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post tour crits

Podium Cafe, for Cycling fans

The Shadow Of The Tour: The Post-Tour Critérium Circuit

By Feargal McKay  @fmk_RoI on Aug 16, 2011, 7:42am EDT 32

post tour crits

This started festering on my desktop sometime over the winter, when I realised that a lot of the cycling books I'd read had made passing reference to the critérium circuit but I'd never really got around to understanding that circuit very well. I had the usual view: crits were a good night out but hardly competitive. But did that mean they weren't important? So I started putting together notes and quotes. Finally I thought I'd better get it off my puter as it just kept growing. So here it is. Apps for the length. Print it and read bits during the duller parts of the Vuelta. If nothing else, it's food for thought.

Behind the Tour de France there used to be a Shadow Tour. One that took place in the weeks after the Tour itself ended but received only a fraction of the Tour's coverage. The post-Tour critérium circuit.

Riders tore around France in the Tour in July and then they tore around France, Belgium and the Netherlands again in August - with occasional trips to the fringe countries, if the money was inviting enough - clocking up as many critériums as they could. Here one day, there the next, speeding (yes, in that sense too) from this village to that, driving overnight and through the day. And at the end of each drive a critérium to be raced. In many ways, this Shadow Tour demanded a lot more of its participants than the Tour de France itself did.

Walsh makes this observation about the critérium circuit:

"The critérium circuit, particularly in France, where distances are so great, encourages excess. Riders will forget the normal rules in the pursuit of money."

Then as now, riders piled into the critérium circuit because the money available on it made it worthwhile. However, a difference between then and now was in the disparity between a rider's basic wage - the salary paid to him by his team - and the amount he earned independently, usually through appearance fees negotiated by his agent. For many riders, the fees paid to ride critériums, taken collectively over the course of a season, matched - often exceeded - their basic pay. And, for most of the riders in the peloton , that made the difference between a year in which, financially speaking, they were just getting by and a year in which they had enough cash left over to put something aside for their post-cycling future.

While purses in official races are shared among team personnel - riders, mechanics and soigneurs alike - on the critérium circuit it is every man for himself. Appearance fees and prizes won go into the pocket of the rider. Well, after the usual deduction by the rider's agent and the travel and accommodation costs, which come out of the rider's own pocket. Back in the old days, the taxman didn't always get his cut, the races being cash in hand. Actually, back then, the taxman probably took more overall interest in who raced what critériums than most cycling journalists, so that he could try and claim his slice of the cake.

In the eighties, an average rider could expect to be paid between £500 and £1,000 (in eighties' money) to appear at a critérium. Kelly's fee, Walsh estimated, was about £2,000. Kelly wasn't even the top earner on the critérium circuit in those days. He was just a winner of the Tour's green jersey. Laurent Fignon and Bernard Hinault, Walsh figured, could expect £3,000, based on their status in France and the fact that they were Tour de France winners.

To put some perspective on those figures for you, consider two numbers offered by Benjo Maso in The Sweat of the Gods. There Maso reckoned Kelly's 1984 Super Prestige Pernod win was worth £3,500. His Paris Roubaix victory netted him £1,200. In just two post-Tour critériums Kelly could earn more than in both of those two competitions. And he wouldn't have to share it with the rest of his team.

Do the math and you'll quickly see that the number of races you could squeeze into your schedule could make a major impact on your annual earnings. It was the icing on the cake for a lot of riders. For some riders, it was the cake itself. And for others, it was their breakfast, dinner and tea. And this is what the critérium circuit had always been about.

Paul Howard, in his Jacques Anquetil biography, has Bernard Hinault's take on the critérium circuit in the seventies:

"In those days, when you won a Classic, you won hardly anything. When I won Liège-Bastogne-Liège, it was about six thousand francs to share with the team - only six hundred francs each. That's not much. But it helps your palmarès . If you can't win the Tour, you can always win the Classics which then helps with the critériums. And don't forget, base salaries were very small, More than half your income was from the critériums. If you're thinking about Pères Jacques ... if he raced ten critériums, he could buy a house."
"I missed out on a lot of money by not riding the 1963 Tour. A Tour rider is a celebrity in cycling and in the sixties he would be invited to some forty or so critériums after the Tour, and even an average rider could expect about £80 appearance money for each one, plus prizes and primes."

Brian Robinson told Paul Howard about his time in the peloton , in the fifties and sixties:

"The real earning power came from the series of contracts after the Tour. You'd be riding nearly every day for thirty days, getting as much as £80 nearly every day, so it was pretty good money. Unlike us, who just rode contracts after the Tour, the stars rode contracts all year round. So, there were those to fit in, and, speaking purely as a professional, he [Anquetil] would be busy enough without worrying too much about the one-day races."

Robinson told Les Woodland another story, which concerns Louison Bobet, the star of the fifties, the first man to knock-off three Tours back-to-back:

"Once, after the Tour finished, I had no contracts for seven days, so I had a week off and went to a training camp in Epernay, where Bobet liked to rest and build up again. There weren't many miles involved and I was told that if I sprinted for every kilometre sign for seven days, I would have the speed for the critériums. "I was steaming in the critérium and I'd taken every prime when Bobet came up to me and said, 'If you don't let me win, you won't get another contract.' He had so much control. He was Mr Cycling. I was getting £40 a critérium and he was getting £1,000. He was there at every race."

The key problem with the old critérium circuit was this: in order to unlock all the extra cash the circuit offered, you had to get yourself from race to race and then ride the race and put on a bit of show. The miles in between races were far greater than the miles raced. Those miles - more than the miles raced - made it a Shadow Tour.

At the Tour, as the seventies drew to a close, riders were beginning to get fed up with the ever increasing number of transfers - and the ever longer distances covered by them - in between Tour stages. They began to protest and force the organisers of the Tour to take their well-being into account. And yet, even for years after these protests, those same riders willingly put themselves through even greater torture each August in order to compete on the critérium circuit. Without complaint.

This was the excess side of the circuit that hooked Walsh's interest. A key issue Walsh had with the post-Tour critériums was how they impacted on Kelly's form at the Worlds. This point about form was something Walsh regularly came back to in his coverage of Kelly's career, that Kelly tired himself out in the month of August, chasing critériums, and consequently arrived at the Worlds never really having the form he should have had. Kelly himself, Walsh noted, had always complained that the post-Tour critérium circuit was poor preparation for the Worlds, and each year declared he would cut down the following year. Not that he ever did.

"It took me a while to work out why there had been so few French world champions in cycling history. Back then the world title was run at the end of August or the start of September, and not at the end of September as it is now. After a month travelling from one critérium to another, barely sleeping and knocking back a drink or two to keep everyone company, the French riders - who were in greater demand for the critériums than the foreigners - were worn out. After riding the critérium circuit I would be almost more tired than after the Tour, which is saying something."

That said, there were those who disagreed with this view. Freddy Maertens, for instance:

"In spite of how much some riders hate the critériums as a preparation for the World Championships I've never thought of them as being a disadvantage. I would always have a massage afterwards (on long journeys, my physio would always come with me). I never stayed behind too long discussing the race afterwards, I made sure I always got enough sleep and, most important of all, I always trained about one hundred fifty kilometres a day with the World Championship in mind."

Here I should acknowledge that, while I am looking only at the post-Tour critérium circuit, August was not the only month when riders raced these small local races. Kelly talked to Walsh of the post-Classics kermis season in Belgium. For Kelly, these races explained the lack of success for Belgian teams in the Tour de France in his own early days in the peloton , arguing that the Belgians took too much time off to ride kermis races when they should have been focussing on Tour preparation.

"I was still very tired [at the end of the Tour], but had recovered my fitness a little. If I could have rested then perhaps I would have felt fine in a few days, but I had to fulfil my contracts to ride in various events. This was the biggest drawback for a young rider trying to make a name for himself. He rides hard and well to make people notice him and thus gain contracts to ride. Having done this, he then has to work even harder in order to ensure that he stays in the public eye. If you begin to turn down contracts you rarely get a second opportunity to ride that particular event. "Thus, having slogged your guts out to get somewhere, you have to work even more desperately if you want to keep at the top and retain your reputation. So it was with me, and I had to go through with all the contracts, for to break them would not only have meant loss of money but also prestige and I would have been regarded as unreliable. This vicious cycle had me dragging myself around the critérium races at Milan, Turin, Sallanches in the French Alps, and then across to Lyon all within the space of a week after the Tour ended. And that was not all of them, for I then went to Belgium for a few days of races in different parts of the country, and then made a supreme effort to reach Nice in time for another event."

From Belgium to Nice is more than fifteen hundred kilometres, which Simpson drove "alone, exhausted." He had left himself twenty-six hours to get from one race to the other and arrived just as the Nice crit kicked off. He barely survived five klicks before retiring. The next crit on the itinerary was back the way he'd just come, in central France. He crashed out of the race. At that point, Simpson seemed to find sense, returned to Paris and retired to a hospital bed for a week.

You can see the how Walsh could decide there was a story in the post-Tour critérium circuit. A story he wanted to try and understand and share with his readers. So, somehow, he convinced Kelly to allow him tag along for a couple of days. And so, for three days in August 1984, mid-way through the second week of the circuit, David Walsh joined Sean Kelly and Kelly's wife Linda, along with Kelly's friend and domestique Ronny Onghena, as they went in search of critériums.

They started out on at nine o'clock on a Wednesday night, from Kelly's home in Vilvoorde, driving to a critérium in Chaumiel, the Bol d'Or des Monédières. Call it fourteen hundred kilometres of roads away. The critérium in Chaumiel was due off at two-thirty on the Thursday afternoon. So they had less than seventeen hours to get from A to B.

At six on the Thursday morning, having driven through the night, they stopped at a small hotel in Thulle, about forty kilometres away from the village of Chaumiel. In their nine hours on the road they'd had just one stop for fuel and coffee. In Thulle they slept until eleven-thirty and were on the road again before midday. Halfway to Chaumiel, they stopped for breakfast/lunch ("ham, salami, pork, gherkin, bread and mineral water").

The critérium itself was a hundred fifty kilometres, lapping a large circuit, probably about twenty kilometres long. Four hours of racing. Thirty-five riders made up the peloton . Among them was Laurent Fignon - the winner of that year's Tour - who himself had driven eleven hundred kilometres from a critérium in the Netherlands the night before.

As well as Kelly and Onghena, there was another of Jean De Gribaldy's boys at the Chaumiel critérium, their team-mate Eric Caritoux, who had been a surprise winner of the that year's Vuelta a España. Coming from Carpentras, a little further south than Chaumiel, Kelly suggested to Hinault and Fignon that it might be good if Caritoux won the race. It was agreed that, if Caritoux had the legs for it, they had no problems with such an arrangement. Caritoux duly showed that he had the legs and won the race.

By seven-thirty, having showered and attended to his post-race obligations, Kelly and company were back in their Citroën and on the road for Concarneau, in the south-west of Brittany. Another nine hours of driving. An hour or so into the drive, Kelly stopped for their evening meal.

Uncharacteristically, here Kelly deferred to the presence of his wife and a journalist, stopping at a slightly up-market restaurant. Not his usual choice, as Kelly later made abundantly clear to Walsh:

"I haven't eaten in a restaurant like this for a long time and it will be a long time before I am caught in one again. If you stop at one of the self-service places in the motorway you can see exactly what you are getting and have it eaten in half an hour. That means an extra hour's sleep somewhere further on in the journey."

For Kelly, the critérium circuit was no busman's holiday and he was strict in his diet: melon, pork chops, cheese, black coffee. Onghena could push the boat out a bit - De Gribaldy wasn't around to hide all the fun and fattening food from his charges - and enjoyed a desert of ice-cream and cream. That boy really knew how to have fun.

(This, it should be pointed out was the lap of luxury as far as riders at the other end of the scale were concerned. In Paul Kimmage's description of the critérium circuit, the lowly paid domestiques dined on "a bag of chips and a sausage roll bought from a chip van at the side of the road.")

What with all the waiting between courses, it was ten-thirty before Kelly and co were back on the road, the thick end of two hours after they'd stopped. You'd almost have to concede Kelly's point about the speed of eating at motorway self-service stations, even if they don't have linen napkins. Around one-thirty there was a brief stop to fuel up: diesel for the car, coffee for the passengers.

At four-thirty on the Friday morning they checked into a hotel near Rennes and slept until one-thirty in the afternoon. Breakfast - this time a self-service restaurant, practicality trumping Kelly's concern for his travelling companions - and they were back in the car, arriving in Concarneau at about five.

This was a late-evening critérium, ten o'clock. Fignon was there again. Another attraction was the little heralded Vincent Barteau, one of Fignon's Tour team-mates, and the man who had worn the yellow jersey of the Tour for eleven days the month before, an exploit engineered after Barteau's directeur sportif , Cyrille Guimard, sent him off on a long-distance escape that saw him gain twenty minutes on the day and gave him a seventeen minute cushion protecting his hard-earned maillot jaune .

The Concarneau critérium took place in the pouring rain. The race went to another team-mate of Fignon's, Pierre Henri Menthéour (brother of the more infamous Erwann). This time Walsh noted an argument between Fignon and the critérium organiser, before the start of the race. The organiser had wanted the winner of the Tour's maillot jaune to win his race. Fignon - for whatever reason - demurred.

Most critérium organisers wanted either the big star or the local star to win their race. But there are rules, even to the critérium circuit. Sometimes the outcome is agreed upon, sometimes a critérium is a free-for-all, sometimes the races are only loosely choreographed. Generally, everyone tries to make everyone else happy - race organisers, fans and riders alike. Everyone tries to keep the show on the road. Everyone understands that that is what a critérium is, a show.

Quite how fixed critériums are varies from report to report. The level of fixing obviously varies from locale to locale and from generation to generation, so there are no absolutes in this. The easiest thing to do is to say they were - and still are - all fixed, all the time. But then, it's also the easy option to say that everyone doped all the time. Just because it's easy to say doesn't make it right.

Most everyone though acknowledges that some form of fixing exists in most critériums on the continent. Here's Laurent Fignon, from We Were Young And Carefree :

"Let's not beat about the bush: the only reason critériums exist is to create a spectacle. The organisers pay the riders to take part. The racing follows well-established 'rules,' that have changed little in the past forty years. The best-known riders of the time have to be kept on show all the time. The public isn't fooled. They come for that and they like the way the racing is stimulated. It's not one hundred percent arranged in advance but the conventions stipulate that the two or three big names in the bunch contest the win at the end."

Conventions though are there to be disregarded. In 1987, as part of their preparation for the World Championships , the four continent-based Irish riders of the time - Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche, Martin Earley and Paul Kimmage - were back in Ireland for a series of three Kelloggs' city centre critériums, in Dublin, Wexford and Cork. The first race being in the capital and Roche being both the hometown kid and the winner of that year's Tour an attempt was made to arrange the race in his favour. Here's Roche himself:

"There was a meeting of the riders before the Dublin race. Sean proposed that, as I had just won the Tour de France and this was my first race back in my home town since the Tour, an agreement should be reached whereby I would win. In a similar situation on the continent, there would not have been any need to ask. Everyone would have understood that the guy back in his home town after winning the Tour would simply have to win. His fellow professionals would want it as much as the public. It is a kind of admission that the critériums are more spectacles than madly competitive races. That is the way we understand them and I am sure that is the way the public see them as well."

But apart from the Irish riders, Allan Peiper was the only other big rider in the field, the rest being made up of British-based professionals. And they didn't want to gift the win to Roche. They wanted him to pay for the privilege of winning in front of his own fans. A grand. Whether a deal was reached or not isn't clear, but the Irish riders felt that the British weren't playing by the rules and - even though Roche won the race - they weren't happy. And when the British riders excluded them from the fix for the other two races, they decided to give them a lesson in continental racing etiquette. Roche again:

"After that there was war. The English riders were furious. We were painted as the Irish mafia ripping off the poor British pros. They claimed that it had been agreed that one of their riders would win in Wexford. They said they had let me win in Dublin. We did not accept that there had been any agreement for Wexford since they had not discussed the race with us beforehand. Neither did we accept that they let me win in Dublin."
"As the Kelloggs' series progressed, there was rivalry between us UK-based pros and the continental guys. Some of this rivalry was influenced by the fact that the UK riders got a flat rate while the continental stars were paid much more in appearance money in order to persuade them to come over and race. So we had a race in which the UK riders, who made up the majority of the field, felt that they were the ones putting the show on and getting much less reward than the handful of continental stars."

