As friends on the Bidon podcast remarked in their Giro preview show, the Giro is on course for the longest ever streak without an Italian winner, the last time the race had a home winner was Vincenzo Nibali in 2016. He’s just announced he’s retiring and it’d be nice to be able to list several
This week isn’t all about the Ardennes.
The Tour of the Alps kicks off Monday and a swathe of grand tour stars are set to race across a saw’s tooth five-stage
parcours. With the Giro d’Italia just 20 days away and the Tour de France looming on the horizon, this week’s Alpine tour sits perfectly placed for stage-racing greats to tune-up and tweak their three-week engines.
From the future of Chris Froome and Thibaut Pinot, to the pink jersey quests of Simon Yates and Jai Hindley, there will be some must-watch storylines spinning out of the Austrian and Italian mountains this week.
2021 Team Trends: A Superficial, Relative Assessment
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Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images
Just busting through the offseason doldrums, wondering when racing is going to... oh wait, there’s racing right now? Kinda maybe? Something in New Zealand? Well, hope springs anew and the GP La Marseillaise hasn’t said no yet. Also the Volta Valenciana is insisting on carrying on. So it won’t be the offseason much longer.
This means little time is left for us to put out a raft of offseason capsules, the in-depth team-by-team reviews we have done in the past, but I thought it’d be fun to do a shortened version of this, covering all the World Tour teams. Rather than serving as a complete update on a team, this format’s intent is to give a flavour of which teams shifted up or down the pecking order, on paper at least, in relative terms. I tried this for one of SBNation’s basketball sites and so why not give it a whirl here?