Daily Cycling Facts 28.05.2014

The second edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the oldest of the five Monument races, took place on this day in 1893 - the only time it has fallen on this date and, since it's now held between mid to late April, it never will again. Run for a second and final year as an amateur event, it was won for the second of three consecutive years by Léon Houa; it took him 10h42" to complete the 250km parcours - almost seven minutes faster than the previous year. 30' behind him was Michel Borisowski, who is sometimes incorrectly said to have been Russian but was in fact Belgian. There are only two known photographs of Houa - one can be seen on the right; the other will appear tomorrow, the anniversary of the first edition of the race.

Michael Boogerd
Michael Boogerd, who was born in The Hague on this day in 1972 and was later - somewhat unsurprisingly - nicknamed The Boogeyman, became a professional cyclist with the WordPerfect team in 1994 and remained with them for his entire career as the squad found new sponsors and changed its name, first to Novell and then to Rabobank.

Boogerd's speciality was the Ardennes Classics, the hilly courses suiting his wiry physique very well, yet he was frequently outclassed by riders such as Michele Bartoli, Johan Museeuw and Erik Dekker, which saw him earn a reputation as an "eternal second." Shortly after his retirement in 2007 he dismissed the claim, and with some justification: after all, he had won an Amstel Gold Race in 1999 and two editions of the Brabantse Pijl (2001, 2003). Not all Classics specialists can carry their talent over into the stage races, but Boogerd enjoyed some success here too - including a stage win at his very first Tour de France (Stage 6, 1996), fifth overall at the Tour two years later, another stage victory at the 2002 Tour (Stage 16) and numerous other good results. His greatest achievement, meanwhile, were his three National Championships: he won the title in 1997, 1998 and 2006.

An enormously popular rider among the Dutch public, not least of all on account of his dazzling white smile and boy band looks, Boogerd was 50% of the inspiration for the book Michael & Erik - which covers the his and Erik Dekker's careers.

Diana Žiliūtė

Diana Žiliūtė
Diana Žiliūtė, born in Rietavas on this day in 1976, is a Lithuanian cyclist who first appeared on the international scene in 1994 when she won the Junior World Road Race Championship. Three years later she won the European Under-23 Time Trial Championship and then in 1998 the Elite World Road Race Cup and Championship.

Thus began the career of Lithuania's most successful cyclist of all time - she would go on to build up one of the most impressive palmares of any cyclist during the late 1990s and first decade of the 21st Century with a series of victories at the Giro Donne (Stage 3, 2000; Stage 13, 2001; Prologue and Stage 6, 2004), the Tour de France Féminin (GC, 1999; Prologue, Stages 1, 5, 6 and 7, 2006; Stages 1, 2b and 3, 2008; Prologue, 2009), the Women's Challenge (Stage 3, 1998; Stages 3 and 6, 2000), the Holland Ladies' Tour (Stages 1, 2 and 7, 2003) and the Vuelta Ciclista a Navarra (GC and Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4, 2000). In addition, she won a second World Cup in 2000, the Trofeo Alfredo Binda in 2003, the GP Liberazione and the Giro di San Marino in 2006, the Tour de Prince Edward Island in 2007 and the Giro della Toscana in 2009.



Tom Southam, born in Penzance on this day in 1981, was the rider who, along with Charlie Wegelius, caused controversy at the 2005 World Championships when they chose to ride in support of the leader of the Liquigas-Bianchi trade team rather than Team GB leader Roger Hammond. Like Wegelius he paid a high price for doing so, becoming persona non grata in the eyes of many fans for some years after the incident.

Rohan Dennis, an Australian cyclist born on this day in 1990, has won several gold medals at the National Track Championships and the World Track Cup. In 2010 he began to make his mark on the road, too, winning the Under-23 National Time Trial title after coming first overall at the Geelong Tour. In 2012, he won the U-23 National TT and road race, then came fifth overall at the Tour Down Under - and look to be on the verge of beginning a great career.

Cees van Espen, a Dutch rider born in Arnhem on this day in 1938, was one of that vast majority of cyclists who middle along, winning a provincial race here and there but never quite finding what it takes to make it into the upper echelons. Among his modest victories were Culemborg in 1961, the Ronde van Twente in 1962, Ossendrecht two years later - and Stage 5a at the 1965 Tour de France.

Other cyclists born on this day: Mickaël Bourgain (France, 1980); Luke Madill (Australia, 1980); Wim van Huffel (Belgium, 1979); Vagn Bangsborg (Denmark, 1936); Arve Haugen (Norway, 1943); Bjørnar Vestøl (Norway, 1974); Scott Richardson (South Africa, 1971); Chris Koberstein (Canada, 1968).

Daily Cycling Facts 27.05.2014

Michele Bartoli

Michele Bartoli

Michele Bartoli, born in Pisa on this day in 1970, turned professional with Mercatone Uno-Medeghini-Zucchini in 1992 and developed into one one of the greatest Classics specialists of the late 1990s and first five years of the 21st Century.

His first Classics win was the Brabantse Pijl of 1994, the year he also won Stage 14 at the Giro d'Italia. In 1997 and 1998 he won the World Cup, earning him an invite to join Mapei for 1999 - his time there being marked by a clash with Paolo Bettini who had won Liège-Bastogne-Liège as team aleader after Bartoli was injured at the Tour of Germany. By 2001, the year that Bartoli departed for Fassa Bortolo, the feud has escalated to such a point that the two men refused to work together during the World Championships and allowed Oscar Freire to take the title.

Bartoli won Liège-Bastogne-Liège twice (1997, 1998), the Giro di Lombardia twice (2002, 2003), the Brabantse Pijl twice (1994, 1999), La Flèche Wallonne (1999), the Omloop Het Nieuwesblad (2001), the Amstel Gold Race (2002) and numerous other one-day races, stages and stage races. He may have won many more had he not have become disillusioned with cycling following injury in 2004: "I just wasn't motivated to continue...I can't be a top level rider any more and that was a major influence on my decision, rather than my recent physical problems," he told Cycling News.

In 2007, Bartoli was connected to Operacion Puerto by La Gazzetta dello Sport who claimed that the code name "Sansone" - the name found on an IV bag of blood in the laboratory of Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes - referred to him, saying that it was the name of his dog.

Freddie Grubb
Freddie Grubb, who was born on Kingston in Surrey on this day in 1887, was called "the most talked-of cyclist in Great Britain" in 1910 after he set a new 100 mile time trial record, covering the distance in under five hours - on road, riding a fixed-wheel bike without normal brakes. One year later he entered a 12-hour competition on a 210 mile course near Liverpool, that distance being judged impossible by the event's organisers. They had to extend it by 10.5 miles because Grubb ran out of road.

Review of an F.H. Grubb bike, 1920

Grubb could be seen as one of the forefathers of the Straight Edge movement that has many followers among BMX and mountain bike riders - he never smoked, refused to consume alcohol and was strictly vegetarian at a time when few had even heard of such a concept and the general wisdom was that cyclists should consume vast amounts of meat before a race (Maurice Garin famously got through 45 cutlets of meat during a 24-hour race 17 years earlier).

In 1912, he competed in the Olympics and won two silver medals, then turned professional in 1914. Cycling wrote, "He is 25 years of age, and scales 12st stripped, and when he gets accustomed to the Continental methods there is no reason he should not shine as a star of the very first order in the professional ranks." However, his professional racing career (which - who knows? - might have led to the first British success in the Tour de France) didn't last long - not, as was the case with so many riders of the day, due to war; but because he found European ways not at all to his liking - he said that the Continental riders would "stick an inflator [pump] in your spokes as quick as look at you" - and hankered to return home. He must really have hated it, because the National Cycling Union had banned road racing in Britain and the rules of the time stated that once a rider had competed as a professional, he or she could not downgrade to amateur status nor compete against amateurs. Thus, a return to Britain effectively spelled the end of his competitive career, yet he did it anyway.