The Kelloggs' series ended in 1987, when the Kelloggs' Tour of Britain took over, but by then it had caused something of a minor controversy in the staid world of British cycling:

"There was talk of race fixing and of riders buying victories and of race organisers fixing races so that certain riders won. In particular, there was a rumour that some riders were involved in fixing the result of Sport For Television events, which were the races that got the TV coverage and were, therefore, the races that were most important to team sponsors."

Those allegations surfaced toward the end of 1987. Nothing ever came from them. By the time they surfaced, Alan Rushton's Sport For Television company - which Pat McQuaid was involved with - had already moved on. The problem faded away and the British were able to get back to doing things their own way.

But no matter how firmly the outcome of a race is written, there are no guarantees in cycling. The best laid plans of Mycenaean men and all that. Sometimes the choreography goes just goes to pieces for no discernable reason. Here's a tale Erwann Menthéour tells in his doping confessional:

"Laurent Jalabert was making his show. He had just finished fourth in the Tour de France and he had the green jersey on his shoulders, with a win at Mende on July 14 [Bastille Day] as a bonus. Naturally the public wanted to see him in action. He broke away by himself, by agreement with the others, because the script of the critérium is written in advance. [...] That day though, nothing went the way it was planned. Jaja was supposed to drop back to us, and the bunch was riding as a group to get up to him, but his lead went up by a second a lap. Some riders started getting worried, and the complaints flew. He wasn't respecting the rules. In the end, a rider feigned a puncture so he could wait for him and calm him down a bit. But when he got up alongside him, Jaja told him: 'What are you talking about? I've been waiting for you for the last ten laps!'"

Failing to abide by the rules - the peloton 's rules - has consequences. Cycling is a small world, and it is easy for the many to bully the few. Here's a story from a critérium organiser, Ad Coenrads - the man behind the Acht van Chaam, one of the first post-Tour crits in the Netherlands - in which he makes a curious case for the honesty of the competition in his race:

"Of course some riders made some deals in the past. But sometimes it has gone wrong as well. In 1981, Roy Schuiten won when it was supposed to be the local hero, Johan van der Velde. But it was 'over and out' in the peloton for Schuiten after that."

In the actual racing then, the critériums that made up the Shadow Tour hardly compared to stages in the real Tour. But being fixed only means the outcome is known. Riders still have to get around the race. Kimmage:

"Although the race is organised this doesn't necessarily make it easier. It's not that easy to fool the crowd. Unless they see the stars whizzing by at sixty kilometres an hour they won't be happy. There is nothing false about the average lap speed, which rarely falls below fifty kilometres an hour. There is nothing false about the grimacing faces. It is just the result that is, well, 'doctored.'"
"Critériums were the principal way of cashing in on winning the green jersey. Those few weeks after a Tour de France are often greatly underestimated by the public. Even when the peloton is flying round the circuit at fifty kilometres an hour, you can still hear the cry, 'Lazy swines!' All I can say is just try staying out in front with a great storming pack chasing after you! "Another often heard cliché is that it is arranged beforehand who is going to win a critérium. Sometimes there is talk, I won't deny that, but if somebody tells someone else that he thinks he can win, he has to go out and prove it. With all the corners and bends, after which you always have to get going again, it is certainly not just a leisurely exhibition ride."

Let's pick up the thread of Walsh's trip with Kelly again. Back on the road after the Concarneau critérium, the Irish journalist learned another of the loosely-written rules of the critérium circuit. Kelly was unhappy with Onghena's performance in Concarneau. The Belgian had pulled out, blaming the wet conditions and his contact lens. But Kelly didn't hold with just turning up at critériums, showing your face and then buggering off. You had to sing for your supper. And - for Kelly - that meant that you didn't really have the choice of pulling a sickie, as the hard-man of the peloton explained to Onghena:

"You should have taken it easy for a couple of laps, pulled in on some quiet part of the circuit when the rain was at its worst and then rejoined the race when things improved. Not a sinner would have noticed."

A point that has to be remembered here is that Onghena was getting those critérium rides because of Kelly. And that meant that - as far as Kelly was concerned - Onghena's performances reflected on him too. Onghena was one of the peloton 's spear carriers, a guy who never got to win in his own right. But because he was Sean Kelly's spear carrier, he was well rewarded for his efforts. Between their first meeting at the Splendor squad in 1979 and the demise of the Kas sponsorship in 1988, Kelly looked out for Onghena, kept him on the roster year after year, and demanded that Onghena got his share of the critérium contracts.

"Many bike racers make a significant part of their money in the critériums and it is important that the very top riders make the critériums because without them, there will be no public. There were times when I needed the critériums more than I do now and in those days I was very glad of the money. Now I feel an obligation to support the critériums, knowing they are important for many pros. The critériums, for example, give me a chance to repay Eddy for the work he did in the Giro and the Tour. Organisers permit the big name riders to nominate some of their team for certain critériums and I would not accept a contract unless Eddy was also offered one."

For Kelly and co, it was after midnight when all the post-race commitments in Concarneau were completed. Another day, another dollar. If it's Saturday, it must be Kortenhoef next, far to the north, near Amsterdam. Another eleven-hundred kilometres of driving for Kelly and his merry troop.

Seven hours and they were in Brussels, still three hundred kilometres shy of Kortenhoef. Three hours sleep, Kelly declared. Walsh noted that Kelly spent most of them lying awake, unable to find sleep. He attributed this to over tiredness. By eleven, Kelly was up and cleaning his bike. By noon, they were back on the road.

At Kortenhoef, an afternoon race this time, Dutch riders stole the show, Leo van Vliet from Gerrie Knetemann, with Phil Anderson there in third to stop from being a Dutch lock-out. Walsh noted a conversation between Phil Anderson's wife, Anne, and Kelly's wife, Linda. Her husband, Anderson remarked, had never been allowed to win a Dutch critérium. She blamed Jan Raas, who - it was claimed - controlled all the main Dutch critériums at that time, and called him a jerk.

Stephen Roche, in his autobiography, made an observation about Phil Anderson, how wherever he lived, he never tried to pick up any of the local language. If you wanted to talk to him, you talked his tongue, English. Anderson, Roche suggested, expected too much. The Antipodean chided other Anglosphere riders who chased him down when he was in breaks but himself never thought twice about chasing them down when they were in a break. Anderson, in Roche's analysis, simply wasn't liked in the peloton . Respected, maybe, but never liked.

Maybe something as simple as that explains him not being allowed win in Kortenhoef, although you always have to take Roche's analysis of other riders with a large pinch of salt. He had an odd view of what a 'proper' cyclist was. Whatever the excuses, Kelly'd already won two critériums in Holland that year, one of them at Elsloo, a few days before Walsh signed on with him. Anderson's break came the following week, at a crit in Tiel, when he was allowed to win, with Greg LeMond and Hennie Kuiper behind him.

By nine o'clock on the Saturday night, the Kortenhoef critérium completed, Kelly was back in Brussels, dropping Walsh off at the train station, their three days on the road together at an end. Walsh boarded a train taking him back to Paris, where he'd based himself for the year as he tried to get under the skin of the cycling scene. Kelly went home to Vilvoorde, a good night's sleep and a day of rest before going back on the road in search of more critériums.

Three days, three races, about three and a half thousand kilometres of driving, four or five hundred kilometres of racing and only sixteen hours or so of sleep. Walsh had got a good story out of it but for him the August critérium circuit was already over. For Kelly, well he was £6,000 up on the back of those three days Walsh spent on the road with him, and expected to earn about £30,000 in total over the course of the month, racing in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Great Britain. By Monday, with Walsh back in his Parisian home, typing up his stories, Kelly was back on the road, earning his crust.

Perhaps here it would help to get a larger picture of the circuit as it existed back then. Seeing as 1984 has taken up so much of this tale so far, let's look at that year:

Here's Fignon on that month of racing following his Tour victory in 1983:

"I barely had any time to savour my success, or to rest and reflect. A Tour de France winner, especially a French one, has a debt to his people and the cycling world was waiting expectantly for me in the critériums. I think I rode twenty-five on the trot. Obviously, as the 'rules' stipulated, I won a fair few of them. And I earned a good deal in appearance money."

Peiper talks about his 1984 experiences on the critérium circuit in A Peiper's Tale . His contract with Peugeot was earning him £5,000 (it went up to £20,000 the next year). The type of rider he was, he could expect maybe £500 per critérium (he was a good prologue rider as well as a domestique , in other words fair-to-middling). Riding ten critériums was all it would take for him to double his annual income. Twenty-five of them ... well you see what I mean about the critérium circuit being breakfast, dinner and tea for some riders.

Here's Peiper's take on those weeks on the road:

"Sean [Yates] and I both finished the [1984] Tour really tired, and then we rode the critériums. So we had ridden the twenty-one days of the Tour, then twenty-five critériums back-to-back. We rode all the post-Tour critériums in Holland, plus we rode critériums once a week in England, and we rode some in France. Sometimes we'd ride a critérium in England, fly back here to Belgium and drive to a race in France, then drive back to Holland. And we did that for twenty-five days straight, still with no medical support. It took me a long time to recover after that."

No medical support didn't mean Peiper rode those critériums a l'eau . Riders looked after themselves:

"It was during those critériums that I found how easy it was to get carried away and sucked into the climate of pro racing in those days. We were getting changed for a race in the South of France, and in the changing room there were some older pros. They had some amphetamines and a needle, and were passing it around. They had a little bit left over and asked if anybody wanted it. I tried it and rode the one-hundred kilometre race like it was nothing. I was in heaven."
"I sit on the bed watching the [four] others get ready, waiting for the moment. I'm waiting for it to happen. Fuck it, I want it to be happen. The pressure - I can't take this pressure. It happens: the smiles ... a bag is produced. In it small white ampoules of amphetamines and a handful of short syringes. A glance is thrown in my direction. My 'chastity' is well known within the team but it is only polite to offer. I scratch my head and breathe in deeply. If I walk out through the door with only the hotel lunch in my system I will crack mentally. As a result I will probably be dropped and ridiculed after two laps. I can't face any more humiliation. The pressure. I need the money. I nod in acceptance."

Do the drugs work? Here's how Kimmage got on at that race:

"The race is one of the easiest I have ever ridden. I am never under pressure. I have such absolute confidence that I won't get dropped, and I'm able to attack off the front and contribute to the spectacle. This is all that matters to me. To be able to perform. To merit the few quid I have come for. [...] Physically I feel the effort. I feel the pedals, the shortness of the climb. But mentally I'm so strong that it's never a problem. My mind has been stimulated. Stimulated by amphetamines. I believe I'm invincible therefore I am."

For Peiper, the doping culture on the critérium circuit was a way of easing the pressure, or a way of letting off a bit of steam:

"At best, taking drugs in those races was a way of easing the mental pressure of racing three weeks in the Tour de France and following that with thirty critériums. Or it was a joke, it was fun, a buzz, no different from a beer or a coffee. That was the attitude; it was as commonplace as that, just like naughty kids experimenting with beer or cigarettes in the park, and regarded as nothing more serious or shameful than that. I certainly didn't give it much thought. "

Fignon seemed to echo Peiper's notion of the critériums as being a place to let off some steam:

"I liked the atmosphere. The critériums were a sort of continuation of the after-Tour party which suddenly went on another month. You finished the race, and in the evening, as tradition demanded, you picked up where you had left previous night's festivities. It was stimulating but tiring. The ascetic life of a sportsman competing at the highest level doesn't really fit in with letting it all hang out in nightclubs."

Kimmage offers this take on why riders turned to doping at critériums:

"As a result [of the time spent getting from one race to another], on arriving at the critérium they [the riders] were often in no condition to race - but this was a minor detail. Amphetamines were wonderful for motivating a tired domestique to climb once again into the saddle. And as there were never any controls it was at critériums that abuse was at its highest. The drugs were never used in pursuit of victory, because all the critériums were fixed. The people came to see the star winning, so the star always won. That way the punters went away happy and would return next year. No, the amphetamines were an insurance. An insurance that riders would 'perform.' The small riders were expected to animate the race. The routine was to attack off the front for a few laps, milk the applause and then let the star bring you back. By doing this you felt uninhibited when, at the end of the night, you approached the manager and asked for the contract. Contracts were always paid after the event. Amphetamines ensured you got paid."

Johan van der Velde had this to say in 1989:

"Every day, another race. It was detestable but you had to win money. You'd be taking amphetamines every two or three days. In the Tour it was always the same thing: an injection in the morning and pills in the evening."

Doping didn't just arrive on the critérium circuit in the eighties. It had always been a part of it. Speaking in the sixties, Rik van Steenbergen described his experience on the circuit:

"I've had to drive to Paris, then immediately after the race get back in my car for a ten hour trip to Stuttgart where I had to get on my bike at once. There was nothing to do. An organiser would want this star or that one on the bill. He would pay for it. Another would want the same ones the next day, and the public wanted something for its money. As a result, the stars had to look fresh at every race, and they couldn't do that without stimulants. Doping is necessary in cycling."

And here's where you arrive at one of the biggest problems with the old critérium circuit: while everyone was demanding that riders rode the big races clean, no one seemed to care what was happening lower down the food chain. Attempts were made to tame the Tour - where all the media attention was focussed - but a blind eye was turned to the Tour's shadow. What they eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve.

Dope controls on the circuit were rarer than hurricanes in Hampshire, and in those days, there was no out of competition testing. There was one famous incident, in 1982, at a critérium in Callac, when an attempt was made to test riders and they rebelled. Leading the rebels was Bernard Hinault, then the peloton 's patron, offering a firm ' Non! ' to dope controls. He, Jean-René Bernadeau, Patrick Clerc, Pierre Le Bigaut and Bernard Vallet refused to submit themselves to the requested anti-doping control. When faced with the prospect of a one month suspended suspension and the usual fine of eleven hundred Swiss francs, Hinault threatened a boycott of the Worlds.

This, for me, is an important aspect of the critérium circuit, the part of it which probably intrigues me the most. What role - if any - did the critérium circuit play in cycling's doping culture? I'm not going to argue that critériums caused doping, that using drugs to get you through the miles of driving between races lead to you using drugs in the races themselves, and consequently using drugs the rest of the season. I'm not that stupid.

Don't forget, before the critérium circuit there had been the original Six Day circuit. And even in the critérium circuit's heyday, many riders also spent their winter riding the boards, clocking up the miles, topping up their bank balances, and doped to their eye-balls. Track racing did far more to create a culture of doping than the critérium circuit did. And even there I'm not sure I'd blame the Six Day circuit for causing cycling's doping problem.

Cycling itself, from the start, was the real problem, I guess. From the get go races were crazy, demanded too much. Cycling appealed to an atavistic desire to enjoy the suffering of others. Or, if you want be noble about it, it appealed to a honourable interest in seeing how far the human body could be pushed. All so that bicycle manufacturers could triumph the sturdiness of their machines. Which is something I've never fully understood, given how often races demonstrated how frail those machines really were. But then I've never really understood marketing and why we are seduced so easily by it. But we'll save that digression for another day. Let's try get back to critériums and their role in cycling's doping culture.

If I'm not arguing that the critérium circuit caused cycling's doping problem, what am I doing? I guess I'm asking this: how much did the critérium circuit contribute to embedding cycling's doping culture? How much did it contribute to the normalisation of taking drugs in order to ride races?

One issue with doping at critériums is that it seems to have been more open than at other races. Well, maybe not open, but with riders sharing changing rooms, more visible. Here's Peiper again:

"I can remember the first of the after-Tour critériums in 1992, held in Aast in Belgium. After getting changed and leaving the changing-rooms, one of my Tulip Computers team-mates asked me, 'Did you see all the guys charging up in there?' I looked at him, dumbfounded, and said, 'No, where?' Then he told me how guys were slipping a hypodermic under the skin at the top of the thighs as they adjusted their shorts, or doing it in the upper arm as they pretended to rub on Eau de Cologne with a face cloth."

Go back to Peiper's own experience with amphetamines and how easy he found it to "get carried away and sucked into the climate of pro racing in those days." This was also an argument partly made by Paul Kimmage. Despite riding the 1986 Tour, Kimmage rode no post-Tour critériums. He could have, he felt, if he'd pushed a bit, but he didn't:

"I knew that the critériums would draw me closer to the temptations of drugs and I didn't want that. I was afraid of being tempted, too many complications. If one of the lads offered me a charge, in good faith, before a critérium, how could I possibly refuse without offending him? I still desperately wanted to be one of the boys. If I refused a charge, I knew they would never totally accept me. And so being absent from the critériums suited me just fine."

