slow-mo footage of muscular hunks almost bursting out of their skinsuits?
Ditto for the men. Boom-boom.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons the media has taken to Victoria Pendleton? She’s a slip of a thing, yet can power, prettily, around the track to beat women with traditionally trunk-like trackie thighs.
She’s certainly being groomed for stardom. Every other TV cutaway shot seemed to be of Victoria smiling, Victoria clapping, Victoria warming up, Victoria warming down, Victoria with her skinsuit peeled back to reveal a colourful sports bra.
Indeed, just as star footballers often have a second-unit camera following their every move, the BBC seemed to have dedicated a camera to Victoria. Perhaps there was a hope she’d get her kit off live on TV?
Before the World Championships Victoria was getting more media interview requests than the whole of the rest of Team GB put together. Gold medal success for riders other than Victoria evened out this anomaly.
In today’s The Times, Matthew Pinsent - an Olympic gold medal winning former rower - is glowing about cycling:
“Of the 18 events on offer at the Track World Championships, Britain won half. It’s a domination that no cycling nation has achieved before and sends a warning shot to all the others before the Olympics.
“In Olympic circles, people talk of the top four sports (athletics, rowing, sailing and cycling) in revered tones, but if the competition days in the Laoshan Velodrome in Beijing are anything like last week, there should really be only one sport to which the ultimate respect is paid. Never has an Olympic sport burst on to the scene in this country with such a calculated and deserved medal haul.
“…under British Cycling’s instruction, [Rebecca Romero has] become a world champion in her second sport in less than three years.
“Romero was infamous on the rowing team for never smiling or enjoying her training, but hasn’t been able to wipe a broad grin off her face since winning on Thursday. Rowing gave her an ability to train and push herself when she didn’t want to go farther — mainly because she didn’t want to do it. Cycling has taken all that and made her enjoy her sport, and it shows.”
So, Britain’s elite cyclists aren’t just world-beaters, they’re having fun on their bikes too. That’s a great message.
Pix are of my kids at Revolution track events.