Perhaps that made him bitter. After the First World War (during which he abandoned a bike shop he'd set up in 1914 and had to give up his vegetarianism or starve while serving in the Royal Navy), he went into business with a man named Ching Allin and, supported by funds from a member of his cycling club, the two men set themselves up as Allin & Grubb, a bike manufacturer based at 132 Whitehorse Road in Croydon, South London (the building, much altered, is still there and is now occupied by a firm of safe engineers. According to historian Mick Butler, Grubb was an intensely dislikable man who, among other things, demanded to be given sole credit for the quick release system they'd invented since he was the firm's chief designer and despite the fact that the system appears to have actually been invented by Charley Davey, the man who had provided the funds to start the business (incidentally, the quick release was the first example of its kind, predating better-known systems by several years). Customers found Grubb hard to deal with, so before long Allin was handling sales and relations while his partner concentrated on design.

Advert for Grubb bikes (£12!) from
Cycling, 22.05.1925

Nevertheless, the pair fell out: by 1920 Allin & Grubb had changed its name to A. H. Allin and was selling bikes under the Davey brand. Grubb, meanwhile, set up a new business based at 250 London Road in West Croydon (an advert in Cycling, 04.03.1920, lists F.H. Grubb at the address as having "no connection to any other company," suggesting that the split had been far less than amicable and that the two men were keen to distance themselves from one another - the very imposing building is still there, but is now an ice cream shop), moving to Twickenham in 1926, and by 1924 had a shop in Brixton. That company produced what is believed to be the first British recumbent bike and lasted until 1934 when it went into liquidation - not only had it lasted fourteen years, it must also have been financially successful because when Grubb set up a new company under the name FHG, he re-employed 20 of his old staff at a new premises located at 147a Haydon's Road in Wimbledon, South-West London (that building is long gone, replaced by ugly low-rose flats). His family kept the business going after his death, then sold it in 1952 to Holdsworth, one of the most famous British bike manufacturers of the times. Holdsworth continued to produce Freddie Grubb-branded bikes right up until 1978 (Holdsworth, incidentally, are still in operation and can be found at 132 Lower Richmond Road in Putney), 29 years after his death on the 6th of March 1949.


Heather Albert, born in Sandy, Utah on this day in 1968, was a cross-country runner in high school before taking up duathlon whilst at Brigham Young University, where she earned a PhD in microbiology. She was inspired to take up cycling by her brother and entered her first race in 1994 - two years later, she won silver in the National Road Race Championships. Albert was involved in a serious crash at Houston's Alkek Velodrome in 2004, breaking her collar bone and dislocating her thumb; several other riders at the meeting claimed that the crash had been caused intentionally by Rebecca Quinn. She made a full recovery and, in 2007, won silver in the Points race at the National Track Championships.


Other cyclists born on this day: Ingmar De Poortere (Belgium, 1984); Lode Wouters (Belgium, 1929); Maryan Hary (France, 1980); Rogelio Arango (Colombia, 1959); Yang Hsiu-Chen (Taipei, 1968); Joseph De Bakker (Belgium, 1934); Karl Köther (Germany, 1905, died 1986); Jan Blomme (Belgium, 1959); David Rhoads (USA, 1932); Michael Glöckner (Germany, 1969); Gregorio Caloggero (Peru, 1917, died 1995); Nataliya Kyshchuk (Ukraine, 1968).

Daily Cycling Facts 26.05.2014

The Giro d'Italia began on this day in 1991 with a 193km starting and ending at Olbia on Sardinia. The 21 stages (two split) covered 3,715km. Franco Chioccioli achieved the most complete domination of the race for many years when he led through 20 stages, winning Stages 15, 17, 20 and the General Classification after many years of trying - he'd been 25th in 1982, won the Youth Category in 1983 (when he was also 15th overall), finished in 24th place in 1984, then came 9th and won Stage 14 in 1985, 6th and won Stage 8 in 1986, 14th in 1987, 5th and won Stage 6 in 1988, 5th in 1989 and 6th again in 1990 (in 1992, he was 3rd overall and won Stage 20, then also won Stage 15 at the Tour de France). Chioccioli, incidentally, was nicknamed Coppino on account of his resemblance to Fausto Coppi.

Coppino and Coppi

Zita Urbonaitė
Zita Urbonaitė, born on the 3rd of September 1973 in Šiauliai, won the Lithuanian National Championships in 1999 and 2002; successes that made her a household name in her native country and encouraged many other Lithuanian women to take up the sport. She retired to start a family in 2006, but died on this day in 2008 after being hit by a train in Montebelluna, Italy. She had been suffering deep post-natal depression since giving borth to a daughter three months earlier.

Mikel Nieve

Mikel Nieve
Mikel Nieve, who rode for Euskaltel-Euskadi from 2009 until the team's demise at the end of 2013 and subsequently for Sky, was born in Leitza, Navarre on this day in 1984. At the 2011 Giro d'Italia, Nieve mounted a solo breakaway with 50km to go on Stage 15 and eventually succeeded in dropping stage leader Stefano Garzelli 5.7km from the finish line, then won by 1'41" - sufficient to propel himself from outside the top ten into fifth place in the General Classification. The stage, that year's Queen, was later termed "the hardest of my life" by no less a rider than Alberto Contador.

Andy Bishop
Andy Bishop, born in Tucson, Arizona on this day in 1965, turned professional with the Dutch PDM-Concorde team in 1988 after coming second at the United Texas Tour and winning the Tour of the Gila the previous year. He would complete three Tours de France, coming 135th in 1988, 116th in 1990 and 126th in 1991, then failed to finish in 1992.

Jean Graczyk
Born Neuvy-sur-Baragneon on this day in 1933, Jean Graczyk had been a successful amateur track rider - winning a silver medal at the 1956 Olympics - before he turned professional in road racing, a move inspired by his National Amateur Road Race Champion title the same year.

Jean Graczyk

In his first professional season he won two races, then in his second he won the 105km Stage 13b at the Vuelta a Espana and the overall Points competition at the Tour de France. In 1959, he won Paris-Nice and Stage 5 at the Tour and in 1960 Stages 4, 12, 17, 21 and another Points competition at the Tour and the overall General Classification at the Critérium International. After that, he concentrated (successfully) on criteriums and smaller races for a couple of years before returning to the Vuelta in 1962 and winning Stages 6, 13, 14 and 16, then went back to the criteriums and smaller stage races for several more successful years prior to his first retirement in 1970 before re-emerging with the West German Rokado team for five months in 1972.

Graczyk's nickname was Popoff, which René de Latour said was on account of his habit of "popping off" the front of the peloton to mount solo breaks and win races. Sadly, American-born de Latour's French was not quite good enough for him to know the rather less cheery real reason - it's a racist slang term for anyone of Polish heritage.


Livio Trapè
Livio Trapè, born on this day four days after Graczyk, was a highly successful Italian track rider whom many people believed would, like Graczyk, go on to even greater triumphs in road racing during the 1960s. However, despite numerous riders who have excelled in both disciplines, great skill in one cannot always be carried over to the other - as would prove to be the case here. Trapè rode in three editions of the Giro d'Italia (1961, 1962, 1964) but failed to finish each, came 73rd at Milan-San Remo in 1961 and 64th in 1962 and 45th overall at the Vuelta a Espana in 1966. His one moment of road race glory came at the Giro di Lombardia in 1962, when he finished in second place behind Jo de Roo.