Peer pressure is just one issue to be considered here. Another is why doping so openly at critériums was perfectly acceptable. Go back to the sixties, when doping controls were first introduced. At that time, doping was perfectly acceptable in the rest of society. If a truck driver could legally buy and use pep pills to keep him on the road why shouldn't riders use pep pills to keep themselves awake as they drove the vast distances between races? And if they were doping in the car, why shouldn't they then also dope on the bike? Having taken some uppers to get to a critérium, should they really be expected to take some downers so that they effectively rode the race clean?

"When you're driving a hundred thirty thousand kilometres a year, you have to stay awake. The riders take drugs - but so do those who look after them. I'd rather take ten milligrammes of amphetamines than wrap my car around a plane tree."

Here's Voet on the critérium circuit:

"I often went off to take part in the round of village circuit races, the critériums, which followed the Tour. Usually I shared a car with two of the top Belgian riders for the whole three weeks as we travelled around France. Anything went during this time, which was without rules or morals. The most explosive cocktails in the world! "The riders would often gather in bands of seven or eight, sometimes in smaller groups. They did everything together, in the same way that they decided the race result together several days before the race. After eating, this is what tended to happen: everyone who charged up would 'chip in' a little bit to a common jar. An ampoule of Pervitin, one of Tonedron, some MD. A common jar in every sense, which was mixed up before being 'served' in equal portions by subcutaneous injection. Often a snifter was kept for me so that I would be awake to drive to the next race."

One of the funnier stories Voet tells is of how the use of amphetamines by a team mechanic saw Sean Kelly get busted at Paris-Brussels in 1984 for using Stimul. Kelly had actually been using an ephedrine-based cold medicine coming up to the race and, because it was on the banned list, didn't want to do the dope test he was called for. So his urine was substituted with some from one of the team's mechanics. Except that the mechanic had forgotten about the Stimul he'd been using to keep himself awake behind the wheel.

There's a world of difference between Pot Belge and Stimul - for starters, Pot Belge was a witch's brew of amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, heroin, painkillers and sometimes corticosteroids,  which you couldn't buy in your local pharmacy - but the point here is that the average person could use stuff like Stimul to stay awake behind the wheel. Why shouldn't cyclists?

I'm not making a pro-doping argument here. Pep pills were taken away from truck drivers. Today, the number of hours they spend behind the wheel is legislated, they're supposed to have a spy in the cab with them, the tachograph (not always the most efficient spy, I know). Should something have been done to legislate the number of hours riders spent behind the wheel? Rather than taming the Tour in order to eliminate cycling's doping problem, should the UCI and all the others concerned with the problem of doping - particularly the media - not have sought to tame the critérium circuit first? Or were they right to just put their heads in the sand and ignore it?

Once before, jokingly, I suggested that attempts to remodel cycling along the lines of Tennis' ATP Tour or motor-racing's Formula 1 calendar were wrong, and that the sport should look to horse-racing. I was drawing on a comment made to Albert Londres by one of the Pélissier brothers in that famous 1924 piece, Les Forçats de la Route , about how, one day, Henri Desgrange would have them racing with lead weights in their pockets.

One rule the jockey club in the UK has today is to restrict the number of days racing a jockey can put in in a week. This is partly to stop them endangering themselves driving up and down the country in search of a ride. Cycling, in the days before rising salaries reduced the importance of the critérium circuit, could have done with such a rule.

It would have been impossible to impose though, for the very simple reason that, for too many riders, the critérium circuit was where they made their money. So in order to change the critérium circuit, you'd have had to work out how to rebalance the financial equation first.

Fortunately, fate intervened and did that before the authorities got around to taking their fingers out of their arses. The eighties changed a lot of things in this sport. The rewriting of the salary structure was one of the most important changes. And - as a good little left-leaning socialist Euro-weenie - this is one reason I like what happened to cycling in the eighties: riders finally began to get a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.

"For the riders the key aspect of this development was not only that they could earn more than before, but also that the major sources of their income had changed. These were no longer the appearance fees for critériums and kermesses, but the salaries and bonuses they received from their employers. It goes without saying, of course, that the steep rise in riders' salaries affected the relations between employers and employees. The sponsor paid a lot of money to have the riders wear their companies' jerseys, but this gave them the right to determine when, and where, the riders would compete."

The changes in cycling's salary structure helped diminish the importance of the critérium circuit, killed it off as a Shadow Tour. Like the Six Day circuit of the earlier era, the post-Tour critérium circuit began to wither. As salaries went up, so too did appearance fees. With riders earning more, they expected to receive more for appearing at critériums. If they felt the need to ride them at all.

"We got very good money, of course. And, to be truthful, the French franc was worth a lot more than now. But I think the motivation has changed with the professionals as well. You get riders like [Steven] Rooks and [Gert-Jan] Theunisse saying after the Tour they're stopping at home because they can't be bothered with critériums, and that's not so attractive to the public. I don't think you're serving the sport doing that, because the more popular cycling is, the better it is for every one of the riders. "Its good that they're well paid now, of course, but they have to give everything they've got. [...] The whole sport has changed. They aren't hungry any more. There's so much money to earn now, even for a third-rate rider. Twenty-five years ago, a third-class rider didn't get jam on his bread. So if they got fifty guilders for a critérium, they rode. But now, every rider is well paid, so they don't do much for it. They say, 'Oh, I've got a good contract from the firm, I'm okay.' The hunger to ride well, to succeed and only then earn money is over."

When Pedro Delgado won the Tour in 1988, he followed that victory with five critériums in the Netherlands, at about £4,500 per race, followed by just four critériums in France. Jump forward in time. Lance Armstrong was reported to have demanded more than €100,000 in appearance fees at the height of his fame in 2004. Two years earlier, he was only asking for $50,000. Floyd Landis only got to race one critérium following his 2006 Tour victory - in the Netherlands, at Stiphout - before the news of his doping bust broke. That one race was reputedly worth €50,000 to him.

The critérium circuit that exists today is markedly different from the circuit of old. It is no longer the Tour's shadow. It's been tamed. But it still has its role to play, not just in padding out a rider's bank balance, but also in the sense of the recognition it affords the men of the Tour. Mark Cavendish had this to say of the post-Tour critériums he rode in 2008:

"It was when I went back to Europe and particularly the Dutch and Belgian post-Tour critérium or circuit races that kicked off in the week after the Tour that I really got a sense of the shift in perception. The sole purpose of these races is to showcase the heroes of the Tour, who are unsurprisingly happy to bask in the adulation of tens of thousands of fans in return for substantial appearance fees. From my point of view, not only was the money a welcome bonus and the fast, nervous racing ideal preparation for the Olympics, but, in the echoing voices of the fans as they cheered my name lay the most vivid confirmation yet of how wide and powerful the Tour's impact could be."

In 2010, Edward Pickering went to a couple of crits in Belgium - which, along with the Netherlands, still has a thriving post-Tour critérium circuit - with Robbie McEwen. The first race Pickering joined McEwen for - on a Monday, two weeks after the Tour had ended - was an evening Derny-paced crit in Wilrijk, a suburb of Antwerp about an hour's drive from where McEwen lives in Brakel. The next day they ventured across the border into the Netherlands, for a three-part points race in Naaldwijk, near Rotterdam, a couple of hours drive from McEwen's home. McEwen tried to explain to Pickering how hard today's critérium circuit could be:

"It's tiring. One year we did a crit in Erik Zabel's home town, partied all night, then flew to Toulouse at 7am from Dusseldorf. I drove two hours from Toulouse, did a two hour crit, won it, collected my dough, drove back two hours, two hours in the plane, two hours in the car, and back to Belgium. Then I slept for a weekend."

Go on, admit it, you've read this far, you've seen the story of Simpson driving from Belgium to Nice and then back into central France and then spending a week in a hospital bed. You're looking at what McEwen told Pickering and, though you're trying very hard not to be like Jan Janssen about it, you're still thinking to yourself, 'Kids today, eh? They've got it easy.' Try this bit from McEwen then, about the current earning power of the circuit:

"The rate's gone down a bit. Boom time was 2003 to 2007. Luckily for me, my most successful Tour results, and therefore highest number of crit appearances, coincided with the big budgets. One year I did eighteen or twenty - I was too tired to really count. A good Tour gives you glory and satisfaction. Crits give you the money. You could make a quarter of a million euros in a month. But it's very very tiring."

Eighteen or twenty races, in the weeks following the Tour. Having raced the Tour. In 2006, you could have watched McEwen on the podium in Aalst, Belgium the day after the Tour ended. The next night he was again on the podium in Belgium this time in Diksmuide. The next night it was Hadsten in Denmark. The next night he was back in Belgium, for the crit in Herentals. The next night in was Heerlen in the Netherlands. That's five days of racing - Monday through Friday - straight after the Tour ended. The next week saw more visits to the podium in Belgium and the Netherlands. The week after that he was on the podium in Germany. Kids today eh, they've got it easy.

One of the issues that piqued my curiosity about the old critérium circuit was the savagery of the travel involved. Today, even if you expand the distances, the travel can be a lot more comfortable. Take Lance Armstrong. In 2002, he won at Stiphout on the Tuesday after the Tour ended. On the Friday he padded his palmarès with a victory in Rheda, Belgium. The next day he was paired with Floyd Landis for another crit. That night he flew back to the States for a Sunday afternoon ride, the  New York City Cycling Championship, a charity event in aid of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He flew Concorde. And returned to Europe on the Monday morning, again by Concorde. That's one way of taking the pain out of the mileage, I suppose.

I've blamed money for killing the Shadow Tour. It became less important to riders as their salaries rose. But another factor that needs to be taken account of is the UCI's attempts to fill in the gaping void Hein Verbruggen saw whenever he looked at the post-Tour calendar. The Worlds got kicked back a month, the Vuelta a España moved from Spring to Autumn. New World Cup races began to appear to fill the post-Tour void that was already filled by critériums. The cavalry had arrived.

Even before the UCI got the finger out, there had been official races peppering the post-Tour cycling calendar. As I've given you a glimpse of the 1984 post-Tour critérium calendar, it's worth considering the official races it competed with. Races such as the Vuelta a Burgos (August 8-12), the Tre Valli Varesine (August 12), the Coppa Agostini (August 14), the Tour of Belgium (August 14-19), San Sebastian (August 16), the Coppa Placci (August 18), the GP de Plouay (August 21), the Tour of the Netherlands (August 21-25), the Tour du Limousin (August 23-26) and Paris-Bourges (August 28). And then you were into the Worlds.

"Millar said he didn't want to ride the Kelloggs'. He was miffed because he had four critériums in France lined up for that same week with a lot more money on offer than the Kelloggs' but Z-Peugeot, his team, were making him go. Even when he got to Britain he was talking about riding a couple of days and then climbing off and returning to Troyes."

So as well as all the other factors impacting on the critérium circuit, you had the teams trying to tell their riders to ride the new races the UCI filled the calendar with.

Despite all this though, the circuit, in a reduced form, still exists. Belgium and the Netherlands seem to be where the critérium circuit is at its strongest today. In France it's barely a shadow of its former self. As Robbie McEwen suggested that the 2003-2007 period was boom time for the critérium circuit, perhaps a look at the calendar from one of those years would be instructive. I picked 2006:

You may have worked out by now that I am not wholly a fan of the harshness of the old critérium circuit. I don't mourn the passing of the Shadow Tour. That, of course, is easy to say when I stand back and look at the circuit as a whole. But pick an individual race and it's not so easy. Take the critérium that used to be held in Callac.

Starting in 1946, on the first Tuesday after the Tour ended, the citizens of Callac and the surrounding area welcomed the men of the Tour. For five days they celebrated the feast of St Barbara, and the Tuesday critérium was central to their celebrations. As many as thirty thousand people turned out to watch the race. At its height - at the end of the seventies - as many as ninety riders participated in it.

The critérium at Callac attracted the cream of cycling's crop. Luis Ocaña, Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond each took a victory at Callac just days after winning the Tour. Raymond Poulidor won there, as did guys like Cyrille Guimard and Jean-François Bernard. Louison Bobet, Bernard Thévenet and Laurent Fignon won there. Eddy Merckx won there. In 1967, Barry Hoban was given the win, in memory of Tom Simpson.

And then, in 1999, it all ended. Stéphane Heulot, Sébastien Hinault and Jaan Kirsipuu filled the final podium. Callac's critérium ceased to be. Fifty-odd years of cycling history and then ... gone on the wind. Today, Callac's critérium is remembered in a little book, Le Critérium de Callac , in which the authors - Arsène Maulavé and  Marcel Le Roux - gather together memories from the people who made the race happen. Similar books could - probably should - be written for many of the other critériums that have disappeared.

France in particular, as I've said, suffered the most decline in its critérium circuit. Not all of this is down to rising appearance fees and greater competition from the official calendar. Urbanisation took its toll on some races. Others disappeared simply because the people organising them faded away. In some cases, age simply caught up with people. In other cases, it was the passion that died. Particularly in the nineties, it wasn't easy to retain your passion for this sport, not when the bodies were piling up on mortuary slabs and no one seemed to want to do anything about it. And then, of course, there's the state of French cycling.

And there you may have something that's important abut the critérium circuit: local races need local stars. Germany and Austria made their mark on the critérium circuit when they had the riders. Post 2006 and 2007, the taste for cycling there is obviously down. Look at the crit in Luxembourg, which has steadily been moving forward in the calendar since it started as a September race in 1996. Now, with the Schlecks to cheer for, it's a July race.

Or look at Britain, which became part of the circuit in the eighties on the back of the success of British and Irish riders. Who knows what's going to happen there next: will the current series of city-centre races, particularly the Nocturne Series, become part of the post-Tour critérium circuit in the near future?

The picture painted here of the critérium circuit isn't particularly pretty, I know. Which is unfortunate, for crits are fun. Any race where you have time to walk to the bar, order a refill and get back to the barriers in the time it takes for riders to go around again is bound to be fun. So one happy story abut crits for you, this one from Stephen Roche's autobiography: it was at a pre-Tour crit in Paris that he first set eyes on the woman who would become his wife, Lydia Arnaud.

"One evening we were riding a critérium in Longjumeau on the south side of Paris. Before the start all the ACBB guys were talking about a girl who was there. Before the end of the race, all eyes were on this girl. All through the race I was watching her. I wanted to win and attacked every time there was an opportunity. Each time I was recaptured until I went away and stayed clear. After winning I made sure that I saw the stunning-looking girl before going home."

The next night Roche went to another crit, this time as a spectator, "in search of the girl with the blonde hair." He'd already found out that her brothers, Thierry and Michel, were both racers and one of them would be at this crit in Menthes, on the West of Paris. From there, they met up a few more times. Then, in August, Roche was riding two critériums as part of the Grand Prix de Gauches. During the first, he was away with another rider, Yves Renaud, when he saw someone he knew chatting to Lydia:

"They were getting on well and each time Renaud and I passed, I noticed the two of them together. After four laps of watching this, something had to be done. Casually slowing down on the hill, I moved over to where they were and, nodding towards Lydia, I said, 'Hey, Jean Louis, she's mine. Hands off.' Half joking, half serious. Quickly I rejoined Renaud. He told me he was from Gauches and that it would mean a lot to him to win. I did not mind who won in Gauches and let Yves have it."

Who wouldn't be swept off their feet by such a display of masculinity? You can smell the testosterone from here and have to brace yourself from swooning, no? In the second critérium, Roche decided to put on a show for the girl with the blonde hair, even put on new tyres - the cyclists' equivalent of putting on an ironed shirt, I guess - and cleaning his bike "until it sparkled." First corner in, he rolled a tyre and had to retire. You're thinking: 'Clever bastard. Now he can spend the rest of the race with the girl of his dreams.' And Roche figured that's exactly what his ACBB boss would think too. So he set off for a two-hour training ride before seeking out Lydia. That's discipline for you. But from that race on, the two officially became a pair, stepping out together. And the rest of that story, I guess, you know.

When looking at the critérium circuit, something that has to be considered is the role it plays in cycling's ecosystem. And here I mean its role beyond cycling's doping culture. As everyone knows, changing something in one part of the ecosystem can have knock-on consequences elsewhere.

In the era when many riders made most of their money riding crits, those races exerted influence on the rest of the cycling calendar. A lot of influence. Here three groups of people come into play: the critérium organisers; the riders themselves; and the riders' agents. The organisers and the riders were too diverse to exert any real power. But there was only a handful of agents. They became the sport's real power-brokers.

