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Welcome back to Spin Cycle, Escape Collective’s news digest.
Once again we are coming to you from the past. Hope everything is good in 2025. If not, what did you expect?
There are a lot of prediction-type articles floating around this time of year, so our guarantee is that ours will be so mightily unhinged as to blow away the cobwebs and make you yearn for the relative calm that was 2024 by comparison.
We’ll be back with our regular programming soon enough, but in the meantime we thank you for your patience as we take a medium-to-large sized victory lap after making a number of savvy predictions this time last year (correctly predicting all three Grand Tour winners who?)
Turns out that as well as bringing you dumb stories twice weekly, enough actual information permeates our simple, scroll-dulled brain to make us supreme ball knowers … wait, wheel knowers. Nah, that’s not quite right, we’ll try and have a term that sounds right ready by 2026.
Be sure to leave your own predictions on the official record in the comments section so we can all look back next year and see how right or wrong we were.
Last year’s crystal ball gazing 🔮
👴 Alejandro Valverde returns to the peloton – I mean, scroll down his Instagram page and he’s still almost exclusively dressed in Movistar team kit, and he does have four recorded races on ProCyclingStats for 2024 … but these are gravel races. Valverde just stopped short of getting back on a road bike by the looks of it. 2025 could be the comeback year though …
😔 Wout van Aert wins Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix – we may have jinxed this one, sorry Wout.
🎤 Patrick Lefevere and Richard Plugge start a podcast – Richard Plugge proved to be a bit too preoccupied with trying to get his OneCycling land-grab off the ground, and maybe we were one year off again, as Patrick Lefevere now has a lot more time on his hands and has probably finally learned what a podcast is.
🇸🇮 Tadej Pogačar wins both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France – Bear in mind this was before Jonas Vingegaard had crashed at the Tour of the Basque Country, and seemed unbeatable. We know (cycling)ball.
🦊 Mark Cavendish doesn’t win a Tour stage – Be honest, by the letter of the law that was a sprint deviation …
🐝 Visma Lease-a-Rider – This was our pitch post-Cian Uijtdebroeks extraction and following Visma-Lease a Bike’s dominant season that Richard Plugge would implement a new revenue stream for his team by leasing out riders to teams who needed the UCI points. 2024 teams would have been better off borrowing UAE Team Emirates’ riders, but we were half-right in Plugge inventing a new revenue stream, we just didn’t guess it would be auctioning off Wout van Aert’s ripped up jersey from his Vuelta a España crash.
🇫🇷 Marc Madiot finally has enough – Who knows how Marc Madiot reacted to Thibaut Pinot drinking beers with Richard Plugge in the Alps, but it didn’t end up with the French boss throttling his Dutch counterpart underneath the Arc de Triomphe. However, it does seem Madiot’s demeanour is as gloomy as it’s ever been, decrying cycling as now being a sport for rich kids, and losing his young talent Lenny Martinez to Bahrain Victorious. If you find yourself in Madiot’s vicinity, give him a hug.
🤖 Primož Roglitch – We predicted victories at Liège and the Tour de Suisse for Roglič at his new team, before falling short at the Tour de France and then coming back to win the Vuelta. He didn’t race Liège or Suisse, but he did win the Critérium du Dauphiné before abandoning the Tour and then winning a fourth Vuelta. Was that all three Grand Tour victories correctly predicted? Maybe we’re not so stupid after all …
🤦♂️ No one circles the wagons like the Ineos Gren-oh-dears – We predicted various calamities for Ineos Grenadiers, but got the flavour slightly wrong, coming closest with the idea that Josh Tarling would leave, which he did come fairly close to doing so.
🛶 Make mine an Ag3r – Are you bored with us taking our victory lap yet? Well, luckily this is the last one, as we called Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale improving remarkably, going from nine victories in 2023 to 30 in 2024.
2025 predictions 💭
Tadej Pogačar doesn’t win a Grand Tour 😱
Jonas Vingegaard gets his revenge at the Tour de France and then Pogačar abandons the Vuelta mid-way through.
Visma’s best Tour de France branding yet 🎨
From ‘Ride Your Dreams’ alongside an AI Jonas Vingegaard in 2023 to ‘Beyond Victory’ in 2024, Visma-Lease a Bike’s Tour de France branding just gets better and more detached from reality with each passing year. If 2025 isn’t the year they go with just the straight up “live, laugh, love” we will be bitterly disappointed.
Remco Evenepoel leaves Soudal-Quick Step 👋
The Belgian team’s ringmaster Patrick Lefevere is gone, serious money man Jurgen Foré is in charge, and his brain isn’t filled with feelings, just numbers on imaginary spreadsheets. As the team modernises, and with Lefevere no longer holding on to Evenepoel mostly to prove a point and not be beaten, Foré snaps Ineos Grenadiers’ arm off when they reverse in to Quick-Step’s service course with a truckload of money for their Belgian double Olympic champion. Or more likely Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe get him.