Nico van Gageldonk, born today in 1913

Other cyclists born on this day: Roland Bezamat (France, 1928); Nico van Gageldonk (Netherlands, 1913, died 1995); Li Wenhao (China, 1989); Satomi Wadami (Japan, 1987); Jacqui Nelson (New Zealand, 1965); Knud Jacobsen (Denmark, 1914, died 1987); Herbert Francis (USA, 1940); Latauro Chávez (Argentina, 1966); August Rieke (Germany, 1935); Harry Jackson (Great Britain, 1941); Arnaldo Benfenati (Italy, 1924, died 1986); Aleksey Markov (USSR, 1979); Donald Sheldon (USA, 1930); Pelle Kil (Netherlands, 1971); William Freund (USA, 1941); Rok Drašler (Yugoslavia, 1979); Ramón Hoyos (Colombia, 1932); Petr Kocek (Czechoslovakia, 1952).

Daily Cycling Facts 25.05.2014

Karel van Wijnendaele

On this day in 1913, the inaugural Ronde van Vlaanderen was held. Like many of the older cycle races, it was organised to promote a newspaper, in this case the Flemmish Sportwereld. Only 37 riders turned up to race (some sources say 27), a major disappointment for the paper's co-founder and race organiser Karel van Wijnendaele (real name Carolus Ludovicus Steyaert, 16.11.1882 - 20.12.1961 - he took his pseudonym from the name of the village where he was born, ) who had become editor on the 1st of January that year. "Sportwereld was so young and so small for the big Ronde that we wanted. We had bitten off more than we could chew," he later said. "It was hard, seeing a band of second-class riders riding round Flanders, scraping up a handful of centimes to help cover the costs. The same happened in 1914. No van Hauwaert, no Masselis, no Defraeye, no Mosson, no Mottiat, no van den Berghe, all forbidden to take part by their French bike companies."

When van Wijnendaele was eighteen months old, his father died - which left his mother to raise her fifteen children alone. This meant, of course, that as soon as the boy reached fourteen years and could leave school he needed to find work - which he did, carrying out odd jobs for a baker and looking after cows, washing bottles and doing other odd jobs for rich French-speaking families in Brussels. He hated the way they looked down on him for his poverty, but their prejudice was what drove him on to make something of himself and, like so many others in the early days of the sport, he turned to cycling as a way to make extra money. "Being born into a poor family, that was my strength," he later said. "If you're brought up without frills and you know what hunger is, it makes you hard enough to withstand bike races." He must have been an exceptionally bright lad - his education would have been extremely basic, but when he realised he was never going to make his fortune from racing he turned to writing about it instead. His skill as a writer was good enough that by 1909 he was cycling correspondent to two national titles.

In that first year, the race started in Ghent with the parcours consisting of a 324km loop through Flanders and back towards Ghent where it ended at a wooden track at Mariakerke, running through Sint-Niklaas, Aalst, Oudenaarde, Kortrijk, Veurne, Ostend, Torhout, Roeselare and Bruges along the way. As was standard in races of the time, all riders were expected to be entirely self-reliant and, permitted no assistance from team vehicles or mechanics, had to carry spare parts and perform all roadside repairs themselves. The prize fund added up to 1,100 Belgian francs and the money Sportwereld made from the event covered less than half that cost.

Paul Deman, 1889-1961

The winner - with a time of 12h3'10" - was 25-year-old Paul Deman, who would also win Bordeaux-Paris the following year before becoming involved in espionage during the First World War when he acted as a cycle courier smuggling top secret documents into the Netherlands, which remained neutral. He was eventually caught by the Germans and imprisoned in Leuven to await execution by firing squad - fortunately, the Armistice was declared just in time to save him and he returned to cycling; winning Paris-Roubaix in 1920 and Paris-Tours three years later.

Despite van Wijnendaele's dismay, word had spread by 1914 with riders generally appreciative of the race and in 1914 47 showed up. The French teams still forbade their members from entry, but Alcyon's Marcel Buysse - a Belgian himself - recognised that the race was destined for great things and refused to pay heed; entering and winning the second edition. In time, the Ronde became a symbol of Flemmish national pride and so successful that the enormous crowds of spectators would cause problems, and the race is now perhaps the second most popular of the Monuments after Paris-Roubaix which it precedes by one week on the racing calendar.

All but forgotten: Luigi Annoni

The Giro d'Italia started on this day once, in 1921, when it covered 3,107km in ten stages. Costante Girardengo, then aged 28 and arguably the strongest cyclist the world had yet seen, was by far the favourite and led the General Classification from the start of the race after winning the first four stages. Stage 5, however, was a complete and unmitigated disaster - having suffered a series of mechanical failures, he decided he'd had enough, dismounted, drew a cross on the road and declared "Girardengo si ferma qui" ("Girardengo stops here"). Gaetano Belloni had caught him up in the GC the day before, so the leadership went to him when he won the stage and he kept it the next day too despite losing the stage to Luigi Annoni. However, Giovanni Brunero won Stage 7 and then rode carefully; keeping out of harm's way but ensuring he completed each of the remaining three stages with a time good enough to remain in front overall. Annoni won Stage 8, then Belloni won Stage 9 and 10 - but neither could catch Brunero, who won with an advantage of 41".

The Parkhotel Valkenburg Classic took place on this date in 2012 with Marianne Vos starting as favourite. During the race, an official motorbike on the parcours turned out to be slower than she was and failed to get out of her way in time; she crashed hard and broke her collarbone. Nevertheless, she remounted and finished the race, taking second place just behind her team mate Annemiek van Vleuten.

Geraint Thomas
Born in Cardiff on this day in 1986, Geraint Thomas began cycling competitively when he was ten years old with a local club, the Maindy Flyers - named after a Cardiff velodrome with a famous uneven track caused by subsidence. He also raced for the Cardiff CC and Just In Front clubs with whom he began to enjoy some success including a National Junior Championship and a silver medal at European Championships, which earned him a place on British Cycling's Olympic Academy. In 2004, he became World Junior Scratch Champion, then in 2005 he took the National Elite title for the same event and shared gold medal for the team pursuit race with Mark Cavendish, Steven Cummings and Ed Clancy. That same year, his career almost came to an early end: during a training ride in Sydney: a shard of metal lying in the road was thrown into his wheel when the rider in front of him him hit it, causing him to crash - onto the metal, which ruptured his spleen and caused massive internal bleeding.

Geraint Thomas

His spleen had to be removed, but he made a full recovery and, two years later, entered his first Tour de France with Barloworld; the first Welshman in the race since Colin Lewis in 1968 (though since Lewis was born in Devon, his status as a Welshman is a little shaky). He was 140th, just one away from Lanterne Rouge, but had finished in the top 20 for two stages - but merely finishing a Tour is an achievement, especially if it's your first and you're Benjamin du Tour (the youngest rider in the race). He chose to stay away the next year, instead riding the Giro d'Italia before returning to Britain in order to train for the Beijing Olympics where he, Ed Clancy and Bradley Wiggins won the Team Pursuit. His 2009 season was severely limited after a crash during the individual time trial at Tirreno-Adriatico when he misjudged a corner, hitting crowd barriers and fracturing his nose and pelvis. He returned to competition late in the year to take 6th place overall at the Tour of Britain and, on the 30th of October, set a individual sprint world record time under current rules at the UCI World Track Championships by finishing the 4km in 4'15.105" - 3.991" slower than the fastest time ever recorded, set by Chris Boardman thirteen years earlier but using a riding position since banned under international competition rules. At the end of the year, he announced that he would be leaving Barloworld to ride for the new British team Sky.