Organisers negotiated riders' appearance contracts with the agents. In order to get a ride in critériums, riders needed to make sure the agents were aware of them. The obvious way of doing this was to win. Winners were - and will always be - the heroes of this sport. But cycling can be perverse. We like our losers too. Of course, we don't call them losers, for us, they're heroic failures. We celebrate not their losing, but the manner in which they lose. These riders represent something for us.

At an extreme here is the lanterne rouge in the Tour. Even he - simply by virtue of being the last man to finish the Tour - could expect to receive a substantial number of critérium invites. He too was a star and the public wanted to see the stars of the day. But in between finishing first and finishing last, there's ample room for other forms of heroic failure.

There's the escape artists, the guys who dangle off the front of the peloton , often-time getting swallowed up and spat out almost within sight of the finish line. Pull off a great exploit - stay away until the finish line was almost in sight - and you too could fill your pockets in the post Tour critériums.

It would have been cruel had the demise in the importance of the critérium circuit caused the demise of the escape artists, the guys who enlivened a lot of dull days of racing. But, fortunately, the money that poured into cycling to feed the new salary structure also fuelled a rise in the TV coverage of the sport. And - as live TV coverage of races, particularly the Tour, expanded - sponsors wanted to see one of their riders going up the road if for no other reason than to get his jersey on TV for an hour or two. For a time, you could even predict the moment at which an escape would happen: it would coincide with the moment when live TV coverage commenced. So exploits continued to enliven races. Killing the butterfly in Borneo didn't cause a hurricane in Holland.

"The full story is that, before the stage, the team were talking about the critériums, the circuit races organised by towns during the summer, which provide the riders with some extra cash, and Cedric was asking if there were any for him. One of the managers said, 'No one has asked you because you're not very visible.' So that day he decided to be visible for an hour or so."

The hour or so turned into the stage winning break. In attempting to land a ride in a post-Tour crit, Vasseur won a stage in the Tour. (There's another side to that story: Vasseur hadn't sought his team leader's permission before poking his nose out of the peloton and Boardman was mightily miffed with him: "it was a classic example of lack of trust within a team, and it shows how easily the authority of the team leader can be undermined.")

There is though another factor that needs to be considered here when we look at riders' agents and their role in the critérium circuit. Their control over who got to ride what races on the critérium circuit gave them influence over what happened elsewhere. Get on their bad side and you could wave goodbye to a lot of potential income. Be on their good side and it could be fill your boots time. To get an idea of the way critériums were organised here's Paul Kimmage, in A Rough Ride :

"Critériums were a French tradition in August. The Tour would generate huge interest for cycle racing in July, but in August there was nothing. The critériums were a means of avoiding the cold turkey syndrome. A placebo for an addicted public until the Autumn Classics. The mayor of a small village would decide he wanted the stars of the Tour de France in his town and would contact a critérium manager. The manager would submit the price of engaging thirty professionals and the mayor would hand over the money. The manager then set about contacting the riders. He would sign up three or four really big names, the Tour winner if possible, the French champion, and two or three Tour stage winners. Most of the mayor's cash would be spent on these, for these were the men who drew the crowds."

The rest of the riders were the also rans of the peloton - some local heroes and the rest of the field made up of journeymen domestiques . And this was the way the agents gained their power: they decided who those additional riders would be.

In Belgium, the critérium market was controlled by Jean van Buggenhout. In the sixties, he had had one chief rival, a Catholic priest, Father Van Landeghem, who for some reason decided to get into the cycling game, undercutting Van Buggenhout and promising that his profits would go to the Church. Generally though, in Belgium, Van Buggenhout was the real power-broker. Here's a story Vin Denson tells:

"The man who really called the shots with Solo [the trade-team Denson rode with, lead by Rik van Looy] was the Belgian riders' agent, Jean van Buggenhout. Whatever he said was law. He had been a rider but he'd found better prospects in management, and the whole of Belgium cycling was in his pocket. He took a percentage from almost anybody who turned a pedal in that country, and he was so powerful that he could almost make or break a rider with his say so."

Freddy Maertens tells this story about Van Buggenhout:

"At the start of my career, Jean van Buggenhout held absolute control when it came to critérium contracts. He certainly lived up to his reputation of being a 'Merckist.' I can remember my first meeting with Van Buggenhout in a cafeteria on the quayside at Ostend in 1973. He presented me with over twenty contracts. I thought I was worth BF 10,000 per critérium in view of the fact that I had finished second in the Tour of Flanders and had turned out to be the revelation among the young riders. However, Van Buggenhout saw it differently. 'You can ride all the critériums for BF 6,000 each or you don't ride in any of them,' he said. 'It's one or the other.'"
"I've just had a long conversation with Roger Piel. He made me understand that winning the Tour for the fifth time would be meaningless. The public would still be against me. On the other hand, if [Raymond] Poulidor won, it would be great for me, as I'd become much more popular. Poulidor and [Fiorenzo] Magne know nothing about it, but Piel has guaranteed me fifty well-paid after-Tour contracts as well as fifty-thousand francs [about five-thousand pounds in old money]."

It might seem crazy to think that unimportant little critériums in towns even natives would be hard placed to find on a map could exert such influence over the rest of the cycling season. That they could decide who won - or, more likely, didn't win - the Tour de France. Certainly, in the case Gém was talking about, nothing came of Piel's attempt to influence Anquetil. Maître Jacques ignored Piel's advice, rode that Tour - the 1964 Tour - and made it four Tours back-to-back and five overall. But there's another story from that era. Two stages from the end of the 1965 Paris-Nice, Anquetil was trailing his bête noir, Raymond Poulidor, having been beaten by Pou-Pou in a time trial. Anquetil offered this on what happened next:

"I thought, what would happen if the results were reversed: first Poulidor, second Anquetil. Then I'd have been written off straight away. One lone defeat would count for as much as fifteen or twenty victories. Was that fair? I could already picture the crocodile tears being shed because of my supposed decline."

On the last stage, Poulidor had to fend of multiple attacks from Anquetil and his team-mates, but also from others who still fancied their chances of overall victory. Eventually, his team-mates having fallen away, Poulidor was left alone. And when Anquetil attacked forty kilometres out from the stage finish he couldn't go with him. At the Promenades des Anglais in Nice, Anquetil had taken sufficient time to reclaim the lead and take the overall victory.

But then the allegations began. That Anquetil's domestiques had ridden Poulidor's guys into ditches. That other teams had been bought. Poulidor, speaking to l'Équipe was in a bitter mood:

"I note simply that Anquetil is still the patron of cycling. I don't deny his strengths, nor even his superiority in many domains, but I consider that his team-mates did not behave well on the road to Nice. Jacques Anquetil would acknowledge as much if he is honest himself."

Anquetil was in typical form with his reply, adding fuel to the polemica 's fire:

"Poulidor is a cry-baby. The interview in which he repeated the accusation made by his team, to cast a doubt over the correctness and sincerity of my victory, that interview is not worthy of a champion, and I will find it difficult to forgive him."

When Paul Howard was writing his Anquetil biography, he got this version of events at that Paris-Nice from Poulidor:

"The rivalry had grown even fiercer since the Tour in 1964, and it culminated in our confrontation in Paris-Nice. He [Anquetil] had great difficulty in accepting defeat, especially his entourage, those people around him. So when I'd beaten him by thirty-six seconds in a time trial, his speciality, he wouldn't accept it. The result was that, on the last day, rival teams teamed up, it must be said, and what shocked me the most was that these arrangements happened in front of the race director [Jean Leulliot]. He let it happen, as he was closer to Anquetil than to me. They played tricks on my team-mates - [Barry] Hoban and [Joseph] Spruyt - tipping them into the ditch, and everyone attacked. Orders had been given. Anquetil had done nothing - I've nothing to reproach him for. When he attacked me, I was at the end of my tether. People say I'd wasted too much effort chasing after others, but [Michele] Dancelli attacked - he was only two minutes down - and [Vittorio] Adorni was the same."

It was Poulidor's belief that Gém had bought the other teams off, paid them to work for Anquetil. But Philip Brunel offered Howard an alternative explanation:

"There were two managers - agents, if you like - in France, Roger Piel and Daniel Dousset. Dousset had Anquetil, [Franco] Bitosi, [Lucien] Aimar, [Rudi] Altig and [Vittorio] Adorni. Alliances in the peloton were arranged by the managers, not between the teams. Sometimes there were link-ups determined by a race, but there were also alliances to protect the 'aristocracy.' In this Paris-Nice, there was Adorni, who raced for Anquetil because Dousset told him he had to. He said, 'I need to maintain Anquetil's prestige for the critériums' [so he could maintain the value of his own ten per cent]."

Stephen Roche tells this story about Dousset and how his power extended even into the personal lives of the riders he represented:

"Daniel Dousset, who was then manager to all ACBB riders, invited Lydia and me around to his house to eat. During the evening Dousset managed to separate Lydia and me; he ended up with Lydia in the dining room and I with Madame Dousset in the sitting room. He lectured Lydia for an hour on the facts of the cycling life and how she could ruin my career. When you are sixteen years old and going out with a boy that you like there are things you do not want to hear."

What of the agents of today? What power - if any - do they exert? Has the diminishing of the critérium circuit's importance taken the wind out of their sails? Or, like the agents of old, are they still the invisible hand guiding things along? For some reason, I think there must be a really interesting story to be told there. Let's leave it as a story for another day though. Let's get back to critériums and try and wrap this thing up.

Economic Darwinism put paid to the critérium circuit's importance, killed the Shadow Tour. The circuit still exists today and - occasionally - it does still exert influence over other races. But the severity of the circuit has been reduced. For those who still pile in and fill their boots, riding a dozen or so crits in the weeks after the Tour is still something that deserves a degree of admiration, especially from those who think that most cyclists today hang their wheels up as soon as they climb off on the Champs-Élysées. Today's critérium circuit is still, I think, something we should celebrate, applaud. It is still a spectacle.

What of my question about the role the Shadow Tour played in embedding cycling's doping culture? Does the taming of the Shadow Tour offer an answer to that question? Perversely, that did nothing to help clean up the sport. Rather, the new money that fuelled the Shadow Tour's demise created a new race to ever greater extremes. But because everyone was winning - because everyone was benefiting from all this new wealth - no one with the power to do anything about it cared to. And then one day the sponsors - some sponsors - got a conscience. And the teams - some teams - realised something had to change. And the UCI - finally - was spurred into taking action. Economic Darwinism saved cycling.

The problem with leaving it up to economic Darwinism to solve all our problems though is this: no one takes control over the way events unfurl. Shit happens. Sometimes it's good for the roses. Sometimes it just stinks the place up. Which - I guess - brings us around to the topic I'll have to look at next: Jonathan Vaughters' latest attempt to put a bit of order on things with a salary cap. Should we attempt to limit teams' budgets in order to save us from the next great evolutionary leap forward? Or should we just strap our helmets on and enjoy the ride?

Sources: Sam Abt - In High Gear ; Chris Boardman - The Complete Book Of Bicycling ; Mark Cavendish - Boy Racer ; Vin Denson - The Full Cycle ; Malcolm Elliott - Sprinter ; Laurent Fignon - We Were Young And Carefree ; Paul Howard - Sex, Lies And Handlebar Tape ; Steve Joughin - Pocket Rocket ; Paul Kimmage - A Rough Ride ; Freddy Maertens - Fall From Grace ; Benjo Maso - The Sweat Of The Gods ; Richard Moore - In Search Of Robert Millar ; Allan Peiper - A Peiper's Tale ; Stephen Roche - The Agony And The Ecstasy ; Tom Simpson - Cycling Is My Life ; Willy Voet - Breaking The Chain ; David Walsh - Kelly: A Biography of Sean Kelly ; Les Woodland - The Crooked Path To Victory ; Les Woodland - Cycling Heroes .

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Fixed for the fans - the post-TdF criteriums

A race where the outcome is known before the start? Surely not! Well, yes. The series of races generically known as 'post-Tour crits' provide the cycling-mad fans in Belgium, Holland and Germany with an opportunity to get close to the stars of the Tour de France. Jeff Jones provides an overview of these races where the outcome is known before the start.

(BELGIUM, August 8, 2002): The post-Tour criterium circuit is currently in full swing, usually taking place over the two weeks following the completion of the Tour de France. The popular races are held in most countries, in towns such as Boxmeer, Stiphout, Chaam, Heerlen, Roosendaal, Surhuisterveen, Oostvoorne, Pijnacker (Netherlands), Aalst, Geraardsbergen, Peer (Belgium), Dortmund, Rhede, Duisberg, Hannover (Germany), Camors, Liseaux (France), Herning (Denmark), Graz (Austria), and this year for the first time, New York (USA).

The latter is a bit of an anomaly in the sense that the race isn't decided before the start. What? Fixing races?!? A shocking state of affairs! It would never happen in my day - I suppose you're going to tell me that Santa Claus isn't real next? Rumour has it that you can even place bets on these races, although you have to be quick to collect your money afterwards...

It should be remembered that these races are a public spectacle, where thousands of fans can see their heroes in person, after just having completed their three weeks of suffering in France. Although some of the riders don't earn a great deal of prize money during the Tour, they can make up for that by riding the post Tour criterium circuit. Jersey winners (Lance Armstrong) or big name riders (Mario Cipollini) can earn between 20 and 60 thousand euros per race in start money, while the rest of the pack has to make do with the pickings, which are still better than nothing.

Rabobank's Addy Engels commented to the Amersfoortse Courant about why the riders chose to race in these "spectacles" so soon after finishing an enormously taking three week bicycle race. "You have to train, even after the Tour. If you don't do anything for two or three days you have problems. And what is better than training at night and they even pay for it? It's like looking at monkeys. There aren't too many sporting heroes who are on television for three weeks. You can follow them very closely. And the audience wants to see them live."

The budget of a criterium such as the Ronde van Boxmeer is 135,000 euro. Most of this budget goes to the riders. If someone like Armstrong costs 60,000 euro, and the Dutch super trio of Erik Dekker, Michael Boogerd and Karsten Kroon another 35,000 euro, the organiser has to make a choice as to how many (and which) Tour riders he wants, to try and keep everyone happy. In the heyday of Dutch post Tour crits 25 years ago, there were 96 races on offer. Now there are only 12.

"It would be hypocritical to say that I do this for fun," said Michael Boogerd. "It's my job and I get a lot of money for it. And there are a lot of kids who can't go to France to see us. I know it; when I was I kid I was very enthusiastic about seeing the riders for real. Cycling is a real sport for the working class people; that's the power of our sport."

Before the advent of high base salaries, post-Tour criteriums used to be an important part of a rider's program, as they could earn a lot more money in proportion to their normal salaries. Top Dutch criterium manager Gerry van Gerwen says "But since cycling is a television sport, the base salaries are good enough, and the criteriums can come in second place. It's more a publicity exercise. The riders get applause, get recognition and promote their own brand."

He equates doing criteriums as the same as a singer who is famous on TV doing a world tour. "A criterium brings the riders to the people. You can see them, smell them and touch them," he said.

What goes down?

So how do they manage to 'fool' the public into believing that a real race is happening? Although it should be blatantly obvious from the results - how often would Lance Armstrong beat Mario Cipollini and Giovanni Lombardi in a criterium, for example? But these are professionals, and they know how to put on a good show.

In the early laps, when the pace is not so high, they will let a local favourite go to please the crowd. Meanwhile, the rest of the peloton will grimace in pain as though they are giving it everything to chase the local rider down, eventually succeeding at a (perceived) huge cost of energy. These guys can ride criteriums at over 50 km/h if they want, so the speed doesn't have to be that low to make it look good for the public.

Addy Engels puts it this way. "Don't forget, we do 100 kilometres mostly in under 2.5 hours - mostly above 40 km/h. So it isn't that easy. Tactics aren't the most important part of these races. But present yourself to the audience, that is. People come for their fun, they want to see the big shots and a nice race. And we take care that they get what they want.

Allowing for the fact that the top three are usually pre-determined, the rest of the placings can be fought out in earnest. So, some genuine racing actually does happen amongst the pro's at these events. There's also the various support races, with the amateurs, women, juniors and masters, who are free to race as hard as they like, while the crowd gradually drowns itself in the local beverage of choice.

This brings us to an important point. In many European countries (Belgium springs to mind for some reason), the carnival or 'feest' is a big and very ingrained part of the culture. Folks like to have fun, and having a sideshow of bicycle racing to go with their beer is an ideal form of entertainment. It's relatively quiet (depending on the PA system), but fast and exciting enough to capture the attention.

