Author: Harold Dalton

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…

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…