His first season with Sky would be a good one, kicking off with team time trial victory at the Tour of Qatar before he went on to four consecutive top ten stage finishes at the Critérium du Dauphiné and then the National Road Race Champion title. He also rode the Tour de France again, finishing the prologue in fifth place, second on Stage 3 and leading the Youth Category (in which he would eventually come ninth overall) for a short time. 2011 got off to an even better start with second place at the Dwars door Vlaanderen, possible indication that he may have the makings of a future Classics winner, then in May he won the Bayern-Rundfahrt - his first professional stage race victory and the first time the race had ever been won by a British rider. He would wear the white jersey again at the Tour that year after finishing Stage 1 in sixth place, then kept it until Stage 7 after Sky finished the second stage team time trial in third place - he would be one of several Sky riders to lose significant time in that stage when they waited for team captain Bradley Wiggins who had been in a crash and, it turned out, would not be able to continue. On the Hourquette d’Ancizan as the race entered the Pyrenees, Thomas led an early break and would twice stare injury in the eyes, losing control and very nearly crashing twice within just a few seconds - his determination that day earned him the Combativity award. For 2012, he took part in the Giro d'Italia but then concentrated on track cycling in the run up to the Olympics.

Thomas proud of his Welsh roots - when told that flags of non-participating nations would not be permitted at the 2008 Olympics (Wales, as a part of the United Kingdom, counted as such; though non-recognised might have been a more accurate term), he said: "It would be great to do a lap of honour draped in the Welsh flag if I win a gold medal, and I'm very disappointed if this rule means that would not be possible." With Ed Clancy, Stephen Burke and Peter Kennaugh, he won the Team Pursuit - he had to complete his lap of honour in the Union flag, but the crowd made up for it with masses of red dragons held aloft.

Thomas has been a vocal opponent of doping in cycling. In 2008, when Barloworld team mater Moisés Dueñas was thrown out of the Tour for France due to a positive test for EPO, Thomas was forthright in his opinions. "Duenas, when I last heard, was facing a five-year prison sentence in France, which I hope he gets," he told the BBC. "It’s about time people realised it can’t happen anymore. I guess you will always get people who will try to cheat the system, not just in sport but in everyday life. Saying that, if someone is fraudulent in a business, wouldn’t they be facing a prison term? I don’t see how riders taking drugs to win races and lying to their teams is any different. Bang them up and throw away the key!"

Ian Stannard

Thomas' Sky team mate Ian Stannard shares his birthday but is one year younger. Born in Chelmsford, Great Britain, he made his professional debut as a trainee with T-Mobile in 2007 having been invited to join the team when managers chopped out several older riders in an attempt to move on from a series of doping scandals and present a more youthful squad at that summer's races. However, he would remain with them for less than a year; moving on to Landbouwkrediet-Tönissteiner in 2008 - the year he took part in the Tour of Britain and came third overall, riding for a GB national team, an unusual sight in a race usually competed by trade teams

In 2009 he switched again, this time to ISD (now Farnese Vini-Selle Italia), and rode the Giro d'Italia - his first Grand Tour, where he came 160th. At the end of the season he announced that he would be moving to Sky for 2010, with whom he immediately revealed himself to be a Classics specialist of some note when he took third place at Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. He remained with Sky in 2012, and won the National Road Race Championship; and is still with them in 2013 when top ten finishes at Milan-San Remo and Dwars door Vlaanderen suggest that he's on the cusp of his best years.


Daan de Groot
Daan de Groot, born in Amterdam on this day in 1933, won Stage 13 at the 1952 Tour de France after using what can only be described as unusual tactics. The stage ran for 205 flat kilometres between Millau, now world famous for its 343m tall Viaduc (the tallest bridge in the world), and Albi, home to one of the world' most spectacular cathedrals (which began life in 1287 as a fortress and remains the largest brick-built structure in the world). Both lie in the Tarn, which is in that part of Southern France that's just a little too far from the Mediterranean and Atlantic to enjoy cool breezes and it gets very, very hot indeed - as it had done that day, and the peloton were suffering.

1933-1981

De Groot had been dropped by the peloton and many of the other riders in the autobus must have thought the sun had gone to the Dutchman's head when he suddenly stopped, got of his bike and dived into a field of cabbages - the Dutch are, after all, not well-accustomed to searing heat. A few were probably convinced when he picked some leaves from one of the plants and wrapped two around his neck and placed one underneath his casquette.

However, he was a wiser man than they thought. With the cool, fleshy leaves protecting him he recovered and was able to sprint off to catch the peloton, then gradually made his way up to the front. Realising that the heat had now had a similar effect on the entire pack, he attacked and nobody could chase him down. Someway up the road, the blackboard man told him that he had an advantage of treize minutes, half an hour - but, as he spoke very poor French, he thought he had three minutes and accelerated, going on to win the stage by 20 minutes.

De Groot's wife died in 1981. A year later, aged 48, he committed suicide.


Joseph M. Papp
Born in Parma, Ohio on this day in 1975, Joe Papp began cycling competitively in 1989 and joined the US National Team five years later and achieved some impressive results. In 2006, a sample he provided at the Tour of Turkey tested positive for testosterone metabolites and he received a two-year ban - unusually, it was also ruled that all his results since 2001 would be disqualified, which led to widespread complaints from fans.

However, while testifying in the Floyd Landis case, Papp confessed to having been a part of an extensive doping program that had been in place for some time and listed the many drugs he and other cyclists regularly used, also admitting that he had almost lost his following a relatively minor crash that caused massive internal bleeding due to his use of EPO. As a respected cycling author, he has since become considered something of an expert on doping - his detailed descriptions of what cyclists use, when, why and what it does to them enabled WADA to successfully argue against Landis' claim that he would not have used testosterone at the 2006 Tour de France because it would not have helped him improve his performance. While he was quick to testify against Landis, he was also one of the first to extend the hand of friendship in 2010 after the Pennsylvania-born rider finally decided to come clean. That same year, Papp was charged with distributing banned performance drugs, a charge to which he pleaded guilty before naming 180 athletes to whom drugs had been supplied. The case was eventually sealed, indication that related cases are still in progress, and in 2011 Papp was handed a three-year suspended sentence.

Today, Papp gives many speeches each year in which he outlines the dangers of doping in an attempt to discourage others. He has never officially retired from cycling and as such remains on the US Anti-Doping Agency's test pool list, having to provide them with accurate details of his whereabouts for a period of one hour every day of the year. He has never missed a test.

Georg Totschnig

Born in Latenbach on this day in 1971, in 2005 Georg Totschnig became the first Austrian to win a stage at the Tour de France since Max Bulla in 1931 when he beat no less a figure than Lance Armstrong. He'd been part of a break that had escaped early in Stage 14, then he, Walter Bénéteau and Stefano Garzelli split the group when they rode off alone. Bénéteau and Garzelli fell back on the final climb to Ax 3 Domaines, but Totschnig kept going hard and held Armstrong off all the way; eventually crossing the line with a 56" advantage. His achievement earned him the Austrian Sportsperson of the Year award.

Branislau Samoilau, born in Vitebsk on this day in 1985, won the Under-23 Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2004, was Belorussian Under-23 Time Trial Champion in 2005 and 2006, then took the Elite title in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. He's also not a bad stage racer, having come 22nd overall at the 2007 Giro d'Italia and 16th overall at the 2011 Tour de Suisse. Now riding with Movistar, he may well develop into a talented all-rounder  in the coming years.

Erki Pütsep, born in Jõgeva on this day in 1976, was Estonian Road Race Champion in 2004, 2006 and 2007.