Criteriums and kermesses, cyclocross races and track races are all very much spectator friendly cycling events. Road races aren't nearly as spectator friendly, unless there are finishing circuits or a publicity caravan to keep the crowds amused while they wait for their 30 seconds of action. They work, because people can still enjoy a day out in the fresh air with other like-minded folks. The Tour de France takes this to an extreme, as evidenced by the enormous crowds en route. As far as the racing is concerned, anyone can see it better on TV, but the atmosphere of being there is something that is very hard to capture on the box.

Criteriums provide this and more, because you can watch the best riders, as well as having a convenient place to party on into the night. They are for the most part free to watch (except for Draai van der Kaai in Rooosendaal which is 12 euros per person). The good guys win and everyone is happy. There's still an element of unpredicability about them anyway, as most of those watching will not have access to the winner's list.

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Polemic: On The Significance Of The Post-Tour Crits

post tour crits

July 28, 2016 0 Comments

Image: ©CorVos

In the couple of weeks after the Tour, a funny thing happens. Or rather: a whole series of similar funny things happen. In towns around France, Belgium and Holland, some of the biggest stars in road cycling appear, alongside lesser-known local riders, at what are effectively exhibition events. Over the course of an evening, following a couple of warm-up races, members of the pro peloton ride numerous very fast, short-ish laps of the town centre, and then, with a couple of kilometres left, following an agreement made before the “race”, three riders “break away” to fill the podium places. This is the standard “Post-Tour Crit”.

It is easy to dismiss these events. For one thing, not only are they fixed, but everyone – riders, spectators, everyone – knows they are fixed. Organisers agree which riders will appear on the podium in advance of the race, leaning heavily towards the stars of the recently completed Tour. For another thing, the events are very silly : at Monday’s Aalst Criterium, the prize awarded to this year’s maillot jaune Chris Froome for “outsprinting” Greg van Avermaet and Rafal Majka was . . . a big Napoleon hat.

[powr-media-gallery id=e1d32cb2_1469692790]

However, there are one or two issues that are worth noting.

For one thing, Froome’s annual earnings from Team Sky have been estimated (by no less an authority than Sky Sports) at a remarkable £3m (and that was before he won his third Tour). Clearly, then, anyone who wants him to attend their event is going to have to pay a significant amount to make it worth his while (unless, of course, he rode in Aalst simply because he wanted a big hat). It has been suggested that crit organisers will pay the biggest Tour stars the equivalent of around $30,000 a night just to appear.

Where does this money come from? It isn’t hard to figure it out. A post-Tour crit may well be a circus, but guess what: people like circuses . The sight of some of the world’s greatest athletes riding round their local pedestrian precinct is enough to bring the people of small-town northern Europe onto their streets in their thousands. Then, the bunch rides laps so that – in contrast to the Tour – the punters can actually see them going past a few times. So, in simple terms – again in contrast to the Tour – such punters are both stationary for an entire evening and can easily be served with, say, beer and doughnuts. Local beer and doughnut sellers pay organisers handsomely for a spot on the course.

So. Punters get a show, beer and doughnuts. Entrepreneurs pay organisers for access to punters. Organisers pay riders (and other costs), and trouser the difference. Everybody’s happy.

Again, it is easy to sneer. But the reality is that events like these were once the core of professional cycling’s economy. Why do Tour winners traditionally pay all their prize money to their teammates? Is this the selfless gesture of a true sporting hero, born of romantic tradition? No: it’s just good business. Tour prize money was always small beer compared to what the yellow jersey could make on the post-Tour crit circuit. So it makes sense to incentivise your teammates to help you win it. 

So there’s plenty of money in post-Tour cycling action, however fixed and silly. But here’s the thing: criterium racing doesn’t have to be either fixed or silly .

Since 2009, the Pearl Izumi Tour Series, organised by Sweetspot, has been bringing fast, exciting racing action (from both men's and women's pelotons) to Britain’s provincial town and city centres. The FACE Partnership’s London Nocturne has been doing the same for the capital since 2007. Before these, in the 1980s, there was the Kellogg’s series, whose Monday night races in Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Nottingham and Birmingham were a huge hit when shown on the newly-created Channel 4, drawing between two and two-and-a-half million viewers every week.

Another example. 2016 sees the tenth anniversary of the USA Crits Championship Series. But the individual races in the series, and US criterium racing generally, have a much longer history than that: some of the individual events in the series have been running for over a hundred years. They are a full-blown cultural phenomenon, too: races are often combined with music and arts festivals that very effectively showcase host towns, making the whole event even more spectator-friendly, and consequently drawing huge crowds of up to 30,000 people.

A post-Tour crit, as things currently stand, is obviously a circus masquerading as a sporting event. But it is equally obvious that in economic and sporting terms, criterium-style racing has a lot going for it.

We all know that, economically, professional road racing is a mess, at least from the perspective of the teams. Unable to charge entrance fees to roadside spectators, and with no share in cycling’s TV revenues (which are 100% retained by organisers), the teams are (to use Jonathan Vaughters’ term) in “permanent start-up” mode: without stable revenue sources they are dependent on sponsors, who change every couple of years – meaning teams are always scrabbling for new ones. And since sponsors buy the right to name and dress the team as they wish, the teams lack durable identities, which in turn limits their merchandising opportunities.

The teams’ dependence on one source of financing is in part due to the traditional structure of races, running from point-to-point over vast distances. While such races are, of course, often spectacular, they are neither spectator- nor TV-friendly. For spectators the action is over in a few seconds. For TV, following the race across country and up and down mountains, is a pain. Such events are great marketing vehicles in that they get people’s attention and showcase the regions they pass through. But making the most of them is very hard work.

Criterium racing, rather like track cycling (as we argued in a major feature, "Inside Track", in Conquista issue 11 ), solves all these problems, essentially by simply having the riders do laps of a short circuit, and so keeping everything in one place.

Crits could never replace road cycling’s great races. But they needn’t even try. Let the great races, Tour included, serve effectively as marketing for the crits - just like they always have done, and still do today. In the period after the Tour there is a huge appetite for bicycle racing and its stars. There is no reason, other than the historic, why this appetite should not be filled by genuine, all-action, city-centre racing, rather than the WWF-style circus of the post-Tour crits.

This is more or less what happened in triathlon. Originally, the world’s triathlons were run over varying distances to varying rules. But the creation of a governing body, the ITU, brought standardisation and, by virtue of having the athletes swim, cycle and run laps of city centres, made the sport vastly more accessible to spectators and television. Now triathlons bring huge crowds to the centre of cities worldwide – Cape Town, Hamburg, Yokohama and Australia’s Gold Coast are all on the schedule for 2016.

Why can’t cycling do something similar?

One final thing. Every year, the road cycling season is brought to a climax by the UCI Road World Championships. Over the course of a week, a single town plays host to a series of races, culminating on the last weekend in the men’s and women’s elite races. All these races have a distinctive format: the peloton rides a number of kilometres over a cross-country course before arriving in the city centre, where it rides a number of fast laps before reaching the finish line. 

Read that sentence again. City centre . . . fast laps . . . Remind you of anything? This format is well entrenched in cycling’s history, and combines the sporting and economic advantages of both point-to-point and criterium racing. Indeed, the UCI Road World Championships remains by far the governing body’s largest source of revenue.

Could this be the format of a whole new series of events that run through the year, rather than just one annual, year-end jamboree? Every season, the UCI puts on four Track World Cups as well as the Track World Championships. Why not do the same on the road, and share the spoils with the teams – men’s and women’s?

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Dario’s Diario: The Post-Tour Crits

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Our man Dario Cioni signs in after a month of post-Tour recovery – which for a pro means lots of bike riding – but when the menu incldues several of the lucrative criteriums, the racing become a lot more fun …

August 2007

The month that follows the Tour is quite strange for the riders. You find some that will try to maximise their condition, racing as much as possible. Others prefer to take it easy, relax after a month full of stress and take more time with the family and friends, and maybe race a couple of criteriums.

Let’s make an example. During the month of August I raced 4 criteriums with Cadel. The first was in Wien, followed by two in France and ending with one in Holland.

I met Cadel at Malpensa Airport (Milan-Italy) and then we caught the same flight to Wien. By chance there was a flight leaving for Bilbao just 30 minutes before, going from the gate next to ours. Well, when we arrived at the airport we found the whole Lampre team (including Cunego, Ballan, Bruseghin and others) and they called us when they went towards the gate. When we answered that we were not flighing to Bilbao but to Wien for the criterium they were surprised, and well also jealous as a 50Km criterium is a different race from the Classica di San Sebastian.

The Criteriums some positive features, the first being you just go to the start a few hours before the event, not the day before like a normal race. This would save us many days away from home in our racing career. The second is that the atmosphere is fantastic, with a huge amount of spectators and cycling fans. In Wien we rode around the course in a horse drawn cab, stopping at the finish to be presented. Cancellara won the criterium with Cadel finishing 3rd.

The next two crits were in France in the Bordeaux and Limousine regions. Here I was surprised by the amount of people that would come to the criterium, that were not organised in cities but in small villages in the middle of the country. Both courses were hard, including a 1km climb to be repeated 30 or 40 times. The last Criterium was in Holland, very similar to the French ones but with a flat course.

My first official race was Hamburg, but nothing special.

On the private side of life, I have tried staying as long as possible with my wife at home. It was not too hot, and this is the best part of the year to live in my town, as no one is around, the traffic has drastically decreased which makes it very good to train on the road. The only mistake I made once was to ride up to San Gimignano on a Sunday. There the certainly was more traffic than usual…

On the agricultural side I have been checking my wines, as this is the first time I will make my own Chianti wine and things are going very well. We also had some rain after a very dry and sunny July, that has helped to grapes to develop well and get nice and big. Also the olives are growing, bigger and bigger. It is not the best year for quantity but quality should be very good as usual. I will start picking the olives immediately after Lombardy. Yes I am racing until the Tour of Lombardy, still some time to go…

• See Dario’s personal website: CioniDario.com • Buy some of Dario’s own Olive Oil: DarioCioni.com • See the official team website: Davitamon-Lotto.com

ASK DARIO! Gotta question for Dario? Send us your thoughts and ideas, and we’ll choose one (or more if we feel like it) for him to answer with each diary. Send your questions to: [email protected]

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Wiggins: Tour was perfect Olympic TT preparation

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Bradley Wiggins goes into Wednesday's London 2012 time trial with 250km of racing in his legs from Sunday, but after the experience of the Tour de France, he's confident he can cope.

"We've just been at Tour for a month, hanging around the podium, standing up, doing press conferences. Some days we had a couple of hours drive in the bus." Wiggins said. "You've got a 250km race and three days to recover on your backside in a nice hotel."

"The Tour's a great 'worse case scenario' for giving you confidence for the Games."

Wiggins won both time trials in this year's Tour, and is a genuine medal contender, if not out-right favourite, for the Olympic TT. During the Tour's first time trial, 41.5km from Arc-et-Senans to Besancon he beat Sky trade and national team mate Chris Froome by 35 seconds and Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara by 57 seconds.

Current time trial world champion Tony Martin (Germany) was two minutes 16 seconds down after breaking his wrist in a crash on stage one.

In the Tour's final 53.5km time trial, on the penultimate day of the race, Wiggins again beat Chris Froome, this time by one minute 16 seconds. Luis Leon Sanchez (Spain) was third. Both Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin had retired from the race by that point. "That last time trial was the best I've ever done in terms of numbers, and we had some tough days before that."

Usually a Tour rider would head striaight home after three weeks' of racing, and switch off. A few post Tour crits might be in order, but they're for entertainmnet not out-and-out racing.

Once a rider switches off, their performance can plummet, their diet and discipline becomes less strict and their body relaxes. Knowing that the Games followed a few days on from the Tour, the British riders have stayed 'in the zone'.

Team Sky Chef Soren Kristiansen is with the British team, making their food, as are the legions of coaching staff that provide the back-up the riders need so they don't experience a dip in performance.

"Everyone's in great shape," said GB performance director Dave Brailsford. "The Danger at the Tour is going in to descendency. But everyone's come out better than they went in. The question is managing fatigue. They look well and they've ridden the Tour knowing [they'll race the Olympics]."

"Allow [Wiggins] to taper and freshen up and with the rebound affect he can be very confident of being on top of his game."

London 2012: Live text coverage of cycling events

August 1: Men's and women's time trials

July 28: Men's road race

July 29: Women's road race

London 2012: Latest news

Cancellara in, Evans out of time trial

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Bradley Wiggins' UKSI Olympic bike

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Hoy to be GB flag bearer at London 2012 opening ceremony

Millar: I think about Olympics all the time

Cavendish recognises advantage in missed Tour chances ahead of Olympics

Kenny not Hoy selected for London 2012 sprint

German and French Olympic teams sneak in fourth sprinter

Cavendish: GB's best bet for Olympic gold

London 2012: Team info

Men's road race start list

Women's road race start list

Men's time trial start list

Women's time trial start list

Team GB rider profiles

Great Britain track team confirmed

Bronzini leads Italian Olympic cycling team

British Olympic men's road race team announced

Armitstead and Cooke lead GB women's road cycling team

London 2012: Event guides

Olympic time trial routes announced

Olympic Games women's road race: Who will win?

Olympic Games men's road race: Who will win?

Download detailed Olympic road race route map

London 2012 cycling schedule

London 2012: Reports

Cycling events medal table

Women's road race: Armitstead wins silver as Vos strikes gold

Men's road race: Vinokourov wins as Cavendish misses out

London 2012: Photos

Women's road race by Andy Jones

Women's road race by Graham Watson

Men's road race by Andy Jones

Men's road race by Phil O'Connor

Men's road race by Graham Watson

Team GB road race training on Box Hill (July 26)

London 2012: Podcasts

Cycling Weekly podcasts on Soundcloud

London 2012: TV schedule

London 2012 BBC TV cycling coverage schedule

London 2012 Eurosport cycling coverage schedule

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Editor of Cycling Weekly magazine , Simon has been working at the title since 2001. He fell in love with cycling 1989 when watching the Tour de France on Channel 4, started racing in 1995 and in 2000 he spent one season racing in Belgium. During his time at CW (and Cycle Sport magazine) he has written product reviews, fitness features, pro interviews, race coverage and news. He has covered the Tour de France more times than he can remember along with two Olympic Games and many other international and UK domestic races. He became the 130-year-old magazine's 13th editor in 2015.

Former cycling pro Rohan Dennis made his first court appearance for the car crash that killed his wife, Olympian Melissa Hoskins. His bail was extended to August.

By Anne-Marije Rook Published 13 March 24

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By Tom Davidson Published 12 March 24

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post tour crits

Video: Peter Sagan wins as first post-Tour crits already underway

  • July 30, 2018
  • Latest News

post tour crits

Only 24 hours after the Tour de France Paris finale and many of the stars of the event are racing again; this time in the post-Tour crits in Belgium and Holland.

Post-Tour crits held in Belgium, Holland 24 hours after Paris

Just 24 hours had passed since they celebrated the end of the three-week Tour de France, but already the top pros were in post-Tour criterium action.

The crit races are held all over Europe immediately after the Tour, and have been for decades.

Huge appearance money is paid to the top riders to entice them to race. And the classification winners from the Tour compete in their Tour jerseys.

Peter Sagan (Bora-hansgrohe) turned out in his green points classification jersey at the criterium in Aalst, Belgium, where he won the post-Tour crit on Monday evening.

Cheered on by an estimated 55,000 spectators, be beat Yves Lampaert; the Belgian national champion riding for QuickStep taking a close 2nd place.

Dutch champion Mathieu van der Poel (Corendon-Circus) was 3rd on the night. Next came Timothy Dupont (Wanty-Groupe Gobert) just ahead of Thomas De Gendt (Lotto-Soudal).

“I have my sixth green jersey and I am happy to show it today in Aalst,” said Sagan.

“After the final stage on the Champs Elysées, we ate something with the teammates, the supporters and the many sponsors.

“There was no time for a party. I was in bed in time. I view these competitions as rest moments. It is not really full pace.”

post tour crits

The Masters crit in Belgium was won by Johan Museeuw from Dirk De Wolf and Jean-Marie Wampers.

Over in Holland, Tour runner-up Tom Dumoulin was the star turn at the Daags na de Tour criterium in Boxmeer.

He was on the start list for the 80km race with Steven Kruijswijk (LottoNL-Jumbo), who finished fifth overall at the Tour, and his team mate Bram Tankink.

Also riding were Bauke Mollema (Trek-Segafredo) and Laurens ten Dam (Team Sunweb) as well as Team Sky’s Dutchman Wout Poels.

Tankink emerged the winner on the night; beating runner-up Dumoulin and 3rd-placed Mollema in a three-up sprint in the darkness.