The UCI actually does something about safety 🦺
Cycling’s governing body finally become so embarrassed by the bad crashes of its biggest stars, which is also harming the bottom line of the sport, they call up Ronan Mc Laughlin, allowing him to implement his four (fairly easy) safety fixes and giving him a UCI job where he has to wear a (not skin)suit. When we, his former colleagues, bump into him at the spring Classics, he pretends not to see us when he walks past and also never replies to our emails or text messages.
Plans emerge to charge fans on Grand Tour mountains ⛰️
To tackle both the increasing prevalence of poorly behaved fans and a need to increase its economic war chest, Tour de France organiser ASO announces it will charge €5 per person and €50 per caravan to anyone wishing to access the Mont Ventoux summit finish on stage 16. The French are outraged, President Marine Le Pen decries the move, threatening to shut down the Tour de France, which then moves public support so far against her that she resigns.
Julian Alaphilippe wins a Tour de France stage 🇫🇷
With half the field gone and a less powerful Julian Alaphilippe on the pre-retirement Tudor Pro Cycling contract he deserves, the Frenchman pulls out one of his trademark attacks to take the stage win and yellow jersey. At the finish line in the VIP area, a single tear rolls down Patrick Lefevere’s cheek. Marc Madiot is stood next to him. Patrick reaches out and grasps Marc’s hand tightly. They do not say anything or turn their heads to look at each other, but simply bathe in the moment.
OneCycling emerges 💥
Both of the above only come about due to Richard Plugge riding in on horseback to the UCI’s headquarters in Aigle, flanked by other steeds carrying vast chests of Saudi money, announcing the formalisation of his OneCycling pipe dream.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the cycling world, the reason the UCI begin getting its act together was because not only did David Lappartient leave to become the International Olympic Committee President and there was a vacuum to fill, but the OneCycling rumours were growing.
Having corralled UAE Team Emirates, Bahrain Victorious, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Soudal-Quick Step, Ineos Grenadiers, as well as Visma-Lease a Bike and Jayco-AlUla (obviously), Plugge also manages to get Giro d’Italia organiser RCS Sport on board.
ASO hold out, however, meaning that all seven teams are barred from the 2025 Tour de France, and the race is finally won by a Frenchman, David Gaudu.
Jim Ratcliffe goes off the deep end 💂♀️
Dismayed by the continued poor performance of both Ineos Grenadiers and Manchester United, Jim Ratcliffe buys up another 10% of Iceland with the promise of protecting even more Atlantic salmon (who conveniently do as he says and don’t talk back to him), but which is really masquerading as a private prison for footballers and cyclists who disappoint him. At the end of the year, he signs Tom Pidcock back off of Q36.5.
Chris Froome gets a new contract ✍️
Not ready to hang it up just yet, and with many more Quad Locks to shift, Chris Froome signs with XDS-Astana Qazaqstan.
Best 2024 reader predictions 🧠
Lachlan M: “I’m with you on Tadej winning both the Giro & Le Tour with all the world panache one can handle. I do take issue with your Cav predication, Jonny. He is absolutely going to win one, plus the Green Jersey as smiley, yet stoic Cav.”
Dave Arbuthnott: “Not only will Cav not win a stage he’ll become so enraged with Vinokurov swanning around in his Gran Fondo World Champion kit he’ll have a swing at him.”
Caleb Hayter: “Why stop with Pog winning just the Giro and the Tour? I’m telling you, we need to speak the Pogi Slam into existence. Giro, Tour, Vuelta, Worlds, Olympics. Five-for-five. That would unquestionably be the greatest male cycling season of all time, and even grumpy old Belgians would have to admit it.”
Christophe Kam: “My own prediction: Wout is done. Never wins another big race — no Monuments, no Worlds, no Olympics, not even another CX race (when MVDP is there) or another Belgian Championship! But he’ll end his career with a boatload of second places to all manner of stellar riders who are always just that bit better.”
Jeff Barlett: “Tadej doesn’t just win the Giro Tour double, but also wins two Monuments and Worlds. It’s the great season since Eddy Merckx was relevant. He better not transfer to Lease-a-Bike.” [Ed: BANG ON THE MONEY!!]
Joe WS: “Richard Plugge retires and switches to gravel. He’s okay with the obligatory little beers.”
🧺 Send us yer laundry pics
“A laundromat-themed photo booth in Arab Street, Singapore,” writes Ken Ooi.
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: jonny.long@escapecollective.com
Until next time …
That’s all folks! Thanks to Ken Ooi 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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