Jean-Pierre Danguillaume, born in Joué-lès-Tours on this day in 1946, won seven stages at the Tour de France (Stage 22 1970, Stage 18 1971, Stage 6 1973, Stages 17 and 18 1974 and Stages 11 and 13b in 1977) in addition to the Peace Race (1969), GP Ouest-France (1971), the Critérium International (1973) and numerous other races over the course of his eight competitive years, riding for Peugeot throughout. Were it not for the fact that his career coincided with that of Eddy Merckx, he might be remembered as one of the great riders.

Evgeni Petrov, born in Ufa, USSR on this day in 1978, became Russian National Time Trial Champion in 2000 - and took the World Under-23 titles for the TT and road race too. He won Stage 2a at the Tour de l'Ain a year later and another National TT title and the General Classifications at the Tour de Slovénie Tour de l'Avenir in 2002. The subsequent few years were less successful until 2007 when he was 7th overall at the Giro d'Italia. In 2005, he was thrown out of the Tour de France after recording a haematocrit reading greater than 50%, deemed likely indication of EPO use or blood transfusion, and was barred from competition for two weeks.

Other births: Orla Jørgensen (Denmark, 1904, died 1947); Juan Alberto Merlos (Argentina, 1945); Marian Kegel (Poland, 1945, died 1972); Wes Chowen (USA, 1939); Tarja Owens (Ireland, 1977); Patrick Jonker (Australia, 1969); Walter Signer (Switzerland, 1937); Igor Patenko (USSR, 1969); Jameel Kadhem (Bahrain, 1971); Tanya Lindenmuth (USA, 1979); Jhon García (Colombia, 1974).

Daily Cycling Facts 24.05.2014

The Giro d'Italia started on this date five times - in 1914, 1922, 1947, 1950 and 1992.


The Epic 1914 Giro

1914. The stage isn't known and the rider isn't named,
but he looks like Giuseppe Azzini.

1914 was the last edition before the outbreak of the First World War and the first to decide the eventual winner on overall time rather than points, the same system having been used at the Tour de France the year before (the 1903 and 1904 Tours had also been decided in this way). Whilst the parcours was comparatively short at 3,256km (some sources put it even shorter at 3,162km), the race consisted of only eight stages which meant, as was common in those times, stages far longer than riders today face - though we should be fair to modern riders and remember that early Grand Tours had many more rest days. Five stages were more than 400km, Stages 1 and 8 were 468km (some sources say 428km; either way they began at midnight) and the shortest stage, 5, was 328km; for which reason it's considered by many historians to have been the hardest Giro of all time. Stage 3, 430km in length, took longer than any other stage in Giro history to be completed with Costante Girardengo first over the line after 19h20'47".

Costante Girardengo

As if the distances weren't bad enough, the riders also faced severe weather, incompetent officials who supplied them with incorrect directions on numerous occasions and widespread cheating by other riders, many of whom drafted behind cars, and fans who spread nails over the roads to slow down riders they didn't like. It's perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the average speed of 23.375kph was the lowest ever and only eight out of 81 starters finished - another record. Among those to fail was Giuseppe Azzini, leader of the General Classification for one stage after winning Stages 4 and 5 - he went missing during Stage 6 and couldn't be found anywhere. Organisers discovered the next day at a farmhouse, fast asleep in bed.


1921 winner Giovanni Brunero was favourite to win in 1922, but he faced stiff competition from Girardengo and Gaetano Belloni. He finished the first stage with a good lead, but was then docked 25 minutes for cheating. Rather than giving up, he redoubled his efforts and mounted some long-distance solo breakaways which, bit by bit, enabled him to claw his way back into contention. He then won Stage 7 with a time good enough to take the General Classification leadership, which he retained for the remaining three stages. He took 119h43' to complete the 3,095km - neither Girardengo nor Belloni finished.

1947 covered 3,843km in 19 stages and saw Fausto Coppi finally exert his dominance over Gino Bartali, who had taken what would prove to be his last Giro victory the previous year - but the old warhorse wasn't ready to let the younger man go without a fight just yet. They spent the first stage sizing one another up and allowed Renzo Zanazzi to win (Zanazzi, who few remember now, had won Stage 10 the previous year, would also win Stage 5b and finished a stage in third place in 1948, 1950 and 1952 - at the time of writing, he's still alive), but Bartali attacked hard in Stage 2 and finished with a 1'41" advantage. Coppi was the better man in the mountains from Stage 4, but he wasn't quite good enough to prevent his rival taking the General Classification on that same stage and then keeping it all the way through to Stage 15. However, in Stage 16 Bartali finally cracked on the Passo di Pordoi, at 2,239m the highest paved road in the Dolomites - and Coppi beat him to the finish by 4'24". From that points onwards, his victory was as good as decided and he rode less aggressively, keeping himself out of harm's way and won the race with a 1'43" advantage.

Hugo Koblet

Bartali raced again in 1950, when the race consisted of 18 stages over 3,981km, and looked a likely contender when Coppi broke his pelvis in Stage 9 - but now he also faced problems from the Swiss Hugo Koblet who, having won Stages 6 and 8, realised that he too stood a good chance in Coppi's absence. A rider as clever as he was famously handsome, Koblet rode wisely and effectively and led the General Classification from that point onwards; eventually beating the Italian by 5'12" and becoming the first foreigner to win a Giro.

The 1992 edition covered 3,835km in 22 stages. Miguel Indurain gained an early lead in the time trial, but it was on Stage 9 - the first summit finish that year - that he really got the upper hand when he dropped all his main rivals and gained a 30" advantage over Claudio Chiappucci. When he then dominated the final time trial, he secured his winning time of 103h36'08", 5'12" ahead of Chiappucci who took second place. Later that year, he would become the sixth man to achieve the Giro-Tour double when he also won the Tour de France (and the next year, he would become the only man to have achieved two Giro-Tour doubles in consecutive years).

Sean Kelly
John James "Sean" Kelly is frequently listed as the most successful Irish cyclist in history, but he was much more than that - alongside Bernard Hinault, he was one of the most successful cyclists anywhere in the world and remained so for much of the decade.

One of cycling's most iconic images - Sean Kelly
at Paris-Roubaix

Born in Waterford on this day in 1956 to John and Nellie, who made their living from a 48-acre farm, Sean (the name was chosen to prevent confusion at home) has never been much of a talker. Friends at school believed him unintelligent (or believed that he thought he was, at least) and, while he appears the type who may have turned out to be a genius at maths or physics had a teacher ever have been able to discover such a latent talent, he never got the chance to prove it and they never got the chance to find it - aged just 13, he was taken out of school and went to work on the farm. His older brother Joe, still at school, obtained a bike at about the same time to cycle to and from classes every day and Sean got a bike of his own so that they could go for rides together. When Joe began racing (and winning), Sean followed him once again: his very first race was an eight-mile handicap on the 4th of June 1960. Setting out three minutes ahead of the more experienced riders, he remained three minutes ahead at the halfway point and then increased his lead on the return journey to win the race. Two years later, he was National Amateur Champion; a title he held for two years.

In 1975, Kelly travelled with a certain Pat McQuaid and his brother Kieron (coincidentally, Kelly shares his birthday with Pat and Kieron's cousin John McQuaid, who represented Ireland at the 1988 Olympics) to South Africa, where they planned to use the Rapport Tour as part of the preparation for the upcoming Olympics. Aware that the country was being boycotted due to the government's refusal to end apartheid, they entered under false names; however, they were caught and banned from competition for six months by the Irish Federation and then from the Olympics for life. Though this seemed a disaster, it would prove advantageous for Kelly who would, in all likelihood, have found himself outclassed by the top European cyclists at the Games; instead, he entered the 1976 Tour of Britain where he faced opponents closer to his own level and won Stage 6, then came second on Stage 7. This earned him an invitation to join a club based in Metz, which offered him a salary equal to £25 a week, four francs (40p) for every kilometre of every race he won and free bed and board - he accepted, then paid the club back by winning 18 of the 25 races he entered with them, including the amateur version of the Giro di Lombardia.