There was also a pro women’s race earlier in the evening; Anna van der Breggen of Boels Dolmans taking victory.

She is a huge draw as not only is she the Olympic champion but has also enjoyed a great year so far.

This seasons she has won, among others; Strade Bianche,  the Tour of Flanders, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège.

Peter Sagan wint! #NaTourCriterium #Aalst ? pic.twitter.com/ggix1QLu1B — Sam van Rooy ? (@SamvanRooy1) July 30, 2018
De finish. @bramtankink wint in Boxmeer. Tom Dumoulin tweede en Mollema derde. #daagsnadetour #dg pic.twitter.com/H9dcD4Z0Ez — Guus Daamen (@GuusDaamenLTH) July 30, 2018
Zoek de groene trui @petosagan #criteriumaalst @VTMNIEUWS pic.twitter.com/QwkcgbOAW2 — Soetkin Desloovere (@sdesloovere) July 30, 2018

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I’ve not written here since just after the Giro d’Italia , but I’ve been busy racing. Finding time and energy to knock one of these posts out has been tough. Now that things are in a building phase for me I have a few moments to let you know my thoughts on the Tour de France, the whole doping situation in athletics, rider transfers and why we as riders need comfy aeroplane seats with bags of leg room.

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Italy's Danilo Di Luca, winner of the Giro d'Italia, took victory in the first post-Tour de France...

Italy's Danilo Di Luca, winner of the Giro d'Italia, took victory in the first post-Tour de France criterium in Belgium on Monday in the town of Aalst, edging out current Belgian champion Stijn Devolder in a sprint. The weeks following the Tour are always packed full of criteriums, with fans in Belgium and Holland, the traditional home of the post-Tour crits, coming out in their tens- and some times even hundreds-of-thousands. That was the case in Germany in 1997, the year Jan Ulrich won the Tour, when over 500,000 spectators turned up to the German take part in a 'local' criterium.

For places like Holland and Belgium, where cycling is an imbedded part of the culture, the criteriums are seen as a return to the grass-roots for the riders. Typically junior riders begin their careers in 'races around the church' so to see the biggest professionals come back to race these races is a spectacle for the fans. For the riders, it is always good for their popularity to come back to their home country and meet their fans; of course the hundreds of thousands of Euros in start money on offer doesn't hurt either.

The criteriums begin immediately after the Tour, with some riders effectively racing each day for over four weeks. It is widely known that most of these criteriums are fixed; the winner is determined before the start and the races are ridden to a formula, with riders being told that they may 'attack' but they may only be allowed to spend a certain time off the front before being brought so that the favourite can come to the front and take the win. The year that Marco Pantani won the Tour he also won a post Tour criterium held in Holland, by out sprinting a very well known sprinter, who was seen in the first week of the same Tour fighting for the green jersey.

Post tour criteriums agenda and the riders attending: Monday, July 30 - Boxmeer (Ned): Mauricio Soler (Col), Robert Hunter (RSA), Thomas Dekker (Ned), Michael Boogerd (Ned), Bram de Groot (Ned), Bram Tankink (Ned), Pieter Weening (Ned), Steven de Jongh (Ned), Stef Clement(Ned) and Koos Moerenhout (Ned).

Tuesday, July 31 - Stiphout (Ned): Alberto Contador (Spa), Mauricio Soler (Col), Fabian Cancellara (Zwi), Thomas Dekker (Ned), Pieter Weening (Ned), Bram de Groot (Ned), Steven de Jongh (Ned), Bram Tankink (Ned), Stef Clement (Ned).

Tuesday, July 31 - Diksmuide (Bel): Danilo di Luca (Ita), Tom Boonen (Bel), Gert Steegmans (Bel), Stijn Devolder (Bel) en Frank Vandenbroucke (Bel).

Wednesday, August 1 - Chaam (Ned): Mauricio Soler (Col), Michael Boogerd (Ned), Thomas Dekker (Ned), Bram de Groot (Ned), Steven de Jongh (Ned), Bram Tankink (Ned), Theo Bos (Ned), Michiel Elijzen (Ned), Matthieu Heijboer (Ned), Robert Gesink (Ned), Koen de Kort (Ned) and Bart Wellens (Bel).

Thursday, August 2 - Wateringen (Ned): Mauricio Soler (Col), Stef Clement (Ned), Michael Boogerd (Ned), Thomas Dekker (Ned), Bram de Groot (Ned), Pieter Weening (Ned), Steven de Jongh (Ned), Koen de Kort (Ned), Karsten Kroon (Ned), Theo Bos (Ned), Michiel Elijzen (Ned), Matthieu Heijboer (Ned) and Richard Groenendaal (Ned).

Friday, August 3 - Heerlen (Ned): Thomas Dekker (Ned), Bram de Groot (Ned), Steven de Jongh (Ned) and Koos Moerenhout (Ned).

Saturday, August 4 - Steenwijk (Ned): Gert Steegmans (Bel), Michael Boogerd (Ned), Thomas Dekker (Ned), Pieter Weening (Ned) and Bram de Groot (Ned).

Monday, August 6 - Roosendaal (Ned): Alberto Contador (Ned), Michael Boogerd (Ned), Koos Moerenhout (Ned) and Theo Bos (Ned).

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Post-Tour Criteriums

post tour crits

With the Tour de France over the post-Tour criterium season begins. These are exhibition races put on by entrepreneurial race organisers who seek to capitalise on the high profile of the sport following July. Riders are invited to take part in these races and the stars of the Tour de France command big appearance fees, some can collect €50,000. Not bad for an evening’s work .

History These races have a rich history. For a long time they were an essential part of a rider’s income, for decades the stars of the peloton did not earn much money from either salary nor prize money and instead these criteriums and the cash appearance fees formed a big part of a rider’s income. The public would flock to the races because even those who were lucky enough to see the Tour de France ride past in July only caught a glimpse of the champions, a criterium meant repeated laps of a circuit where the crowd could see the riders up close again and again, especially in the days of early television coverage.

Money It was also a form a patronage where a star rider would insist that lesser riders take part and collect appearance money, often earning vital income. These invitee riders could be team mates but also others who’d done a good turn in the Tour de France. There are fewer races today but in times past a rider who had a good Tour de France could spend weeks on the road, driving from one event to the next with their bike and a change of clothes. Today the number of events is drying up. We’re a long way from the days when champion cyclists could pack out a velodrome, the post-Tour criteriums don’t hold the same appeal either. People can see the show on TV, appearance fees are subject to wrangling and some teams don’t want their riders to take part, for example Movistar have blocked Nairo Quintana . But there are still many races and last night’s Aaslt criterium in Belgium looks popular.

The economics means a captive crowd pays for tickets to enter the circuit or a race gets intensive local sponsorship, often hundreds of small shops who each chip in €50 in return for a symbolic advert in race programme as well as more money from the municipality – the mayor gets a photo op with the champ – as well as corporate sponsors. There’s a circular logic where a race that attracts more stars will attract more people and therefore more sponsorship which allows more stars to be hired for the evening.

The Rules In the past these have been unofficial races but most are now registered on the UCI calendar because pros are supposedly forbidden from riding wildcat races. Despite the UCI registration it’s all a show. No teams take part, just riders on an individual basis. There’s no support either, riders make their own way to the race and take the bike out of the back of a the car and pump up the tires themselves.

The link to the Tour is obvious, no more than when riders who wore distinctive jerseys from the Tour de France wear them. For example Chris Froome sported his sequinned yellow jersey from Paris last night. Other riders who have done well in the Tour are also in demand, for example in Belgium we can imagine Jan Bakelants is in demand while in France Christophe Riblon is a draw. Sometimes locals amateurs take part too, helping to swell the ranks on the cheap and provide some regional flavour.

The format is simple, a short loop in town that allows the spectators to see the riders pass by many times, usually over an hour. There will be amateur races before plus some other exhibition events, maybe a race of retired riders. There’s often a victory lap and maybe some other event, a beer festival or a music concert too.

1-2-3 These “races” are normally fixed, the result is determined by the riders in concert with the organiser. The public have come to see a show and they’ll see some famous riders attacking before the big names dispute the finish. Here you’ll often see a climber out-sprint the sprinters, all in the name of a “dramatic” result. The unspoken rule is that the local rider never wins because this would be too obvious.

It’s not as wrong as you think, imagine if you went to see a race and the regional kermesse lord chopped the Tour de France winner on the final bend to grab the win, this lèse-majesté would disappoint and undermine the sport’s hierarchy. Just because it’s fixed doesn’t mean it’s not fast, after all the show looks even better when riders hit 50km/h and if it’s not ideal training, it’s still a workout but hardest part is the travel and being forced into taking snack food on the go.

The best laid plans In the late 1970s one amateur thwarted the pros. This rider was so strong he was hurting the pros. Frustrated at the strong riding the pros had words and decided to gang up on the amateur but the rookie hit back, dropping them. His name? Bernard Hinault, a future five time Tour de France winner.

All year It’s criterium season now but they’re not exclusive to late July. You’ll find races throughout the season in France, Belgium and beyond.

More Cycle Sport Mag have a good piece about a “Day In the Life” of Robbie McEwen from 2011 .

Comments on this entry are closed.

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Laurens ten Dam is cruising the Dutch criteriums with his Chevy van, sleeping on nearby campings with his girlfriend and son. BBQing every night I presume. Like the way he does this.

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More reasons to root for Laurens!

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Facial hair, KOM of Ventoux on Strava and a campervan. LtD is rising in my esteem all the time.

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Really timely article Inrng – thanks! I was just wondering yesterday what the deal is with criteriums now and no one seems to talk about it. I was aware of what things were like 20-30 years ago from reading books, but not these days. So does the likes of Chris Froome and the other jerseys really drive themselves around Europe for the next month with their bikes in their cars?! (or something like it) Sky would probably shuttle Froomie around in style I imagine. I love the idea of him doing it on his own with a floor pump, some snack bars and his sparkle jersey!

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I love the image of Froome camping in a field next to a little crappy car and washing his sequined yellow jersey in a stream.

More likely he’s getting paid enough to be driven around and stay in some nice hotels though.

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Froome and his fiancee would be driving around in the New Jaguar V6 F type leased to him with the ugly Sky paint job (small price to pay for being given the green light for the post-tour criteriums. Apparently, a unpainted right hand drive one would be waiting for him once he come back to UK).

Hopefully they are not stuffing Porte in the uncomfortable back seat (Okay, there weren’t any back seats).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-2373371/Tour-France-2013-Chris-Froome-given-new-Jaguar-F-Type.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

P.S. Can’t remember whether it’s left/right hand drive in Monaco.

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Richie would definitely be in the driving seat 🙂

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Let’s hope it doesn’t break down like the team car did on the way to Alpe d’Huez.

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he he! Like 🙂

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I personally love these events. There was a pre-tour one in London (the “IG Nocturne”) that featured most of the Great Britain women’s track team (the likes of Jo Rowsell, Laura Trott, Dani King) as well as Dowsett and Intxausti, who’d both just had decent rides in the Giro.

Great fun, what’s not to like? Beer, close up ‘racing’ and (in the case of the Nocturne) a penny farthing and Brompton race!

' src=

In theory, the London Nocturne was a proper race, unlike the traditional post-Tour fixes. I say “in theory”, because it seems the organisers got a bit confused and temporarily awarded Laura Trott the win in the women’s race, as she was undoubtedly the star turn, even though she actually finished second.

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“temporarily awarded Laura Trott the win in the women’s race, as she was undoubtedly the star turn, even though she actually finished second.”

Acutally they did award Trott the win. When the replay showed that she was second, they relegated the rider who won, into second place, for taking her hands off the bars when she celebrated…. LOL

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A friend of mine who was at the Nocturne and has some inside information told me that Laura Trott was named as the winner because the (incompetent) announcer immediately called it her way on the night, before viewing the finish-line photo or the transponder data. Whether it’s a coincidence that she rides for one of the event’s main sponsors I’m not sure. Certainly my friends felt Team Wiggle Honda employed dubious tactics based on strength (literally) of numbers and weren’t called to account by the organisers.

To be fair – and factual – Wiggle Honda had the same number of riders as one or other of Matrix Fitness or MG – MaxiFuel, in the race – namely 8 riders.

I know, but they subsequently reinstated Hannah Barnes, hence “temporarily”. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/22920080

Some refreshing honesty here from Froome here: “…there’s good start money…” http://sporza.be/cm/sporza/wielrennen/130722_criterium_aalst_froome

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ooops! On the 3rd of the 4 vids Roger De Vlaeminck asking Porte if he knows who he is; giving him a list of the classics he raced and won. I knew that Froome was quite ignorant in this area in comparison to Wiggins who is an absolute encyclopedia on cycling history. Is the rest of the Sky team as ill educated or is it that De Vlaeminck is still bitter after all these years basking in Merckx’s shadow?

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Porte comes from a small regional city in Tasmania and came to cycling in his early twenties after a stint as a triathlete.

He’s unlikely to have seen any race other than the Tour de France broadcast on television as a youth.

The British riders like Wiggins, G, Swifty, Kennaugh etc, are all well steeped in cycling history, as I’m sure are most of the other guys on the team. A couple of exceptions are the likes of Froome and EBH (who had to be told who Eddy Merckx is).

No different from most other teams, I’m sure.

I know some people might find this difficult to believe but not all riders pour over old videos and read every cycling book ever published, like some fans do

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Britain has a series of criterium races as a championship that’s growing in popularity. See also the Redhook Crit series that holds events across the globe. Very fast past, exciting racing that is ideal for an audience’s bang-for-buck.

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Those are real events, the same with the Bay Series in Australia too and a good way to take the race to the public. The post-Tour races, as pictured above, are part sports, part celebrity spectacles and certainly different.

I would love to be in France right now following these events. What better way to spend the summer.

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part of the reason I’m thinking of moving to Europe after I finish school

' src=

Why was Quintana blocked by Movistar? No Movistar riders participating at all?

' src=

Contract struggles apparently. Has to be rather serious if the resort to this. Not nice.

In all fairness it is the Clásica de San Sebastián on Saturday, and then there are only a few weeks until the Vuelta so this is the arguably the biggest time of year for the Spanish teams.

Quintana won’t ride the Vuelta, though. And i do think that the Tour is much bigger for Movistar than the Vuelta. Don’t know how much they care for a basque race, maybe not that much.

' src=

Well they won Pais Vasco and Klasika Primavera so..

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“Chris Froome sported his sequined yellow jersey from Paris last night.” Really? Sequins? I thought the see-through stuff worn by SKY was ugly enough! Where are the UCI rule makers when we really need them?

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yeah, god forbid you have a manufacturer’s sticker w/ world champ rainbow down by the bottom bracket or a TT saddle half-a-degree off… “J’ACCUSE!”

but sequins on the maillot jaune or head to toe polka dot kit that makes you look like a “Before” picture in a Proactiv infomercial… “I see NOTHING!”

Geez, did you have to remind of the guy someone described as “Mr. Spotty Pants”? Call me old-school, retro, whatever you like, but the see-through jersey, ANYTHING with sequins, and polka-dot shorts should be prohibited by UCI mandate.

polka dot sequins… didn’t they open for ziggy stardust era Bowie?

In Sky and Froome’s defence, the yellow jersey he was premiered with at the final ceremony in Paris DID feature tiny sequins, or crystals. Think the preview of the final stage on this site even mentioned that with a picture.

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If you look carefully, you can see that he was wearing the bling bling jersey throughout the final stage.

http://www.teamsky.com/gallery/0,27401,17548_8834899,00.html#photo=3

is Cav still un-invited to the Dutch Kermesses after officially not riding into Veelers?

c’mon, every wrestling match has to have a masked El Hijo del Santo…

He’s not on the start list for the Raboronde Heerlen this year, but Veelers is. It’s a shame – I saw Cav there a couple of years ago and got some nice photos. It would have been good to see a rematch on the mean streets of Heerlen…..

Kind of difficult for him to be un-invited as he’d never been invited to this crit in the first place. Nice PR stunt by the organisers.

Obviously way off topic here, but I was wondering if anyone can answer some questions for me. CAS just ruled that the UV treatments that an un-named rider (Kittel) did weren’t banned at the time so he is ok. From what I understand, he removed his blood, treated it under UV light (no idea what this does so if someone can shed light, please do) then re-infused it into his body…. Isn’t this a blood transfusion? And I thought those were illegal except for medical procedures?????

