Spin Cycle is Escape Collective’s news digest, published every Monday and Friday. You can read it on this website (obviously) or have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Spin Cycle
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Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle, Escape Collective’s news digest.
First of all, apologies for missing Friday’s newsletter, the first unanticipated dropping of the Spin Cycle ball since its inception. We had a complete and utter jour sans, which happens at the Tour sometimes. And anyway, there was that piece from Ronan that deserved all of the space on the homepage.
Regardless, the Tour rolls on and we’ve caught back up to the bunch. We’ve got a lot of Tour-based goodness for you, obviously, but first something from Romania …
Grin and bear it
The Tour de France may be dominating cycling at the minute, which is a shame not just because the Giro d’Italia Women was a great bike race, but because there was some bear-related activity over at Romania’s Sibiu Tour!
After one of the stages, Jasper Haest of VolkerWessels left his bag outside the bus, which was promptly commandeered by a family of bears.
Luckily, we have a friend over at VolkerWessels, Finn Crockett from our Rás excursion last year, who told us they were all getting changed post-stage outside the bus when the bears appeared forcing them to quickly climb on board. Only poor Jasper forgot his bag in the hurry …
Hanging out with my boys
The NBC coverage of the Tour de France, quite fairly, often gets a bad rap for the coverage provided to American fans, with criticism seeming to increase this Tour due to the demise of the GCN+ app (plus VPN, of course). [We can confirm it is roughly 536% worse than either GCN+ or even the old NBC Sports Gold app days. – Ed.]
However, what you would never get from Eurosport (or probably any other broadcaster for that matter) is this from their reporter Steve Porino.
“UAE was on the cutting edge of cooling strategies but I think I might just have them beat …” he begins, before adding:
“Hanging out with my boys!” Having got his kit off and wading into le man soup of a group of French youths who say they are only on the mountainside for a Bastille Day party, not the Tour de France.
A party with the caravan
Pulling into your hotel for the night after a Tour de France stage and being met with an assortment of vehicles from the race’s publicity caravan sends a very unique chill down one’s spine.
It can be fine, if the notorious employees of the caravan (who basically see the raison d’être of their job to be three weeks of partying in various branches of budget hotel chains across France) are having a quiet night for once.
However, spraying them with champagne after winning a Tour stage is a sure-fire way to get them amped up and ready to party the night away, thereby keeping you, Jasper Philipsen, awake thanks to the paper-thin walls of whichever hotel chain you’ve been put in that night.
Lore has it that the super-secret Tour caravan parties (at least back in the day), used to only be accessible if you’d been given a wooden key to hand over at the hotel room door. We’d rather not know what goes on in there …
Feed Zone 🥖
😮 Tadej Pogačar is growing up? The Slovenian said the key to his stage 15 victory over Jonas Vingegaard was focusing on “hydrating, eating and cooling down,” which he has previously struggled with in crucial Tour moments.
🔀 Madis Mihkels is swapping Intermarché-Wanty for EF Education-EasyPost next season, according to Wielerflits.
🩻 A fracture has been found in Mads Pedersen’s shoulder blade in scans following his Tour de France abandonment, reports De Avondetappe.
🤧 COVID-19 cases are on the rise again at the Tour de France, forcing extra preventative measures to be introduced. Read our report here.
🇮🇹 Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek) won the Giro d’Italia Women in a hotly fought contest with Lotte Kopecky (SD Worx-Protime).
🥔 The spectator who threw chips at Pogačar and Vingegaard is in police custody, read Kit Nicholson’s report here.
🧑🤝🧑 In case you missed it, or if you’re full to the brim with actual racing content from the Tour, Matt de Neef has a wonderful gallery showcasing the race’s roadside fans here.
🇨🇳 Astana Qazaqstan have a new backer in Chinese company XDS, which owns one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in the world. “The draft agreement provides for long-term investment for a period of at least five years and financing at the level of leading WorldTour teams,” the team said in a press release.
🤧 Snot of the week 🤧
People line the route of the Tour de France partly in search of mementos. Either for the freebies lobbed out from the aforementioned publicity caravan, which for many French people is the main reason for turning up, or in the form of a photo or bidon from the peloton.
Imagine the delight of the man in the video below, however, who got snotted on by Richard Carapaz, before preceding to wipe it off his leg. Don’t waste that! That’s good, high-altitude Ecuadorian snot mate!
Cycling on TV 📺
Tuesday July 16th
Tour de France – Stage 16
(07:05-11:30 ET/12:05-16:30 BST/21:05-01:30 AEST) ITV/Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, NBC/Peacock🇺🇸, FloBikes🇨🇦, SBS🇦🇺
Wednesday July 17th
Tour de France – Stage 17
(06:35-11:00 ET/11:35-16:00 BST/20:35-01:00 AEST) ITV/Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, NBC/Peacock🇺🇸, FloBikes🇨🇦, SBS🇦🇺
Thursday July 18th
Tour de France – Stage 18
(07:00-11:30 ET/12:00-16:30 BST/21:00-01:30 AEST) ITV/Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, NBC/Peacock🇺🇸, FloBikes🇨🇦, SBS🇦🇺
Friday July 19th
Tour de France – Stage 19
(06:20-10:30 ET/11:20-15:30 BST/20:20-00:30 AEST) ITV/Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, NBC/Peacock🇺🇸, FloBikes🇨🇦, SBS🇦🇺
📰 Media participation award of the week 📰
Thanks to Raphaël on our Discord server who gave us yet another piece of evidence that Ineos Grenadiers is such a vibes-less vessel it makes Pollution Jim’s other creaking sporting venture at Manchester United look like Woodstock ’69.
“France TV have a feature in their post-Tour [stage] show where they roll a wheel with bib numbers to randomly pick a rider. And the featured journalist has to successfully manage the ‘challenge’ of interviewing the rider. All teams have always accepted (it’s been going for a few years, teams more or less grant access, but all have always accepted, even UAE and Visma).
“The other day they pulled Kwiatko and for the first and only time, the team refused. So Ineos HAVE done something this Tour.”
And finally …
As pointed out by DanhtheManh on Discord, and following on from Tour Daily discussion of France TV piping in church bell and eagle noises over live Tour coverage, a giraffe and unicorn popped onto our screens during Sunday’s stage 15.
This is par for the course, you may be thinking, and maybe we should just be grateful they are wearing more clothes than those who sport mankinis and budgie-smugglers on categorised climbs.
Well …
France TV decided to pipe in a horse neighing, which … is maybe accurate for the unicorn, which definitely exists. But giraffes don’t neigh France TV! Silly billys!
Luckily, another Discord person ‘riggles’ was on hand to capture the moment.
🧺 Send us yer laundry pics
“IT’S NOT COMING HOME,” texts cycling journalist and Escape Collective contributor Andy McGrath, attaching today’s featured laundrette image in Foix where he did his rest day laundry bright and early (11:30am on a rest day). He is a very organised man.
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 Raphaël, riggles and Andy McGrath for contributions to today’s edition and a big thank you to all of you who have signed up already as Escape Collective founding 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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