Unsurprisingly, bosses from professional teams began to take note; among them the legendary Cyrille Guimard and Jean de Gribaldy. De Gribaldy had in fact made him an offer previously but was turned down as Kelly then wished to remain an amateur - this time, though, wanted him so much that he made hasty preparations to go to Ireland to track the rider down, despite having no idea where he lived and not even being sure he's recognise him if he saw him. He did know, meanwhile, where Kelly's parents' farm was located, roughly at least; so, taking an English-speaking rider to act as translator, he flew to Dublin and took a taxi to Curraghduff - a distance of 164km. Eventually, they tracked down the farm only to be told that their quarry was out in the fields somewhere on a tractor and so they ordered the taxi driver to cruise around the lanes looking for him. When they found him, they went to his brother-in-law's house where de Gribaldy offered him £4,000 a year with bonuses - more than three times what the Metz club had been paying him. But, being a simple country boy, Kelly felt loyal to his old club and asked for time to think things over, to which de Gribaldy agreed. Metz offered him more money but couldn't match what de Gribaldy could offer. Kelly, feeling guilty for considering turning his back on the team that had given him his first opportunity, asked de Gribaldy for £6,000, certain the Frenchman would turn his back and walk away. De Gribaldy wrote up a new contract on the spot and Flandria-Velda, at long last, had its great new hope.

The Cavendish of his day, Kelly
was a devastatingly fast sprinter

Now loyal to de Gribaldy, Kelly remained with Flandria for two seasons. However, Flandria was really two outfits: the A team, who raced in the top events around Europe; and the B team which remained confined to smaller, local races in France where they were used as little more than an advertising gimmick for Flandria's mopeds and bikes - while Kelly even to this day is a country boy at heart, he'd glimpsed cycling's upper echelons now and knew that he could get there. The chance to do so appeared to come at the end of 1978 when Michel Pollentier, who had been thrown out of the Tour de France that year when the doctor in charge of taking samples discovered that the rider in front of him in the queue was attempting to fill the jar via a tube connected to a condom filled with somebody else's urine hidden under his armpit demanded that he lift his jersey to prove that he too wasn't using such a device (he was, but later redeemed himself by being one of the first riders to warn others of the dangers of doping when he admitted he'd needed treatment for drug addiction when his racing career came to an end), left to set up his own team. Freddy Maertens, another ex-Flandria rider, wanted him too, as did several other teams that had been hovering around, but when Pollentier secured sponsorship from the very generous Splendor bicycle manufacturer he was able to offer the Irishman a better salary than his rivals.

Unfortunately, Pollentier was not cut out for team management and his new squad faced serious problems - among others, the bikes they rode were of such low quality that they couldn't enter Paris-Roubaix in their first year. Kelly responded by doing what he'd done at school, withdrawing into himself and getting on with things, even winning a few races - including two stages at the Vuelta a Espana (Stage 1 and 8a, 1979) - and, in time, things began to improve as team logistics were ironed out. Meanwhile, Splendor had been joined by Wickes and EuropDecor as sponsors and money was plentiful, Pollentier easily matching offers made by other teams as they tried to lure Kelly away. In 1981, he was paid £30,000 plus bonuses - an astonishingly high figure at a time when the average annual salary in Britain was just over £8,500. However, when Pollentier brought another sprinter - Eddy Planckaert - into the team, Kelly began to wonder what his role was and when he heard that de Gribaldy was assembling a new team decided to find out more.

De Gribaldy had long been known as a rather unconventional manager with a tendency to pick up riders nobody else wanted. More often than not, they'd let him down; but from time to time he'd discover an overlooked diamond. Kelly was of course not overlooked, his results to date had been far too good for that, but he was viewed in a very similar way to Mark Cavendish today - get him in the right position for the final sprint of a race and he was all but unbeatable, but if you wanted a rider who could win stage races look elsewhere. De Gribaldy thought differently - he believed that Kelly had the potential to be more than a sprinter, and this time he signed him up as team leader. Other managers no doubt assumed this was just another de Gribaldy eccentricity, but that year the Irishman won Paris-Nice. Then, he won the Points competition at the Tour de France. The year after that, he won Paris-Nice again, and the Points competition again too. And the Tour de Suisse, and the Critérium International. When he won the Giro di Lombardia, beating Francesco Moser, Hennie Kuiper and Greg LeMond, he proved himself capable of doing battle with the best riders in the world.

Kelly's Paris-Nice record is legendary - having won those first two, he would also win for the following five consecutive years; an achievement unmatched by any rider before or since. This created a sense, especially now that he'd learned climb and ride breaks almost as well as he sprinted, that it was only a matter of time before Kelly won a Tour -  that accolade would escape him, though he finished in the top ten three times with a best result of fourth place. He did win a Grand Tour, however, taking the 1988 Vuelta a Espana with a 1'27" advantage over Raimund Dietzen. He was also a remarkably talented Classics rider, winning nine Monuments (Milan-San Remo twice, Paris-Roubaix twice, Liège-Bastogne-Liège twice and the Giro di Lombardia three times) and came very close to adding his name to those of Eddy Merckx, Roger de Vlaeminck and Rik van Looy, the only men to have won all five Monuments, when he finished the Ronde van Vlaanderen in second place three times.

Kelly today, as rooted in the soil and
unpretentious as he always was

Kelly has been the subject of numerous books on cycling, some of them concerned with his own great achievements and others using his career as a frame work to examine a remarkable period in cycling - when he first raced in Europe, Eddy Merckx was the king. His first Tour de France, 1978, was also the Tour debut of Bernard Hinault. Greg Lemond and Laurent Fignon, Francesco Moser and Robert Millar, Jan Raas and many others all came and went in the time that Kelly was winning races. When he retired in 1994, Miguel Indurain had already won three Tours and was eyeing up his fourth while a young American rider named Lance Armstrong began to show he might one day do well, too.

Today, Kelly works as a cycling commentator for Eurosport and still sounds like a farmer's son from rural Ireland. In 2000, he rode across the USA to raise money for a charity that works with blind and partially sighted people. He created and is still actively involved in the Belgium-based Sean Kelly Cycling Academy, home of the Sean Kelly Racing Team that he also established and which has brought a number of promising new Irish and Belgian riders to the sport. Anyone who has listened to him, following his superb dissection of race tactics and admired his enormous knowledge of cycling history, will be in no doubt that his school friends were very, very wrong about him.

Bo Hamburger
Bo Hamburger, born in Frederiksberg, Denmark on this day in 1970, began his professional career with TVM in 1991 and, in 1994, finished the Tour de France in 20th place after winning Stage 8. He improved in the coming years with 1995, then 13th in 1996 and took the silver medal at the 1997 World Championships. Having switched to Casino-C’est Votre Équipe for 1998 he won La Flèche Wallonne, came fifth at the Amstel Gold Race and then 15th again at the Tour, then had a couple of quiet years before joining CSC and winning the National Championship in 2000.