For every question, inrng has already covered the answer (in this case 18 months ago!)… http://inrng.com/2012/01/blood-irradiation-explained/

Didn’t mean for that to be anonymous BTW

Note it was not banned but it is now.

Yeah I read that. But can you answer the question of is it a blood transfusion? Isn’t this what Armstrong and Hamilton and others did when they would take out blood, freeze or refrigerate it and then re-infuse it? I thought that practice was illegal so how is this different?

With this UV scanning the blood is irradiated and then put back in. With blood doping in sports the blood is drained off, the red blood cells are separated and then stored for weeks or more so they can be infused at a later date, therefore adding the to count of red blood cells and increasing the ability to transport more oxygen.

Thank you for the info!

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The difference is time: if you take blood out, wait for your body to bring the red blood cell (RBC’s) count up to normal levels, then add back in the RBC’s you took out, you have more RBC’s, and thus more ability to convert oxygen to power for a period following the transfusion.

If you take blood out, “clean” it with UV light, and then immediately put back in the blood, you don’t increase your RBC count. I think this is pseudo-science, and maybe even dangerous to the rider if the UV light damages the DNA in the blood cells that are put under the light… but it shouldn’t have any significant impact on RBC level.

As stated above, all covered in Inrng’s earlier post.

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Cavendish accelerated, came around Veelers to handle him a tackle on his right arm that took him straight down into the tarmac. He could have killed the guy. The biggest shame is on the organizers who didn’t take him out of the Tour.

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This is a little bit off-topic, but here goes (from Twitter, obviously):

>Robbie McEwen ‏@mcewenrobbie What happened with @MarkCavendish & Veelers was an accident. Cav sprinting & Veelers looking down drifted right.

>Mark Cavendish ‏@MarkCavendish Can all sprint experts on twitter go & try flicking their bike right at 65kph without leaning your body left to balance & come back to me.

I think you’ll find the commissaires made the right call.

I tend to agree, it was unfortunate but an accident. Sprinting is an aggressive situation but this was something that went wrong rather than an attack.

Watch the video, judge for yourselves. I am not a Cavendish hater, but this just isn’t unfortunate. It’s deliberate.

http://www.eurosport.se/cykel/tour-de-france/2013/dramatik-nar-kittel-spurtvann-cavendish-kan-diskas-for-tackling_sto3835610/story.shtml

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I’m off to the cantal for a week, there’s a local hamlet called Marcoles that hosts a criterium each summer. Last year I saw Voeckler and Rolland, this year it’s Gilbert. Great fun! My question is, why can a village in France manage it but the city of Manchester can’t. It seems to me the cycle events in England avoid population centres, but that’s surely where the money is?

You’re right that some of these races do happen in very small places, they’re often in towns and not big cities.

Thanks for the explanation of the crits and for the link to the cycle mag page really interesting.

I love the thought that McEwan downs a pint at the finish line……….Good Call! though I suspect it was a Belgian Trappist beer rather than the amber liquid he’s probably partial too!

While I’m here …excellent coverage by The Inner Ring during The Tour as ever btw, required reading before and after every stage. Many thanks for your efforts, much appreciated.

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Cool! Froome is coming to town Friday…and Kittel…and Purito! Don’t care who wins! Everyone knows they are fixed! Always a good atmosphere though! Had VIP tickets a few yrs ago…hung out with a crowd of boring, pretentious types…no longer interested in VIP tickets! Much more fun hanging out with non-VIP’s!

VIP tickets always go to those sort!

Is there a directory of criteria with named riders, if any of us happened to be in europe at this preciser moment and fancied a bit of Jeremy Roy tearing up a sprint?

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Being a long time fan of the Tour Series in the UK (which are very definitely real races), I’ve been slightly baffled by reports that Chris Froome won a crit a couple of days ago. I mean, honestly… how? He’s totally the wrong kind of rider. But after reading your report it all makes sense. I’d never realised the post-Tour crits were fixed. Thanks.

And while I’m here – a big thank you for your Tour coverage. Always balanced and considered – the only one I read every day.

is the Ride London Classic part of the crit circus? (ok I know it’s not a circuit etc). Just wondered if it will be a real race or whether a Sagan win in already decided?

Both! The Ride London classic is a real race, but a Sagan win is already pretty much already decided!

It’s got a proper 1.1 classification, so it’s not a crit.

And like most 1.1 races, there’s a huge contingent of Pro-Conti and Conti teams there to challenge the big boys and keep the racing honest.

Also, the finish is on the Mall. If it comes down to a sprint, Arnaud Demare, Gerald Ciolek, Matty Goss and Romain Feillu (all of whom are in the current long list) might have something up their sleeves.

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Thanks for the great explanation, wish we could see these in the states. What happens when you have competitors at the same race e.g. if Contador showed up at the same crit as Froome?

All decided by the race organiser who would tell the riders the finishing 1-2-3 order they want, the intermediate sprint winners etc. This year, they’d say Froome to win over Bert.

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2024 Players Championship predictions, picks: Four long shot bets to win at TPC Sawgrass

THE PLAYERS Championship occupies a pivotal spot in the golf calendar.

Not only is it known as the “fifth major” because of the strength of its field, iconic course and status as the PGA Tour’s flagship event, but THE PLAYERS is also the unofficial jumping-off point of the major championship season.

The Masters is just a month away. 

Defending champion Scottie Scheffler (+500) is the clear betting favorite at TPC Sawgrass after his win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and there is a decent gap between him and the second-favorite, Rory McIlroy, at +1200.

There’s also a jump between McIlroy and the next tier, which includes Xander Schauffele (+2000), Justin Thomas (+2200), Viktor Hovland (+2500), Patrick Cantlay (+2500) and Max Homa (+2800).

One of the reasons punters love events like THE PLAYERS is that, because of the strength of the field, you can often catch terrific numbers on some big names who may be flying under the radar for one reason or another.

That’ll be the focus of my betting card.

The Englishman was a trendy pick to win last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, but he burned his backers by shooting a 10 on the par-5 sixth hole and that was that.

Fleetwood is now being offered at double the price at a course where he’s posted a couple of top-10s and has only missed the cut once in six attempts.

If you put the API aside, it’s already been a strong year for Fleetwood with a win in Dubai and a T-10 at the Genesis, so I’ve got no problem drawing a line through last week (and overlooking that he still hasn’t won in the United States). 

It might feel as if it’s been a quiet season for Finau, but it’s actually kind of strange that he’s flying this far under the radar in this field.

Finau hasn’t threatened to win an event in 2024, but he’s finished inside the top-25 in four of his six starts this year and posted a T-6 at Torrey Pines.

His history at THE PLAYERS isn’t anything to write home about with four missed cuts in seven trips, but two of those were in his first two starts at TPC Sawgrass and he’s coming off a T-19 in 2023.

Simply put, Finau is good enough to be worth a punt at this number.

Things have not come easy for Im over the past calendar year, but he did show some flashes last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

He was hanging around the leaderboard for a good chunk of the weekend, but a poor Sunday doomed him and he wound up finishing a respectable T-18.

It was the kind of performance that put Im in a sweet spot for longshot punters.

It was good enough to make you wonder if he was beginning to find some form, but it wasn’t noteworthy enough to get bookmakers’ attention.

We’ll take it and hope we can beat the market to Im’s inevitable upward trend. 

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This is simply a play on Rose’s history at THE PLAYERS.

The Englishman isn’t in any sort of form at the moment, but he’s got three top-10 finishes at Bay Hill since 2014 and posted a T-6 a year ago.

Rose has been a mixed bag in 2024, but he’s 13 months removed from his last win on the PGA Tour, so he’s worth a shot at a course that fits his game.  

Commercial Content. 21+. Action Network is the official betting partner of the New York Post, which edits this content.

2024 Players Championship predictions, picks: Four long shot bets to win at TPC Sawgrass

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Post-Tour crits; Sky tops Tour prize winnings: Daily News Digest

Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! >","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}'>Download the app .

Welcome to your Daily News Digest. Here’s what’s happening today:

The Tour de France has ended, but the professional cycling season is very much not over. The fall classics season gets underway this weekend with San Sebastian, followed by the European world championships and, of course, the Vuelta a Espana. At La Vuelta, we’ll see many of the Tour GC contenders that dropped out early in the race and many riders who rode the Giro d’Italia. Movistar will also be sending its trident — Mikel Landa, Nairo Quintana, and Alejandro Valverde — to the Spanish Grand Tour.

Story of the day: The unofficial fourth week

Yes, the Tour de France is over. However, there is a special unofficial fourth week — the post-Tour crits.

Geraint Thomas (Sky) and many of the other stars of the 2018 Tour will bounce around Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands this week, participating in various evening criterium races. Riders are paid appearance fees to these nighttime criteriums and, depending on the rider, can sometimes make close to six-figures per race.

The tradition of the post-Tour criteriums goes back many decades. The races used to be a necessity for the Tour riders, as they used the criteriums to bolster their yearly earnings. Riders would pack up their bikes and hit the criterium circuit right after the end of the Tour for a couple of weeks. They would be paid appearance fees just like today and would sometimes be able to double their yearly salary. Now riders only make a few appearances and most of the criteriums are the week after the Tour ends.

post tour crits

The races are huge nighttime parties, draw upwards of 10,000 fans, and are well-known for being pre-decided beforehand. A few years ago, a top German amateur beat Tour riders Nikias Arndt and Frank Schleck as things didn’t go according to plan during the race . Most races have a rider’s meeting before the start where the final results are decided, as well as who wins each prime and when people will attack.

Dispatches from the Tour

No sign of technological fraud at Tour, says UCI

The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) carried out over 3,000 tests through magnetic scanning, X-rays and thermal imaging in its fight against mechanical doping during the Tour de France and said on Monday that all tests came back negative. Tests were conducted before, during, and after the stages.

“The objective is to eliminate suspicion, and to show the public and all of cycling’s stakeholders, including investors, that our sport is credible,” UCI President David Lappartient said in a press release . “We will continue to work in this regard, to ensure that cycling’s positive reputation is guaranteed.”

The UCI said 2,852 tests were carried out at the start of each stage using magnetic scanning technology ( ed. Ipad method), and 164 tests were carried out on bikes at the end of stages using the UCI’s new X-ray machine.

TDF prize purse: Team Sky first, EF-Drapac last

Team Sky easily took home the most prize money from the 2018 Tour de France, thanks to Geraint Thomas’ overall victory and two stage wins, and Chris Froome’s third place. The British-based squad will leave France with 728,630 euros in prize money, while EF Education First-Drapac finished last on the prize list, taking home just 14,420 euros.

post tour crits

A total of 2,272,750 euros (USD$2,648,275/AUD$3,593,056) was distributed throughout the three-week race. Prize money was awarded for stage wins, wearing a leader’s jersey, winning intermediate sprints points, and taking King of the Mountain spots. Thomas took home 500,000 euros for winning the overall title and Froome got 100,000 euros for third. Tom Dumoulin and Team Sunweb were second on the total prize list with the Dutchman taking home 245,280 euros due to his second-place finish.

Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) and Julian Alaphilippe (Quick-Step Floors) each won 25,000 euros for taking home the green and polka-dot jerseys, while Pierre Latour (AG2R La Mondiale) won 20,000 euros as the best young rider. Dan Martin (UAE Team Emirates) also won 20,000 euros as the Tour’s most aggressive rider and Movistar was awarded 20,000 euros for winning the team classification.

The prize money is usually split evenly among the riders and staff.

Tour de France final prize list: 2,272,750 euros (US $2,648,275) divided among 22 teams #TDF2018 pic.twitter.com/EIjXgoTopv — Neal Rogers (@nealrogers) July 29, 2018

Christian Eiking wins at Wallonia

Odd Christian Eiking (Wanty-Groupe Gobert) captured the third stage of the Tour de Wallonia in solo fashion with a blistering attack four kilometres from the line. The Norwegian rider took advantage of the hilly parcours in the finale and hesitation in the peloton to take the victory in La Roche-en-Ardenne.

Tim Wellens (Lotto-Soudal) retained the yellow leader’s jersey by finishing eighth on the stage.

Très belle victoire de Odd Christian Eiking @TeamWantyGobert à La Roche dans la 3e étape du #TRW2018 pic.twitter.com/vVmLPsdcpJ — Tour de Wallonie & GP Wallonie (@tourdewallonie) July 30, 2018

Brown, Toovey take overall titles at Battle Recharge

Grace Brown (Holden Team Gusto) and Ayden Toovey (Bennelong-Swiss Wellness) have taken overall victories at Battle Recharge, the second event in Australia’s National Road Series (NRS) for 2018. Less than a fortnight after finishing 21st at La Course, Brown took a solo victory in Friday’s opening road stage before finishing second on stage 2. She won the stage 3 individual time trial as well, before defending her lead in the final stage criterium. She now leads the NRS’s individual classification.

post tour crits

Former Trek-Segafredo stagiaire Toovey, meanwhile, took second in the opening road stage, then moved into the overall lead on stage 2. He was within two seconds of a stage win in the time trial, before winning the final stage and the race overall.

The NRS continues on August 15 with the Tour of the Great South Coast (men only), and then the Sam Miranda Tour of the King Valley (men and women) on August 31.

Follow the link for full results from the 2018 Battle Recharge .

Transcontinental leaders moving at a blistering pace

The sixth edition of the Transcontinental ultra-endurance race across Europe started on Sunday, and already there’s been a break to the front by some of the race favourites. The 3,800-kilometre race started on the cobbles of Belgium and with the race barely fifteen hours in, the leading riders were already mostly across France and about to head into Germany as they rode toward the first checkpoint in Austria.

The riders out front included 2017 winner James Hayden and second-placed Bjorn Lenhard. However, one of last year’s top contenders was missing. Jonas Goy’s attention was turned elsewhere, as it’s not long since Goy and first female finisher Melissa Pritchard welcomed their first baby into the world and this year the start of the race provided another life-changing moment .

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Transcontinental (@thetranscontinental)

The first riders are expected to start to trickle into the finish line in Meteora Greece from August 5. You can follow the journey via live tracking and find more information on the Transcontinental website .

post tour crits

James Huang went to Italy and climbed the famous Gavia Pass to learn about Giant’s new Defy range and test of the range’s top model.

The previous-generation Defy range broke new ground in 2014 by being the first complete range of endurance road bikes from a major manufacturer to exclusively offer disc brakes. James finds that the new Defy Advanced family rides much more smoothly and is a little more versatile than before, and even includes a Giant-developed dual-sided power meter as standard equipment on the top-end model.

Click through to read our full review of the Giant Defy Advanced Pro 0 .

Merida’s new Mission CX replaces Cyclo Cross platform

post tour crits

The new Mission CX is Merida’s wholly new cyclocross platform. With a UCI approved sticker and space for just 35c rubber, the new Mission CX platform is purpose built with cyclocross racing in mind. It’s available with both carbon and aluminium frame options and replaces the Taiwanese company’s long-standing, and, aptly named, Cyclo Cross range.

The wholly new frames offer front and rear fender support via a removable seat-stay bridge and a revised geometry offers improved toe clearance. The carbon frame is claimed to weight under 900g in a medium, with the aluminium at a less impressive 1,622g figure. Both frames will share the same full-carbon 402g tapered fork, an item that uses a flat-mount brake calliper and 12mm thru-axle, just like the rear.

Sitting at the top of the range is the Mission CX 8000, featuring the new carbon frame and Ultegra Di2 shifting, the latter using the new clutch-equipped RX rear derailleur . The 8000-E shares the same frame and is equipped with SRAM Force 1, and the 5000 with SRAM Apex 1. Lower-level alloy models, designated by three digits, are available too.

