[Podcast] The July Cycling Wrap
It’s time for the second monthly Cyclry wrap up. And it’s only been four months since the last one. Look, there hasn’t been much going on, ok?
Cycling has been booming though. Your dad’s gone and bought a Specialized. Hey… that would’ve been a good name for this podcast if we hadn’t already called it Cycling Was Only Good in the 1980s.
Let’s talk racing.
Racing
There’s a travel ban preventing Americans from leaving their country. That’s good news for the rest of the world, but it means the Yankee Doodle Dandies in the peloton are having trouble rejoining their European clubmates. If you’re a Belgian pro cyclist who doesn’t to be knocked off by someone who’ll use the word radical in his Instagram post about the crash, that’s probably not too upsetting.
But the good news for the Americans is that even the worst Americans wouldn’t have ridden the races this month, so there’s still time for them to smuggle themselves across the border for the season’s proper start.
And yes, I mentioned racing. Cycling resumed in July after its long hiatus – we had three races: Dookola Mazowsza, the Sibiu Tour, and the Tour of Burgos.
The Dookola Mazowsza — I’m pronouncing it correctly, so don’t listen to any Polish trolls saying I’m getting it wrong — restarted the racing season and used its spot in the limelight to… Well, to fail to actually have a bike race. The first stage was abandoned after a non-race motorcycle entered the course and crashed. Emergency vehicles couldn’t deal with the issue without stopping the race from coming through, and no diversion could be organized. So the first stage of the first race back was cancelled 30km before its finish. Welcome to 2020. This was the most publicity the race has ever gotten. There are people who’ve ridden this one who still don’t even know it exists. After that eventful start, not much else happened. Still, it’s worth a mention.
The Sibiu Tour was the first real race back. Kind of. You’ve probably never heard of anybody riding it apart from Davide Rebellin. He actually won it back in 2013, and we’d kind of assumed he’d already retired until he showed up on the start ramp for the prologue. It’s a fun little race, with a varied parcours taking in a variety of terrain in the immediate regions around the city. Ideal inspiration for those of us with limited riding space due to lockdown. Yeah, I’m talking about you, Melbourne.
It started with a technical 2.5km prologue through Sibiu’s cobbled streets, and Nikodemus Holler won it with a little assistance from the weather. After he’d set a strong time early in the day, floods of Rain came down and made most of the day just about staying upright for the majority of starters.
A flat stage followed, and then there was a Summit finish and a mountain time-trial, and finally a complicated point-to-point race that made even the most convoluted British Premier Calendar circuits looks positively simple.
The final time gap went down to eight minutes between Gregor Muhlberger in 1st and Filippo Fiorelli in 10th, not bad for a race that only lasted three days.
And finally, there was the Tour of Burgos. But that’s actually only just started at the time of recording. I would like to preemptively congratulate Remco Evenepoel on his victory though.
WorldTour racing resumes next month, with the Tour de France being the cherry on top on the 29th. Are you going to any of those races? We are not. Travel ban, remember. If you go, send us some pictures or a write up. Or just get up to some mischief backstage. We started the year strong out in Australia, but it’s looking like the rest of the season is going to miss out on our in-person troublemaking, so we’ll have to do it vicariously through you.
Gear Corner
The biggest cycling tech news of the month, and probably the year, is that Garmin went down. Initially, it just looked like servers were down. But as the downtime continued, it eventually came out that it was a ransom attack conducted by hackers who were blackmailing Garmin for $10M. We still don’t actually know if they paid, although Garmin are a public company so we should get the answer in their next quarterly report.
The outage itself wasn’t directly caused by hackers, but instead by Garmin pulling the plug on all its services in a scramble to protect their users data. After four long days, it came back… mostly.
It wasn’t actually too inconvenient for cyclists, since you can still plug your Garmin in to sync your data like it’s the old days, but it’s terrible for their boat and aeroplane technologies. And it’s an open door for Garmin’s rivals to finally carve out some of that market space. We knew it’d take something monumental to knock them off their perch, but we wouldn’t have guessed it’d be some nerd in his bedroom.
And speaking of bike computers, We published everything you need to know about the Hammerhead Karoo 2, rather misleadingly including hints at a Release Date and Price in the title.
While it’s an in-depth overview of the elusive device, some of the facts in that article are incorrect. Trust me, I know a guy. But it’s still the most comprehensive guide on the internet right now, so if that Garmin downtime has you thinking about making the switch to something more modern and secure, this is where you’re going to find the most information. For about another week, at least. Hey, I said I know a guy.
We also reviewed the HR2VP app. Like the PowerTap PowerCal, it gives you live power data from a heart rate monitor, and its accurate enough to be comparable to a much more expensive hardware-based power meter. Unlike the PowerCal, it’s an app, so you can connect any heart rate monitor you own and turn it into a power meter. The developers have added extra features that push it above and beyond the PowerCal too, although there are a few small annoyances with the app-based approach. It’s definitely worth checking out though, especially as a quick and easy way to get on Zwift on almost any equipment you’ve got lying around.
Mavic & Vittoria are both under new ownership. Um. Look for them starting to do terminally uncool ebike stuff in the future, I guess.
Has it been long enough since we mentioned Garmin? They launched their new Edge 1030+ and Edge 130+ head units. The 130+ is the biggest upgrade on its predecessor, packing a device that was previously very basic with a huge number of new features. Garmin also launched a range of solar smartwatches that apparently have incredibly long battery lives. We’ve got the scoop on a new device that’s going to make cycling with a smartwatch much less stupid, but we’re not allowed to share it yet.
Thanks for listening
And that’s a wrap. Keep sending us your emails, apart from those weird ones about Covid-19 being a scamdemic.
I have absolutely no idea what we’ve published recently that’s caused us to get suddenly so many emails written in Spanish too. None of us speak Spanish here, so we don’t know what you’re trying to tell us, but keep them coming. I like to print them out for the visceral thrill of immediately throwing them into the recycling bin. Hey, we still haven’t forgiven you for the Anglo-Spanish War.
What, it was a history joke. It’s not racist.