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.
Yes, we were only in your inboxes a couple of days ago but it’s been two weeks since those pre-recorded missives were ushered out ahead of the holidays and now it’s January and everything is cold and less bright, so we’ve got a lot of news to catch up on.
In between rattling through sitcom Christmas specials and enough confectionery to give Willy Wonka diabetes, we still found the time for a little bit of festive doomscrolling and so have uncovered a few non-urgent gems and oddities we’ll parcel out over the next couple of editions along with the news you need to know.
Right, on with it!
(Jet) set that rib and get him back on the start line ASAP! ✈️
Mathieu van der Poel wasted no time when he belatedly began his cyclocross season on December 22, comfortably winning the Zonhoven World Cup, before going on to take two more as part of his five-race unbeaten run in the mud.
However, a crash at Azencross – Loenhout and a resultant rib injury saw the world champion forced to miss the X20 Trofee Baal as well as this Saturday’s upcoming race at Koksijde.
At the time of writing, he is leaving the opportunity to line up at the next World Cup round at Dendermonde open but admits it will be “a close call”.
Van der Poel will hope to be recovered as soon as possible, with Gazzetta dello Sport recently revealing the fee Van der Poel charges to be on the start line of a (non-World Cup) cyclocross race has gone up from €15-20k last year to €50k this year. Not bad for an hour and a half’s work and with Van der Poel’s star power we’re not surprised he’s pulling in so many fans that the money is worth race organisers’ while.
Presumably it’s thanks to these bumper pay days that Van der Poel has managed to find an upgrade beyond driving an ever-changing fleet of Lamborghinis to cyclocross races, as he opted for a private jet to take him from Belgium down to the recent World Cup round in Besançon. With the 600 km journey taking six hours in the car and there being no normal airports nearby, Van der Poel has picked up where Taylor Swift left off.
“Oh, has that also been leaked,” Van der Poel responded when asked to confirm his travel arrangements by Wielerflits. “But yes, that is indeed true.”
In lighter news, an old tweet of Van der Poel’s resurfaced showing a time when he didn’t have super cars or private airplanes and instead had to do his own dishes. Maybe it’s safer for all of us, particularly white goods and crockery, that he’s probably not doing his dishes any more.
Now, time for a different sort of soap opera …
The Remco Evenepoel industrial complex 🤫
Okay, here goes. It slightly pains me to have followed this saga fairly closely but, I guess, this is the job and if by the end of this section you feel worse than when you started, this is your warning!
On December 27th, a tweet popped up from a random account self-described as “The opinion of the average Flemish person on the daily news” with the person using their limited time on this Earth to chuck the following out into the universe:
“Cycling Juice: Remco Evenepoel allegedly cheated with Amy Sonck [Belgian internet personality]. Oumi has already completely emptied her Instagram and an interview with Remco in HLN is said to appear soon.”
As far as we could find out, Evenepoel’s wife Oumi deleting all the photos off of her Instagram account was the catalyst for this rumour, with another odd suggestion being it was started by some football fans. Either way, the internet switchboard was soon alight with consternation and only extinguished the next day when Evenepoel posted a photo to his own Instagram under which Oumi commented a heart emoji to which Evenepoel replied with a padlock emoji. Christ, we feel too old to be typing this out.
This wasn’t enough for the Belgian media, starved of content over the festive break (more on that later) who corralled Evenepoel into responding to the rumours under the auspices of an interview on New Year’s Eve having just been named ‘Belgian of the year’ by the readers of Het Laatste Nieuws. How convenient.
“Gossip and rumours are nothing new to us, even though this time it was extreme,” Evenepoel told the paper. “That’s how it’s always been. We just try to stay there as a team. Oumi and I discuss everything openly, we don’t hide anything from each other. We don’t stoop to that level and even though it sometimes scares us, we mostly laugh about it.
