Author: Harold Dalton

Ask anybody to name their top five favorite climbers, and you’re sure to get a thoughtful list of their favorites. The man on the street will give a considered response featuring terms like “grimpeur,” “scalatore,” and “Froomey, mate, innit.” But one thing these lists will all have in common is that they’ll include Marco Pantani. The diminutive climber is widely considered one of the greatest climbers ever to grace the sport, with a distinctive riding style, a predilection for all-out gung-ho attacks whenever the road went uphill, and a cultivated styling as Il Pirata. And also a tragic story of…

Happy Fourth of July to the Americans! Cycling is celebrating America’s contributions to the sport (?!) in a variety of ways, all of which largely amount to “please stay home and don’t bother racing.” The USA’s commitment to making its stock market line go up has had the unforeseen consequence of also making another line go up: COVID-19 cases. By, er, quite a lot actually. And now a travel ban is in place across large parts of Europe, preventing US cyclists from returning to the continent for racing. One of our favorite interviewees from the old days, Larry Warbasse, says…

No free lunch for us: Sea Otter is officially canceled. The event was due to be held in April, and was postponed until October due to COVID-19 kicking everyone’s ass. The celebration of cycling is traditionally the site of racing, product launches, and us having to talk to people who have their names on a lanyard around their necks. Following the untimely demise of our favorite Las Vegas sleepless hell, Interbike, Sea Otter has rapidly become the biggest event on the US calendar. So big, in fact, that it’s expanded to Europe, Canada, and Australia. And now it’s reached the…

Those comments? That the shooting of Rayshard Brooks by police officers was justified. Hmm. Jim Cummins has now been removed from his made-up job position as Chief Gravel Officer. And beyond just firing a dude with the job title equivalent of a baseball cap that says Big Boy on it, Life Time are moving to change the name of the Dirty Kanza event out of respect for the Kaw Nation and its people. This was an issue raised earlier in the year, and Cummins did the equivalent of grabbing his ball sack and sneering in a press statement that essentially…

Last year, we reviewed the PowerTap PowerCal, and it inexplicably became one of our most popular articles. Or maybe not inexplicably – people are looking for a cheap and easy way to access Zwift, a platform that normally comes with quite a technological overhead. The bad news is that the PowerCal is no longer available for sale. But now there’s an even easier option: HR2VP turns any heart rate monitor into a power meter using a similar algorithm to that of PowerTap (or actually CycleOps, since they developed it). And, in fact, it takes the concept one step further, which…

Cycling’s current favorite soap opera is over. GreenEDGE Cycling has confirmed that they will not be working with the Manuela Fundación after all. The drama began last Friday, when GreenEDGE, currently the Mitchelton-Scott team, announced the Manuela Fundación as their new lead sponsor for the remainder of 2020 and the entirety of the 2021 season. But disagreements immediately occurred in public. Francisco Huertas believed he’d bought the entire team, rather than sponsoring it, and set out his aim to make it the top Spanish team in the peloton. Team owner Gerry Ryan disagreed. And today they pulled the plug. Wonder…

Everesting is the new Hour Record. Yeah, right. But it has become hotly contested in the Covid-19 era. Records are falling left, right, and center. Actually, if there’s a direction the records are falling, it’s up. Everesting is the act of climbing the height of Everest in a single ride. That’s 8,848 meters. And since we can’t ride up Everest, there’s a lot of prep work in finding the right climb to focus on, completing endless (editor’s note: not actually endless) repetitions to reach the fabled height. Everyone is at it. Your club mates are climbing Hardknott Pass thirty times.…

This essay is Part Five 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…