Author: Harold Dalton

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…

In 2008, the Amaury Sport Oganisation announced that the Astana team wouldn’t be competing in any of its races that year. This was in part due to Astana’s multiple doping infractions, and even more to do with ASO demonstrating its autonomy to run its own races, in defiance of the UCI. The Astana team of 2008 wasn’t exactly the same as the Astana team of 2007. Johan Bruyneel had moved over, bringing with him his US Postal/Discovery staff and riders. That wasn’t a fact that would do much to endear the team to race organizers or fans. And although the…

Can we say “blue balls” here? Apologies for making you read it twice if we can’t. The UCI 2.2 Dookola Mazowsza was the first real race back after the entire sport, and the world, came to an abrupt halt earlier this year. But stage one also came to its own abrupt halt, called off with 30km remaining. Thankfully (?!), Covid-19 was not the cause. A non-race motorcycle entered the course at an intersection, crashing before the peloton arrived. Police and firefighters rushed to the scene, and the riders came to a halt, looked confused, then headed back to their hotels…

With the news that a Jan Ullrich documentary might be in the works, confidentially told to us by someone you’d never believe we’d have ever worked with, we’re revisiting one of Derailed’s worst ever recurring features: Script Extracts. We can’t remember where the inspiration originally came from, but we’d often share silly scenarios featuring pro cyclists, written up as though they were part of movie scripts. Probably because we were writing for TV at the time. That’s hard to tell from this output though. Jan Ullrich used to get fat over the winter. For some reason we decided to make…

The world’s leading gravel event, Dirty Kanza, has become embattled of late. First there were calls to change its name, then COVID-19 forced a reschedule. After a comparatively quiet period, its founder was fired for racially-charged comments, and the question of changing the event’s name to something more culturally sensitive resurfaced in the aftermath. And now it’s canceled. You can throw a dart blindfolded at a dartboard to decide which of those factors it was. Or we can just tell you. It was… *drumroll* COVID-19! The continuing resurgence of COVID-19 in the US has laid waste to the organizers’ plans…

Sticker albums. Got, got, need. Isn’t it. Hmm. Jumpers for goalposts. Panini’s Tour de France sticker album will return this year. Sticker albums were a staple when we were growing up, collecting pictures of footballers we’d never heard of. We would’ve killed for a Tour de France version. Maybe. We were only collecting them because everyone else was, so it would’ve been a lonely existence being the only kid on the playground asking if anybody needed Evgeni Berzin. Sticker albums are still great fun though. We completed the 2018 World Cup one in the May of that year, running into…