VideoNEW
Podcasts
Blogs
Vélo Files: Cam’s Grand Tourismo
Accepting the inevitable wrath that comes with critiquing the hometown team, as Orica-GreenEDGE frantically search for an Australian who can one day challenge for a Grand Tour podium, Anthony Tan wonders whether too much pressure is being placed on the young shoulders of Cameron Meyer, and suggests a solution that may require a degree of humility.
Cameron Meyer is easy to like and hard to hate.
In fact, he’s hard to dislike even just a little. Courteous to all; exceptionally diligent with an incredible work ethic; clearly talented but never big-notes himself or his team; and yes, rides for Orica-GreenEDGE but seems to go out of his way to make sure he’s not perceived to be ‘one of the boys’.
Vélo Files: Game of Numbers
Get used to it – cycling is in the Era of the Power Meter. The sport is now, more than ever, a numbers game. And, according to one performance expert, numbers don’t lie, writes Anthony Tan.
The way things work nowadays, I’m spending less and less time out in the field covering sporting events and an increasing amount doing what many of you do in your spare time, which is watch said events live and couch-side, with preferred communication device at arm’s length.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Living out of a suitcase for more than two hundred days a year wears thin after a certain while, though it took me five masochistic years to realise it.
Vélo Files: Dauphiné Faux Pas?
If the peloton of the 65th Critérium du Dauphiné kept their wits about them last Sunday, they would’ve never let a guy like David Veilleux get away with so much. They won’t again – Anthony Tan is sure of it.
I have what it takes. The opportunity will arise one day.Is David Veilleux is the product of more than a decade’s over-reliance on race radios? Or do we attribute it to conservatism by the bigger teams, who have bigger fish to fry in July? Or did he simply get lucky?
In case you missed him – just like most of the Critérium du Dauphiné peloton did last Sunday – the 25-year-old Europcar rider, along with three others whose names you’d probably never heard before, broke away three kilometres into the opening stage of the week-long race that, along with the Tour de Suisse, serves as the final litmus test before The Big Daddy, a.k.a. Le Tour de France.
Vélo Files: Old Dogs, Old Tricks
We didn’t need further proof but recent events involving Danilo Di Luca and Lance Armstrong attest that old habits die hard. Anthony Tan urges us to remove the rose-tinted spectacles in favour of some hard-core realism.
The situational ethics of cycling fans, participants and the media alike is at best naive and at worst disingenuous.After Cadel Evans became the first from this land Down Under to podium in all three Grand Tours, a genuinely historic moment in Australian cycling history, my colleague Mike Tomalaris lamented about the lack of coverage within mainstream media circles.
Perhaps Eric, a Cycling Central reader, had the answer, delivering a blunt assessment of how things stand under a news story published Wednesday, ‘Nike pares back Livestrong involvement’.
Vélo Files: And Then There Were Three
One need only cast their minds back eleven years ago to support the overused TV commentator’s phrase that ‘anything can happen’. But as Anthony Tan writes, for the podium to be redefined four days from the finish, logic, caution and reason must be thrown out the back door.
The most interest in terms of racing is going to be amongst the fourth to tenth players. They’ll be the ones squabbling over the seconds, chasing each other down and one of those moves might just be the catalyst that Nibali is waiting for to show just how superior he is.Before the final time trial and the arguably the two most difficult mountain stages in this year’s Giro d’Italia, it seems the canny Scotsman reckons the podium is just about set in stone, with the scrap for minor placings where he predicts most change.
It’s a big call. Because maglia rosa Vincenzo Nibali needs to have just one bad day in the Dolomites and he could lose five minutes. Or ten. Or fifteen.
The latest on cycling central
Opinion