“We sometimes hear the craziest things about ourselves. That we are pregnant. Or broken up. Or moving to another country. But we know better.”
We don’t quite know how Evenepoel has the energy to continue to entertain the madness that follows him around his home country, but big respect that he takes all of the nonsense on the chin. Hopefully this story marks a low-point in Spin Cycle coverage this year but we will always uphold our commitment to wade through the swamp so you don’t have to!
Feed Zone 🥖
🕊️ Legendary Italian cycling team manager Gianni Savio, who amongst many achievements uncovered Egan Bernal, passed away on Monday at the age of 76.
😬 Things are looking glum for Gleb Syritsa as the Russian 24-year-old has been demoted from XDS-Astana’s WorldTour team to its development squad to make room for 24-year-old Chinese rider Haoyu Su, who finished fourth overall at the 2022 Tour of Qinghai Lake. Syritsa is a fairly surprising selection as sacrificial lamb to satisfy Astana’s new Chinese sponsors seeing as he’s won 10 percent of the team’s measly haul of 28 victories over the past two years.
Cycling on TV 📺
All cyclocross
Saturday January 4th
Superprestige Gullegem – Women
(07:35-08:35 ET/12:35-13:35 GMT/23:35-00:35 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, Max 🇺🇸, FloBikes🇨🇦, Staylive🇦🇺
Superprestige Gullegem – Men
(09:05-10:30 ET/14:05-15:30 GMT/01:05-02:30 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, Max 🇺🇸, FloBikes🇨🇦, Staylive🇦🇺
Sunday January 5th
UCI Cyclocross World Cup, Dendermonde – Women
(07:30-09:00 ET/12:30-14:00 GMT/23:30-01:00 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, UCI’s YouTube🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺
UCI Cyclocross World Cup, Dendermonde – Men
(09:00-10:30 ET/14:00-15:30 GMT/01:00-02:30 AEDT) Eurosport/Discovery+🇬🇧, UCI’s YouTube🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺
Monday January 6th
No live racing …
😱 Rider in new kit jump scare of the week 😱
Obviously the news of Julian Alaphilippe’s switch from Soudal-Quick Step to Tudor Pro Cycling has sunk in by now, but that didn’t stop the photo of him in his new colours making us look twice. Like trying to read a book in the back seat of a car on winding roads, or when your ears pop on an airplane. Something just wasn’t quite right. We’re sure we’ll acclimatise but right now consider us unsettled.
Similarly, did anyone else completely miss the news Dan McLay had signed with Visma-Lease a Bike or did we receive a degenerative brain disease for Christmas that we’d already forgotten about? Either way, we’re happy for Dan, he’s done his time inside AKA five years at Arkéa-Samsic. Now for the Christophe Laporte-sized transformation into a world-beater please!
And finally …
If you were distressed by the themes covered in today’s newsletter, namely the environmental cost of private jets or the Belgian media’s low threshold for news leading to an unhealthy obsession with Remco Evenepoel’s private life, don’t worry, there’s more where that came from!
On Christmas Day, some poor bastard working for Sporza was forced to feed his article quota by writing up a story of two AI images that had been created by someone on social media depicting the duos of Van der Poel and Wout van Aert, and Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, embracing while wearing Christmas jumpers and broad smiles.
We’re hoping the exact time-stamp of 9am on Christmas morning meant this was scheduled in advance, and some grizzled hack wasn’t sat in his pyjamas, typing out “fake, but beautiful” as his family unwrapped presents and engaged in general merriment.
🧺 Send us yer laundry pics
“It’s from Girdwood, Alaska, and kinda has a Christmas touch with all the snow themed wall paint,” wrote Pol on Christmas Eve, attaching today’s featured laundromat. Luckily, it remains winter the other side of the new year and so still fits.
Thanks for all of the extra submissions following our plea last year. 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 Pol 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
Enter your email address to get our unique spin on news from the world of cycling delivered directly to your inbox!
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