Author: Harold Dalton

For all his success on the bike, Chris Froome isn’t the most popular rider with European cycling fans. Or his own team, for that matter, but that’s a different story. When fans booed him on today’s Route d’Occitanie stage, he reacted as most of us would: by making a rude gesture and yelling something obscene in French. Fun enough for all involved. He yelled “vas chier connard,” for what it’s worth. That means “fuck you, asshole.” Cycling’s the most magnificent sport in the world partly because of the incredible access you get to it. You can ride the same roads…

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…

Ah, the 2006 Tour of Britain. We don’t remember much about it apart from meeting a friend in a place called Penistone. He’s still a friend! And, if it really exists, Penistone is still a place. SweetSpot gave us a press pass for the Tour of Britain that year. It was our first year with as official press at the event (though we’ve been press ever since, even upsetting Mark Cavendish in 2011), and we mostly just drove around the country racing the peloton in a Fiat. This was pre-GPS, so we had to remember which motorway exits we were…

In the latest news from the cycling-free pandemic hellworld we live in, Rochester Cyclocross is now canceled. Because why not? We’re running out of races to cancel. Optimistically, the race’s executive director says, “Hopefully the Covid-19 pandemic will be well behind us all in 2021 and we can get back to racing!” Um. Hopefully. Let’s wait until the numbers stop going up before we allow ourselves the tiniest bit of hope though. The move to cancel the race is a very sensible one and the organizers must be respected for taking such a difficult step when a single year’s cancelation…

Oliver Naesen: “Happy to race Strade Bianche for the first time” I am very happy to race Stade Bianche for the first time. This is the perfect opportunity. Usually the race takes place the day before Paris-Nice and I just watch it on TV. I have incredible memories of the 2018 edition, when Tiejs Benoot won ahead of Romain Bardet. Sitting in front of my TV, I was super excited, and I would have liked to have been in the race. I’m happy with the way I was able to handle this long break. I was lucky, I was able…

It’s a(nother) new name for Team INEOS. From the moment the Tour kicks off on August 29, they’ll have a new name – INEOS Grenadiers – in order to build up hype for… well, take a second to guess the product. Is it gin? Nope! Is it Buckingham Palace? Nope! It’s… a 4×4 car. A 4×4 car literally named after a pub in London. “Over a friendly pint at the Grenadier pub in London, car enthusiast and experienced adventurer Jim Ratcliffe, INEOS Chairman, identified a gap in the market for a stripped-back, utilitarian 4×4.” Good luck dodging the INEOS Grenadier…

GCN Race Pass is here, finally confirming GCN’s position as the ultimate Cycling.TV spinoff. It brings live and on-demand cycling racing coverage for a monthly or annual subscription. GCN have been broadcasting more racing lately, so maybe the potential for them introducing a subscription service seemed inevitable. It did seem inevitable to us, although we were one of the people who applied for the job of making it happen. Broadcasting racing is one of those things that walks a near-impossible tightrope balancing reliability, cost, and quantity, but GCN has a strong backing since being brought into the Discovery Channel group…

For Adorno & Horkheimer, the homogeneity of cultural production in late capitalism ripples with social effects. As with Marx’s analysis, this redrawing of the terms of production produces detachment, in turn producing a social apathy compatible with reproducing the status quo, and permitting the atrocities of liberal capitalism and fascism. In the pursuit of capital and the production of mass culture, humanity strides toward the impersonal, facilitating the exploitations, inequalities, and violences that accompany the social morality of modernity. As Marx analyzed a means of production in an early state of industrial transformation (Benjamin, p. 1051), so does the Frankfurt…