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Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle, Escape Collective’s news digest.
Just when you think you begin to understand the world, something happens that throws it all into question.
Or, in our smaller-scale cycling world, two things: Luke Rowe leaving Ineos Grenadiers for Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale, and Belgians helping a Dutchman win a rainbow jersey. Oh, and Mattias Skjelmose suffering a most-innocuous injury that makes us now a bit scared to do, well, anything.
In the face of this we’ll retreat into something that comforts us: a photo of Tadej Pogačar holding a medium-to-large quantity of pork product and looking rather happy about it.
The Death Star on death Rowe? 😲
It’s official: Luke Rowe is saying Adeos to Ineos and joining Decathlon. We don’t know whether to say sacre bleu or chapeau.
The outrageous news broken by Dan Benson last month has been confirmed, with Rowe joining the French team from November 1 as a sports director, where he will lead the team’s Classics squad.
“The Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale project appealed to me,” Rowe said in a press release. “Particularly with the big step forward made this year in terms of performance, but above all with the future project and the long-term vision. I will be eager to bring my experience from the years spent at the highest level and to support the riders, especially in the Classics.
“The other part of this new project is the team’s ambition to become more international. Obviously, there are some incredible French talents but, with this approach, the team can also be a very attractive option for English speakers and international riders looking to join the team.”
Despite playing down any real reason why he was leaving Ineos in a Watts Occurring podcast episode released when the news was made public, another recent episode saw Rowe voice his criticisms of the team he is leaving, where he has spent the entirety of his 13-year career. “I would question some of the recruitment,” Rowe said. “We haven’t got the best guy in the world. We haven’t got the second-best guy.”
You could argue that Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale also don’t even have the second-best guy, or even the third-best guy with the impending departure of Ben O’Connor to Jayco-AlUla, so it more speaks to just how far off one of the team’s most loyal stalwarts sees the Ineos organisation in 2024.
Presumably, a sports director role would have been available to him at Ineos Grenadiers should he have wished to stay, so it certainly sets alarm bells ringing in the museum of ringing alarm bells that is the British squad as of late.
In more news surrounding the Ineos psychodrama, Tom Pidcock is now apparently in talks with Q36.5, according to Gazzetta dello Sport, the Brit seemingly so unhappy at the British team that he is at least considering both stepping down to ProTeam level but also potentially a pay cut, unless a big sponsor such as a bike brand is coming with him to fund all the treats Chestnut and Acorn could possibly ever desire.
Belgians racing for Dutchies 🤔
Mathieu van der Poel only had to spend a week without being the World Champion of something [correction: okay, yes, he was and is still the cyclocross world champion, should we apologise for cyclocross erasure? Probably, so … sorry] as he stormed to victory at the UCI Gravel Worlds.
He beat second-place Florian Vermeersch by just over a minute and Vermeersch’s fellow Belgian Quinten Hermans was then third, finishing nearly four minutes behind at the head of a small group featuring Jasper Stuyven, Gianni Vermeersch, Connor Swift and last year’s winner Matej Mohorič.
With 64 riders of the nearly 300 on the elite men’s start line being Belgian, the host nation had quite the numerical advantage, although as fourth-placed Jasper Stuyven saw it, riders weren’t necessarily racing for their country’s interests despite donning their national jerseys for the day.
“It’s amusing to me,” a not-very-amused-at-all-actually Stuyven told Sporza afterwards. “Those guys don’t take over [pull hard], but they do when it suits them,” he said. “It was very clear that all the Alpecin guys were here to help him [Van der Poel]. I had expected that there would be racing in [national] teams.”
Rather than push back against their treason, Hermans – who is a trade teammate of Van der Poel’s, as is Vermeersch – agreed that this was a race where Belgians had planned to work for a Dutchman.
“The plan was to ride together with the team,” Hermans said, with “team” meaning Alpecin-Deceuninck, before Vermeersch added: “It’s always better if someone wins from Alpecin. It wasn’t up to us to close the gap but we weren’t really an inhibiting [blocking] factor. We always tried to ride through a little bit. I would have liked to win myself. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to go for the title. I don’t think it was really a problem.”
Who would have known all it would take to bring down borders and encourage goodwill amongst people of all nationalities was a bike racing team sponsored by a caffeine shampoo brand?
Feed Zone 🥖
🇨🇦 Victor Koretzky and Sina Frei won the Short Track events at the UCI MTB World Cup in Mont-Saine-Anna, Canada, while Alan Hatherly and Loana Lecomte took victories in the XCO races. Meanwhile, Mathieu van der Poel has told AD he is thinking about participating in the MTB World Championship in 2025 instead of the Rwanda Road Worlds where he thinks the 5,475 meters of climbing will be too tough for him to compete for the win.
🍖 Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek) and Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) won Giro dell’Emilia on Saturday.
🌈 Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease a Bike) won the women’s UCI Gravel World Championships, outsprinting Lotte Kopecky to take the fourteenth world title of her career.
