Author: Harold Dalton

It’s the Towards Zero Race Torquay! Kind of looks like Race Towards Zero in the website hero, which is pretty confusing. Come to think of it, there’s something even stranger about that pic. The Race Torquay is a new addtion under the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race umbrella. It’s two UCI 1.1 circuit races, one for men and one for women (ugh, don’t get us started), on a breathtakingly beautiful 16km circuit in South Australia. Towards Zero is actually a regional vision zero commitment to stop road deaths. We looked it up. So ignore the joke we made about…

Sky’s famously been keeping the specifics of its world-beating equipment a secret, but we’ve uncovered some details and we’re not afraid to break the embargo! In your face, Brailsford. Because caliper brakes aren’t aerodynamic, the brakes have been removed altogether from the bike. Instead, the back wheel has been designed to constantly rub against the frame in order to allow the rider to naturally slow down. After consulting leading British road safety experts, Sky have added speed camera detectors to every bike. In order to save pointless weight from shoes and pedals, riders’ ankles will be tie-wrapped to their cranks. Instead of skinsuits, riders…

Striking the Sun was a collaborative novel and audiobook project. This chapter took place around three-quarters of the way through the book. There’s a floral chatter like the sound of birdsong in the morning before you’re fully awake. Children’s voices form chords in the air, notes of curiosity and of excitement and also, somewhere in there, of boredom. The range of adult voices is more or less the same. From here it’s hard to tell the specifics of any one conversation, each an instrument in a vast orchestra. They’re stood two deep along this straight, though most of that is…

James Moore was cycling’s first superstar, way back in 1868. This placed him among other Victorian celebrities, such as air balloonists, phantasmagorists, burlesque dancers, and just Egypt as a concept. Moore was not the glowing star of a small sport, either. For Moore’s contemporaries, the prize money for winning races tallied up to what would amount to about six months worth of wages for the average worker, and huge crowds gathered at the races to spectate. James Moore wasn’t the cycling’s first superstar only because he arrived in the sport’s infancy. But it probably helped: history records his tale with…

This essay is Part One of the Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies series. The introduction that follows below is the same for all five essays. One of my great academic mentors, who would almost certainly prefer to remain unnamed in this article, had a fundamental belief in common with me: that sports matter. But while we certainly cycled along the same roads, both metaphorically and literally, it became clear that we were approaching a similar topic from slightly different directions. Over five weeks in 2016, we explored these directions, with research conducted at Tufts and MIT. Here follows…

Jeremy Powers isn’t a rider I’ve ever really worked with. He dialed in as a guest pundit on our UCI Cross World Cup coverage a couple of times, I think, but that’s it. Last year he was a pundit again on Global Cycling Network Racing’s cyclo-cross coverage, interviewed during the otherwise interminable gap between the women’s and the men’s races. My good friend and former colleague Marty MacDonald asked him what his favorite cross race was. Rather than the sands of Koksijde or maybe the bohemian cool of Plzen, Powers bemused Marty with his answer: “GP Gloucester.” I get it…

The 2020 cycling season kicked off this weekend with the Lexus of Blackburn Bay Crits in Geelong, Victoria. Yes, 2020. Yes, we remember being there for the 2015 edition. Yes, it felt recent enough that it was in our header image until we redesigned the site last month. And yes, it’s in Australia. Which is on fire. This is a sport that doesn’t get stopped by snow or active volcanoes, but still. Even if not for the sake of your lungs, take a break from the cycling out of respect for the half billion animals that’ve just died. Alright, we’ll…

The last one is NSFW, unless you work in a penis factory. Images sent to us by Zoom Gordo back in like 2009 or something. Wonder if he still has his blog? Used to be quite good.