Moving pictures

The Roglic story: from Telemark to Tour Glory

LottoNL-Jumbo has released a documentary on Primoz Roglic about how he switched from being a top ski jumper to top-5 Tour de France finisher. Roglic captured fourth overall at the 2018 Tour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwyzXfwdw04

Prudential Ride London Classique highlights

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best bike tech that only belgians have access to\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/velofollies-best-bike-tech-belgian-brands\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"the best bike tech that only belgians have access to\"}}\u0027>\n the best bike tech that only belgians have access to\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"vittoria\u2019s new gravel tires are their fastest yet\u2026 thanks to rice husks and recycled fishnets","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/gravel\/gravel-gear\/vittoria-terreno-pro-t60-mixed-taipei\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/gravel\/gravel-gear\/vittoria-terreno-pro-t60-mixed-taipei\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"vittoria\u2019s new gravel tires are their fastest yet\u2026 thanks to rice husks and recycled fishnets\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/gravel\/gravel-gear\/vittoria-terreno-pro-t60-mixed-taipei\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"vittoria\u2019s new gravel tires are their fastest yet\u2026 thanks to rice husks and recycled fishnets\"}}\u0027>\n vittoria\u2019s new gravel tires are their fastest yet\u2026 thanks to rice husks and recycled fishnets\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"randoms, part two: taipei cycle show 2024","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/randoms-part-two-taipei-cycle-show-2024\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/randoms-part-two-taipei-cycle-show-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"randoms, part two: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/randoms-part-two-taipei-cycle-show-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"randoms, part two: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n randoms, part two: taipei cycle show 2024\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"\u2018it\u2019s bittersweet\u2019: top reactions from mcnulty, evenepoel, vingegaard, and more","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/historic-podiums-surprise-winners-top-reactions-from-mcnulty-evenepoel-vingegaard-and-more\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/historic-podiums-surprise-winners-top-reactions-from-mcnulty-evenepoel-vingegaard-and-more\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"\u2018it\u2019s bittersweet\u2019: top reactions from mcnulty, evenepoel, vingegaard, and more\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/historic-podiums-surprise-winners-top-reactions-from-mcnulty-evenepoel-vingegaard-and-more\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"\u2018it\u2019s bittersweet\u2019: top reactions from mcnulty, evenepoel, vingegaard, and more\"}}\u0027>\n \u2018it\u2019s bittersweet\u2019: top reactions from mcnulty, evenepoel, vingegaard, and more\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"l-twoo aims to offer electronic groupset performance at a budget price: taipei cycle show 2024","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/l-twoo-drivetrains-taipei-2024\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/l-twoo-drivetrains-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"l-twoo aims to offer electronic groupset performance at a budget price: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/l-twoo-drivetrains-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"l-twoo aims to offer electronic groupset performance at a budget price: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n l-twoo aims to offer electronic groupset performance at a budget price: taipei cycle show 2024\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"\u2018all options are open\u2019: out-of-contract jasper philipsen kick-starts peloton-wide chase for world\u2019s fastest sprinter","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/all-options-are-open-out-of-contract-jasper-philipsen-kick-starts-peloton-wide-chase-for-worlds-fastest-sprinter\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/all-options-are-open-out-of-contract-jasper-philipsen-kick-starts-peloton-wide-chase-for-worlds-fastest-sprinter\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"\u2018all options are open\u2019: out-of-contract jasper philipsen kick-starts peloton-wide chase for world\u2019s fastest sprinter\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/all-options-are-open-out-of-contract-jasper-philipsen-kick-starts-peloton-wide-chase-for-worlds-fastest-sprinter\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"\u2018all options are open\u2019: out-of-contract jasper philipsen kick-starts peloton-wide chase for world\u2019s fastest sprinter\"}}\u0027>\n \u2018all options are open\u2019: out-of-contract jasper philipsen kick-starts peloton-wide chase for world\u2019s fastest sprinter\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"americans shine at paris-nice: matteo jorgenson celebrates breakout victory, brandon mcnulty saves 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"},{"title":"has pro cycling maxed-out on caffeine","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-training\/has-pro-cycling-maxed-out-on-caffeine\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-training\/has-pro-cycling-maxed-out-on-caffeine\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"has pro cycling maxed-out on caffeine\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-training\/has-pro-cycling-maxed-out-on-caffeine\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"has pro cycling maxed-out on caffeine\"}}\u0027>\n has pro cycling maxed-out on caffeine\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"meet danielle ravnikar, the nfl cheerleader turned gravel racer","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/gravel\/gravel-racing\/meet-danielle-ravnikar-the-nfl-cheerleader-turned-gravel-racer\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/gravel\/gravel-racing\/meet-danielle-ravnikar-the-nfl-cheerleader-turned-gravel-racer\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"meet danielle ravnikar, the nfl cheerleader turned gravel racer\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/gravel\/gravel-racing\/meet-danielle-ravnikar-the-nfl-cheerleader-turned-gravel-racer\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"meet danielle ravnikar, the nfl cheerleader turned gravel racer\"}}\u0027>\n meet danielle ravnikar, the nfl cheerleader turned gravel racer\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"jonas vingegaard stomps rivals, mark cavendish misses time cut at tirreno-adriatico","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/jonas-vingegaard-stomps-rivals-to-top-tirreno-adriatico\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/jonas-vingegaard-stomps-rivals-to-top-tirreno-adriatico\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"jonas vingegaard stomps rivals, mark cavendish misses time cut at tirreno-adriatico\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/jonas-vingegaard-stomps-rivals-to-top-tirreno-adriatico\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"jonas vingegaard stomps rivals, mark cavendish misses time cut at tirreno-adriatico\"}}\u0027>\n jonas vingegaard stomps rivals, mark cavendish misses time cut at tirreno-adriatico\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"new race, familiar names: sofia gomez villafa\u00f1e and keegan swenson win valley of 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tears\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"evenepoel cannot shake up soggy gc as mcnulty holds on at paris-nice: \u2018the race is far from over\u2019","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/paris-nice-evenepoel-cannot-shake-up-soggy-gc-as-mcnulty-barely-holds-lead\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/paris-nice-evenepoel-cannot-shake-up-soggy-gc-as-mcnulty-barely-holds-lead\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"evenepoel cannot shake up soggy gc as mcnulty holds on at paris-nice: \u2018the race is far from over\u2019\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/paris-nice-evenepoel-cannot-shake-up-soggy-gc-as-mcnulty-barely-holds-lead\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"evenepoel cannot shake up soggy gc as mcnulty holds on at paris-nice: \u2018the race is far from over\u2019\"}}\u0027>\n evenepoel cannot shake up soggy gc as mcnulty holds on at paris-nice: \u2018the race is far from over\u2019\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"rim brakes aren\u2019t dead thanks to the wheeltop eds-tx wireless drivetrain: taipei cycle show 2024","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/wheeltop-eds-tx-taipei-2024\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/wheeltop-eds-tx-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"rim brakes aren\u2019t dead thanks to the wheeltop eds-tx wireless drivetrain: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/wheeltop-eds-tx-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"rim brakes aren\u2019t dead thanks to the wheeltop eds-tx wireless drivetrain: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n rim brakes aren\u2019t dead thanks to the wheeltop eds-tx wireless drivetrain: taipei cycle show 2024\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"how matteo jorgenson won paris-nice: \u2018i saw hesitation between remco and primo\u017e\u2019","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/matteo-jorgenson-paris-nice-victory-huge-me-us-cycling\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/matteo-jorgenson-paris-nice-victory-huge-me-us-cycling\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"how matteo jorgenson won paris-nice: \u2018i saw hesitation between remco and primo\u017e\u2019\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/matteo-jorgenson-paris-nice-victory-huge-me-us-cycling\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"how matteo jorgenson won paris-nice: \u2018i saw hesitation between remco and primo\u017e\u2019\"}}\u0027>\n how matteo jorgenson won paris-nice: \u2018i saw hesitation between remco and primo\u017e\u2019\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"power analysis: what it took for matteo jorgenson and brandon mcnulty to stand atop paris-nice","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/power-analysis-paris-nice-2024-matteo-jorgenson-brandon-mcnulty\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/power-analysis-paris-nice-2024-matteo-jorgenson-brandon-mcnulty\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"power analysis: what it took for matteo jorgenson and brandon mcnulty to stand atop paris-nice\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/power-analysis-paris-nice-2024-matteo-jorgenson-brandon-mcnulty\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"power analysis: what it took for matteo jorgenson and brandon mcnulty to stand atop paris-nice\"}}\u0027>\n power analysis: what it took for matteo jorgenson and brandon mcnulty to stand atop paris-nice\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"three of our favorite cargo bikes: taipei cycle show 2024","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/ebike\/ebike-gear\/cargo-bikes-taipei-2024\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/ebike\/ebike-gear\/cargo-bikes-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"three of our favorite cargo bikes: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/ebike\/ebike-gear\/cargo-bikes-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"three of our favorite cargo bikes: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n three of our favorite cargo bikes: taipei cycle show 2024\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"big weekend takeaways: jorgenson\u2019s diy pathway to the top, evenepoel\u2019s strategic blunder","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/big-weekend-takeaways-jorgensons-gritty-road-to-the-top-evenepoels-strategic-misfire\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/big-weekend-takeaways-jorgensons-gritty-road-to-the-top-evenepoels-strategic-misfire\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"big weekend takeaways: jorgenson\u2019s diy pathway to the top, evenepoel\u2019s strategic blunder\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/big-weekend-takeaways-jorgensons-gritty-road-to-the-top-evenepoels-strategic-misfire\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"big weekend takeaways: jorgenson\u2019s diy pathway to the top, evenepoel\u2019s strategic blunder\"}}\u0027>\n big weekend takeaways: jorgenson\u2019s diy pathway to the top, evenepoel\u2019s strategic blunder\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "},{"title":"randoms, part three: taipei cycle show 2024","url":"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/randoms-part-3-taipei-2024\/","markup":" \n \n\n\n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/randoms-part-3-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"randoms, part three: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \n\n \n \n >\", \"path\": \"https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-gear\/randoms-part-3-taipei-2024\/\", \"listing_type\": \"recirc\", \"location\": \"list\", \"title\": \"randoms, part three: taipei cycle show 2024\"}}\u0027>\n randoms, part three: taipei cycle show 2024\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n "}]' > >", "name": "footer-menu", "type": "link"}}'>advertise >", "name": "footer-menu", "type": "link"}}'>privacy policy >", "name": "footer-menu", "type": "link"}}'>contact >", "name": "footer-menu", "type": "link"}}'>careers >", "name": "footer-menu", "type": "link"}}'>terms of use >", "name": "footer-menu", "type": "link"}}'>site map manage cookie preferences privacy request healthy living.

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IMAGES

  1. Post-Tour crits held in Belgium, Holland 24 hours after Paris

    post tour crits

  2. Post-Tour crits taken by Boogerd, Di Luca and Ciolek

    post tour crits

  3. Mark Cavendish beats Tim Merlier to sprint victory in post-Tour de

    post tour crits

  4. Dario’s Diario: The Post-Tour Crits

    post tour crits

  5. Dario’s Diario: The Post-Tour Crits

    post tour crits

  6. Matthews skips lucrative post-Tour de France crits to focus on

    post tour crits

COMMENTS

  1. The Secret Pro: Post-Tour crits, Worlds and the farce that is the IAAF

    Post-Tour de France crits. With the Tour de France done and dusted you'd think the first thing we riders would want to do is get home and put our feet up, recover from three weeks of slaughtering ourselves around France and see our loved ones. This is all true, but on the flip-side when someone wants to give you good money for a few hours of ...

  2. The Secret Pro, post-Tour de France edition

    Most of the riders headed directly to post-Tour crits the day after the Tour finished. Personally, the idea of spending another 10 days on the road after the Tour is the last thing I'd want. But I've done it before and it's excellent start money — almost too good to say no to. Average riders get paid a couple thousand Euro for starting ...

  3. Just two post-Tour de France criteriums set to take place in France

    According to Vélo Magazine, France will have just two post-Tour crits this year - down from 12 in 2019. While such events pale into insignificance versus the concerns many riders will have for ...

  4. When the post-Tour crits don't go to plan

    Most cycling fans will be familiar with the post-Tour crits, exciting (but manufactured) events where thousands of fans get the opportunity to see the heroes of the road just days after finishing the Tour de France. These races offer lucrative start money and popular winners — the results are fixed beforehand so the big names cross the line ...

  5. A crit on the side

    The post-Tour crits are exhibition races, put on for the benefit of the public, to give them a chance to see the heroes of the Tour de France at close quarters. Nobody wants to see Alberto ...

  6. Jonas Vingegaard and Mathieu van der Poel take wins in first of the

    Post-Tour de France 2023 criteriums. July 24, Boxmeer: 1 Jonas Vingegaard, 2 Wout Poels, 3 Mike Teunissen. July 24, Aalst: 1 Mathieu van der Poel, 2 Jasper Philipsen, 3 Giulio Ciccone.

  7. Mark Cavendish beats Tim Merlier to sprint victory in post-Tour de

    Post-Tour crits are a long-standing tradition in pro cycling, as some of the biggest names from the Tour de France head on a publicity trip around Europe, with a series of friendly races taking ...

  8. The Shadow Of The Tour: The Post-Tour Critérium Circuit

    In 2010, Edward Pickering went to a couple of crits in Belgium - which, along with the Netherlands, still has a thriving post-Tour critérium circuit - with Robbie McEwen. The first race Pickering ...

  9. www.cyclingnews.com

    The series of races generically known as 'post-Tour crits' provide the cycling-mad fans in Belgium, Holland and Germany with an opportunity to get close to the stars of the Tour de France. Jeff Jones provides an overview of these races where the outcome is known before the start. Post-Tour crits allow old mates to catch up.

  10. Wout van Aert and Marianne Vos triumph in green in post-Tour de France

    Indeed, Roosendaal isn't the first of the post-Tour crits, with Van Aert, Yves Lampaert, Tiesj Benoot, and L'Alpe d'Huez winner Tom Pidcock among those who took part in Roeselare last week.

  11. Polemic: On The Significance Of The Post-Tour Crits

    In the period after the Tour there is a huge appetite for bicycle racing and its stars. There is no reason, other than the historic, why this appetite should not be filled by genuine, all-action, city-centre racing, rather than the WWF-style circus of the post-Tour crits. This is more or less what happened in triathlon.

  12. Dario's Diario: The Post-Tour Crits

    The month that follows the Tour is quite strange for the riders. You find some that will try to maximise their condition, racing as much as possible. Others prefer to take it easy, relax after a month full of stress and take more time with the family and friends, and maybe race a couple of criteriums.

  13. Wiggins: Tour was perfect Olympic TT preparation

    A few post Tour crits might be in order, but they're for entertainmnet not out-and-out racing. Once a rider switches off, their performance can plummet, their diet and discipline becomes less ...

  14. Post-Tour crits held in Belgium, Holland 24 hours after Paris

    Only 24 hours after the Tour de France Paris finale and many of the stars of the event are racing again; this time in the post-Tour crits in Belgium and Holland. Post-Tour crits held in Belgium, Holland 24 hours after Paris . Just 24 hours had passed since they celebrated the end of the three-week Tour de France, but already the top pros were ...

  15. Cycling News Headline

    Pro Am Bike is home base for the road bike and mountain bike enthusiast. We're all about the fun and excitement of cycling! Get inspired by what's happening with your favorite pro teams. Then use the site to get out and ride! Find bike tours, local rides, races and riding groups, view pictures, videos, get cycling deals and much more...

  16. Racing this Week: post-Tour crits, harder Clásica, women's World Cup

    No rest for the weary, especially when there's money to be made. The peloton is barely catching its breath following the Tour de France before clicking back into gear with more racing this weekend.

  17. Post Tour crits rosters

    Post Tour crits rosters. By Susan Westemeyer. published 31 July 2007. Italy's Danilo Di Luca, winner of the Giro d'Italia, took victory in the first post-Tour de France...

  18. The Secret Pro: Post-Tour crits, Worlds and the farce that is ...

    28 votes, 27 comments. 111K subscribers in the peloton community. Peloton is the community for professional road cycling. Share links, news, results…

  19. CyclingTips

    The post-Tour crits have started, and here's a wonderful story from last year about one that didn't go to 'plan'...

  20. | Post-Tour Criteriums

    Post-Tour Criteriums. on Tuesday, 23 July 2013. With the Tour de France over the post-Tour criterium season begins. These are exhibition races put on by entrepreneurial race organisers who seek to capitalise on the high profile of the sport following July. Riders are invited to take part in these races and the stars of the Tour de France ...

  21. Post-Tour Crits

    From an AP story on Floyd Landis:"Landis did show top form however to win the Stiphout criterium in the Netherlands on Tuesday night."Does anyone actually...

  22. USA CRITS season preview: Criterium racing, American style

    The U.S. criterium scene is quite like the post-Tour de France criteriums in Holland and Belgium — except for one thing — the racing is real. Creating Sustainability. The premier criterium calendar in America is USA CRITS, the brainchild of Gene Dixon, arguably the godfather of American criterium racing.

  23. 2024 Players Championship predictions, picks: Four long shot bets to

    Rose has been a mixed bag in 2024, but he's 13 months removed from his last win on the PGA Tour, so he's worth a shot at a course that fits his game. Commercial Content. 21+.

  24. Post-Tour crits; Sky tops Tour prize winnings: Daily News Digest

    Welcome to your Daily News Digest. Here's what's happening today: The Tour de France has ended, but the professional cycling season is very much not over.