However, his time with CSC would be short, because at the 2001 Tour the team sacked him after he failed a test for EPO. This was the period before reliable tests for the drug had been developed, meaning that when his B sample proved to be below the minimum level that would have caused suspension from competition, he escaped further charges and returned the following season with Alexia Alluminio. Later, in his autobiography, he admitted to using EPO and growth hormones between 1995 and 1997. He says that he stopped taking EPO in 1997 when he discovered that he had a naturally high haematocrit count which, in the days when the only test for the drug was to count red blood cells in an athlete's sample, would have caused him to fail tests had he continued using it. In 2009, Denmark's Ekstra Bladet newspaper received intelligence that he was involved in a financial pyramid scheme and decided to expose him, later getting a scoop when a hidden camera caught him and an accomplice stealing a journalist's video camera.

Left: Antoine Mazairac. Right: Willy Falck Hansen

Antonius "Antoine" Hendrikus Mazairac, born in Roosendal, Netherlands on this day in 1901, won a silver medal for the Sprint at the 1928 Olympics. He died in Dortmund, Germany, on the 1st of September 1966.

Matthew Lloyd, born in Melbourne on this day in 1983, turned professional with Predictor-Lotto in 2007 and was "released" from the team at the end of 2011. This led initially to rumours that he had been caught doping, but the team was quick to reveal th decision had been made due to "behavioural problems" (they chose not to expand on this, citing respect for his privacy as the reason) following an accident involving a car that left him with spinal injuries. In November 2011, he signed a two-year contract with Lampre-ISD and remains with them in 2013. In 2010, he became the first Australian to achieve victory in Grand Tour King of the Mountains, winning the competition at the Giro d'Italia.

Other cyclists born on this day: Christian Stahl (USA, 1983); Joanne Kiesanowski (New Zealand, 1979); Jonas Persson (Sweden, 1913, died 1986); Barthélemy Gillard (Belgium, 1935); Kanako Tanikawa (Japan, 1970); Peter Meinert Nielsen (Denmark, 1966); Fernand Saivé (Belgium, 1900, died 1981); Steffen Kjærgaard (Norway, 1973).

Daily Cycling Facts 23.05.2014

The seventh edition of La Flèche Wallonne took place on this day in 1943. The parcours was the same length as the previous year at 208km, but the route differed - both races began at Mons, but this edition finished at Charleroi rather than at Marcinelle. Marcel Kint won, the first of his three consecutive victories, and became the first rider to win this and Paris-Roubaix in the same year.

Angelo Gremo, 1914

The Giro d'Italia began on this day four times - 1920, 1923, 1988 and 1993. 1920, which included eight stages and covered 2,632km, was won by Gaetano Belloni, one of only ten riders (from 49 starters) to complete the race. The edition saw a classic battle between Belloni and Angelo Gremo, the latter turning a five minute disadvantage into a fourteen minute lead in Stage 5 when he escaped the peloton as part of a group of five and took the General Classification leadership. With only three stages to go, most riders would have given up any hope of winning after that - but not Belloni, who simply increased the frequency and severity of his attacks in an effort to claw his way back. In the penultimate stage he had the ride of his life, escaping solo and crossing the finish line alone and 42 minutes ahead of his rival. At the end of the final stage, his time was 102h44'33"; 32'24" faster than Gremo. (Note: Giovanni Rossignoli is sometimes incorrectly listed as having become the oldest ever Giro stage winner this year at the age of 37 years and 188 days. In actual fact, he was not in the race that year.)

1923 consisted of ten stages over 3,202km - eight of them won by Costante Girardengo, who had also won in 1919 and taken the third of his six Milan-San Remo victories and the seventh of his nine National Championships that year. In fifth place, finishing 45'49" behind Girardengo's time of 122h58'17", was a young man named Ottavio Bottecchia who was then an unknown independent rider. His success brought him to the attention of Henri Pélissier who arranged for him to receive an invite to join the Automoto-Hutchinson team with whom he would win the Tour de France for the next two consecutive years.

Andy Hampsten and the '88 Giro

Andy Hampsten at the Tour de France, 1993
(image credit: Eric Houde CC BY-SA 3.0)

The 1988 Giro d'Italia covered 3,580km in 23 stages (two split). Stage 11 had to be stopped and, eventually, cancelled after environmental protestors occupied the finish line and refused to move, then Stage 14 could only just go ahead after it poured all day long, with rain turning to snow at altitude. Snow ploughs cleared the roads higher roads literally minutes before the riders arrived (the dirt roads lower down turned into a quagmire) and at 2,600m the snow turned into a blizzard. Johan van der Velde (who shouldn't be confused with John Vande Velde, father of Christian) was the first to the top, beating Andy Hampsten by around a half minute, but became so cold on the descent that he was forced to stop and ask for help from some fans in a camper van - they allowed him to come in and warm up (well, what cycling fan wouldn't - even though being van der Velde there was a fairly high chance you'd have found something had mysteriously vanished afterwards), but as a result he finished the stage 46'49" behind the winner. Hampsten's 7-Eleven team, meanwhile, had a man waiting at the summit with a musette full of skiing gear so that their rider would survive the way down. Erik Breukink sailed past him as he stopped to put it on but Hampsten, the only rider sufficiently protected from the element to ride at high speed without crashing due to shivering so much, was able to catch him up and took a good second place.

The weather had not improved the following day, which although organisers decided to drop the Stelvio Pass and shorten the stage to 83km left the riders in foul moods. Stage 16 was no better and included a climb up the 2,424m Timmelsjoch in Austria (known to the Italians as the Passo del Rombo). This time, however, the organisers would not shorten the stage, a decision that inspired two rider protests as the rain turned to snow on the way up the mountain. In the end, it was Stage 18, an 18km mountain time trial, that decided the race: Breukink was the better time trialer (he'd become Dutch National Champion nine years later), but Hampsten was by far the better climber - and since the stage climbed almost 1,000m at an average gradient of around 8.5%, he had a massive advantage. When he started the stage, he was 42" ahead of Breukink in the General Classification; then he finished the stage more than a minute ahead of his rival. His lead now all but insurmountable, he led the race to the end and finished with a lead of 1'43" - the first American and non-European to have won since the race began.

The 1993 Giro covered 3,703km in 22 stages. Miguel Indurain, who led the race in the last eight stages, won overall for a second and final time after facing down strong, repeated attacks from the Latvian Piotr Ugrumov.

Giampaolo Cheula

Giampaolo Cheula
It's not at all uncommon for mountain bikers to defect to road cycling, but the exchange tends to be one-way with few road cyclists moving into mountain biking. One of those that did is the Italian Giampaolo Cheula, who was born in Premosello-Chiovenda on this day in 1979. Having turned professional with Mapei-QuickStep in 2001, Cheula won some good results in his first couple seasons, then switched to Vini Caldirola and raced in the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana. He moved on to the British Barloworld squad in 2005, remaining with them for five seasons, picking up more good results and riding in two editions of the Tour de France and another Giro, then went to Footon-Servetto in 2010 and remained with them after the transformation into Geox-TMC and eventual demise in 2011.

Then, at the start of 2012, he announced that he would be changing to fat tyres and from that point onwards would be a mountain biker. "I am aware that the only common denominator between road and mountain biking are the two wheels, and are also aware that I worked so hard," he explained. "But the idea of starting from scratch appeals to me. I'm curious to see how I will adapt to the new discipline - and one thing's for sure, I'll put in the same effort and the same professionalism that I did for all those years on the road."


Cédric Gracia, born in Pau on this day in 1978, began cycle racing as a BMX rider when he was six years old. However, his first taste of professional sport would be as a freestyle skier and he didn't return to cycling until 2001 with the Volvo-Cannondale mountain biking team, initially and enjoying considerable success as a downhiller (twice taking silver at the World Championships) and, once the disciplines had been invented, 4X and Freeride. In 2010 he started his own team, the CG Racing Brigade, and for that year was its only member (which must surely be unique in cycling, as well as pushing the definition of the term "team" somewhat); it's since swelled in numbers with the addition of Colombian National Champion Marcelo Guttierez. Gracia's reputation is so great that the two riders were among the very few other than those in the Santa Cruz Syndicate to be supplied with the firm's factory V10 carbon fibre bikes.