🇦🇺 Lachlan Morton (EF Education-EasyPost) has complete his lap of Australia in a new fastest known time of 30 days, 9 hours and 59 minutes. Kit Nicholson has more on this story here.
😞 Former Colombian pro Marlon Pérez (48) was killed during a violent robbery at his home last Thursday in northwestern Colombia, not far from the city of Medellín.
🇲🇾 Brit Max Poole (DSM Firmenich-PostNL) took the first GC victory of his career as the 21-year-old won the Tour de Langkawi by 13 seconds over Italian Thomas Pesenti (JCL Team UKYO).
✍️ Pablo Castrillo’s agent Giuseppe Acquadro has confirmed to AS the 23-year-old will ride for Movistar next year.
🇫🇷 Christophe Laporte (Visma-Lease a Bike) won a muddy edition of Paris-Tours, winning a two-up sprint against Lidl-Trek’s Mathias Vacek while Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) outsprinted the large chase group 20 seconds behind to take third.
🗞️ You can find all this and more in our Daily News roundup. All the news you need on one lovely and clean website. Lovely.
Cycling on TV 📺
Tuesday October 8th
Tre Valli Varesine – Women
(03:00-06:30 ET/08:00-11:30 BST/18:00-23:30 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, Staylive🇦🇺, FloBikes🇺🇸🇨🇦
Simac Ladies Tour – Stage 1 (ITT)
(08:00-09:40 ET/13:00-14:40 BST/23:00-00:40 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧
Tre Valli Varesine – Men
(08:15-11:15 ET/13:15-16:15 BST/23:15-02:15 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, Max🇺🇸, Staylive🇦🇺, FloBikes🇺🇸🇨🇦
Wednesday October 9th
Simac Ladies Tour – Stage 2
(09:00-10:25 ET/14:00-15:25 BST/00:00-01:25 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧
Thursday October 10th
Simac Ladies Tour – Stage 3
(09:00-10:25 ET/14:00-15:25 BST/00:00-01:25 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧
Gran Piemonte
(08:15-10:25 ET/13:15-15:25 BST/23:15-01:25 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, Max🇺🇸, Staylive🇦🇺, FloBikes🇨🇦
Friday October 11th
Simac Ladies Tour – Stage 4
(09:00-10:25 ET/14:00-15:25 BST/00:00-01:25 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧
👽 Professional riders showing human traits of the week 👽
Part of the awe of bike racing is biological (if not regularly physiological) humans doing what seems inhuman on a bicycle.
But sometimes it is nice to be reminded they can be just like us, and the latest rider to display this is Lidl-Trek’s Mattias Skjelmose, who unfortunately suffered a season-ending injury the day before the Worlds road race.
How? By eating breakfast. Having sat down for some morning grub the Dane suddenly felt an intense pain in his back.
“After some tests, it turned out that I have a double hernia,” Skjelmose said in a press release. “I think it is a shame that it has turned out this way, but injuries are – unfortunately – part of cycling. I will now rest well with a view to 2025.”
Get well soon Mattias and let that be a lesson to us all that if even a WorldTour rider can come a cropper while eating his Cheerios the rest of us should definitely be more careful!
And finally …
A singular cure for the Monday blues: Tadej Pogačar holding a massive Mortadella ham presented to him on the podium for winning Giro dell’Emilia on Saturday, his first race in the rainbow jersey. In the gap between rainbow bands and pork product, see Tom Pidcock’s forlorn face as he realises there is no Mortadella ham for him.
Ye olde corrections corner ⚔️
“I might be wrong, but I think this is not ‘medieval clobber’,” wrote Liam Brown in the comments section of Friday’s newsletter, perturbed by my description of the military man hanging out with Simon Geschke.
“I think it is from around the year 9AD, because the race is run in North Rhine-Westphalia, which is the location of the Teutoburg Forest. This was where the Roman Army suffer one of the most significant defeats in their history, to an alliance of German tribes led by Germanic Roman officer Arminius. The region is very proud of this, to the extent that third tier football team Arminia Bielefeld are named after Arminius (Bielefeld lying 70 km east of Munster and much closer to the Teutoburg Forest).”
🧺 Send us yer laundry pics
“Visiting friends in LA this week and found a (former) laundry in Culver City,” writes in Oliver Watson, attaching today’s featured (former) laundromat.
As always, we are accepting your laundry photos (especially ones with the doors open so we can Photoshop riders inside the drum) to star in Spin Cycle. Either send them via the Discord or shoot me an $email: [email protected]
Until next time …
That’s all folks! Thanks to Oliver Watson, Liam Brown and Jase de Puit (blame him for the pun in the opening line of the Luke Rowe story) for contributions to today’s edition and a big thank you to all of you who have signed up as Escape Collective members. If you haven’t there is no time like the present. To smooth the process just click this link here and hit the Join Today button in the top right of the page.
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Spin Cycle
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