Other cyclists born on this day: Wim Stroetinga (Netherlands, 1985); Matthew Crampton (Great Britain, 1986); Lars Wahlqvist (Sweden, 1964); Mark Noble (Great Britain, 1963); Per Lyngemark (Denmark, 1941, died 2010); Valery Chaplygin (USSR, 1952); Didier Garcia (France, 1964); Beat Wabel (Switzerland, 1967); Gerrie Slot (Netherlands, 1954); Gabriel Cano (Mexico, 1965); Oleg Logvin (USSR, 1959); Julio Illescas (Guatemala, 1962).

Daily Cycling Facts 22.05.2014

Eugeni Berzin

The Giro d'Italia has ended on this day once - in 1913 (when it had started on the 6th of May) - and started once, in 1994. 1994 covered 3,739km in 22 stages and was won for the first time by a Russian, Eugeni Berzin. Berzin had won Liège-Bastogne-Liège earlier that year and was immediately singled out as a future great but never quite got there. He was second in the Giro in 1995 and won Stage 21, then won Stage 18 at the Giro, Stage 8 and wore the yellow jersey at the Tour de France in 2006, then vanished from the pages of cycling history.

Christian Vande Velde
Also spelled van de Velde, van der Velde, Vandevelde and in assorted other ways with varying capital position, Christian Vande Velde was born in Lemont, Illinois on this day in 1976. Now one of the peloton's elder statesmen, he turned professional with US Postal in 1998 and rode as a domestique for Lance Armstrong but very rapidly emerged as a super-domestique capable of winning races for himself.

Christian Vande Velde, pictured in 2009

His ability was allowed to flourish after a move to CSC in 2005 from Liberty-Seguros with whom he'd spent a year - though still a domestique (for Carlos Sastre and the young Frank Schleck), the team permitted him to take shots at glory for himself as was the case at the Eneco Tour that year when he led a breakaway during Stage 4 and drove it to a six second lead (unfortunately, it would ultimately fail - course officials somehow managed to direct the peloton along the wrong route and the break was ordered to stop and wait until they were brought back to the right road, reducing their advantage to four minutes). It was at the Tour de France in 2006 that he revealed himself to be one of the strongest climbers in the peloton, forcing the peloton up to such a high rate during Stage 16 that Floyd Landis - whose results would later be disqualified after he was found guilty of doping - cracked under pressure from Sastre and Schleck. Michael Rasmussen (who would be kicked out of the Tour the next year after failing to inform doping control of his whereabouts and later got a two-year ban as a result) won the stage, but the very next day Vande Velde worked with his team mate Jens Voigt and T-Mobile's Matthias Kessler and Serhiy Honchar to once again pile on the pressure as the peloton climbed to Morzine - this time, Sastre won.

Vande Velde remained with CSC until the end of 2007, riding another Tour and Vuelta a Espana with them, then received a new contract with Slipstream-Chipotle for 2008: the team that realised he had General Classification potential. No longer a domestique, he fought hard at the Tour that year and finished in fifth place overall, later upgraded to fourth following the disqualification and suspension of Bernhard Kohl who tested poitive for EPO variant CERA. In 2009, he was eighth.

The next two years, which might have brought his Grand Tour victory, were marked by bad luck. He was forced to abandon the Giro during Stage 3 following a crash (the same had happened, on the same stage, in 2009); then skidded on a patch of oil left by a film crew's motorbike and broke two ribs at the Tour. Still racing with the same team - by then renamed Garmin-Cervélo and now Garim-Barracuda - Vande Velde's 2011 results, including 17th at the Tour, suggest that while his best years may be gone he remains a very capable rider, as was seen in the 2012 Giro when he protected Ryder Hesjedal through the mountains and was thus instrumental in the first ever victory by a Canadian rider.

Vande Velde's early career coincided with that of Lance Armstrong, the two men having been team mates at US Postal from 1998 to 2004. In May 2012 news broke that USADA were conducting a large-scale investigation into doping at the team during that period, an investigation that rapidly led to Armstrong being stripped of his seven Tour de France victories. Perhaps accidentally, perhaps due to a subconscious decision  that it was better to come clean before more names were named, Jonathan Vaughters - manager of Garmin-Sharp, the team for which Vandevelde had ridden since 2008, who had admitted a month earlier that he had doped during his own cycling career - stated online in September that Vande Velde and two other riders on the team (David Zabriskie and Tom Danielson) all had what he termed "a past." In Vande Velde's case, this amounted to using a drug that boosted red blood cell production, later confirmed in the affidavit he provided to USADA to have been EPO. Less than a month later, USADA announced that Vande Velde was to be banned from competition for six months and stripped of all results gained between the 4th of June 2004 and the 30th of April 2006, a decision that the rider publicly accepted. The following day, he released a statement in which he said: "I’m very sorry for the mistakes I made in my past and I know that forgiveness is a lot to ask for. I know that I have to earn it and I will try, every day, to deserve it – as I have, every day, since making the choice to compete clean. I will never give up on this sport, and I will never stop fighting for its future."
.

Jean-Christophe Péraud, born in Toulouse in this day in 1977, was a mountain biker who won a cross-country silver medal for France in the 2008 Olympics. One year later he surprised the cycling world by winning the National Time Trial Championship and suddenly turned out to be a first-rate road cyclist - in 2010, he took ninth place at Paris-Nice, then fourth in the Tour of the Basque Country; and a year later he was second at the Tour Méditerranéen, sixth at both Paris-Nice and the Critérium International and ninth at the Tour de France.

Raymond Martin, born in Saint-Pierre-du-Regard on this day in 1949, won the French National Amateur Championship in 1972, came third overall and won the King of the Mountains at the 1980 Tour de France and then eighth overall at the Tour in 1982.

Maurice Bardonneau was born on this day in Saint-Maurice, France in 1885. In 1906, he was World Stayer (ie motorpaced) Champion and won Stage 1 at Paris-Brussels and he would win bronze medals at the National Stayers Championships in 1907 and 1910 before retiring. Other than that he died at Issy-les-Moulineaux on the 3rd of July 1958, virtually nothing else is known about him.

Now retired, Andrus Aug won a bronze medal twice and silver once in the Estonian National Championships and then had a few years in which he performed well in stage races - including the 2001 Tour du Maroc when he won five stages. Born in Jõgeva on this day in 1972, he retired from professional racing at the end of the 2007 season but continued to ride in amateur events through 2008.

Sherwood CC, a cycling club based in Nottingham, was formed on this day in 1931. Among the club's many past members are Frank Beale, who represented England in the Manx International of 1950, and John Kettell, a National Junior Champion in the 1970s.

Other cyclists born on this day: Vladimír Vondráček (Czechoslovakia, 1949); Hussain Eslami (Iran, 1969); Douglas Lamb (Belize, 1968); Mario Contreras (El Salvador, 1987); Frank Francken (Belgium, 1964); Győző Török (Hungary, 1935); Helle Sørensen (Denmark, 1963); Karl Gulbrandsen (Norway, 1892, died 1973); Atilio François (Uruguay, 1922, died 1997); José Manuel Lasa (Spain, 1940); Dan Frost (Denmark, 1961); Roger Thull (Luxembourg, 1939); Ahad Kazemi Sarai (Iran, 1975); Tom Bamford (New Zealand, 1963); María Belén Dutto (Argentina, 1987); Márcio May (Brazil, 1972).