Spin Cycle is Escape Collective’s news digest, published every Monday and Friday. You can read it on the website (obviously) or click here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle.
The big news of the week was the surprise announcement that Simon Philip Yates was retiring with immediate effect. But is there more to the story than we know so far? Camera angles suggest there may be.
Elsewhere, new questions arise over at Ineos Grenadiers (don't hold your breath for answers), while Lidl-Trek play happy families with photo formations.
Oh, and Astana have released a new rap video.
A new Astana rap video has dropped 🔥
We are in favour of everyone letting their freak flag fly, and that includes the XDS-Astana team, who are back for the third instalment of their rap video series.
Their latest musical effort celebrates the team's 20th anniversary (which was actually last year ...) and the fact they somehow avoided what looked to be certain WorldTour relegation in 2025.
In case you need the links, their first musical effort dropped in 2019 to much fanfare and is still the best of the three. The second followed in 2022, and judging by their current release schedule we should set our calendars for round four to be released in January 2031.
We have to admit this third rap is our least favourite. What has been gained in video production quality has been lost in musicality, and there is nothing that gets close to the rawness of Astana riders pushing Jakob Fuglsang in a wheelchair down a nondescript hotel corridor.
However, in this latest edition we do get Nicolas Vinokourov getting very close to showing a Bloods gang sign before the camera cuts away. We'll take what we can get and are just glad Astana haven't let the rap music video game die, especially with MTV shutting down at the end of last year in the UK and Europe.
Farewell, Simon Philip Yates 👋
The most unexpected news of the week landed on Wednesday morning when Visma-Lease a Bike announced 33-year-old Simon (Philip) Yates would be retiring from racing with immediate effect.
The Brit still had a year left on his existing deal with the Dutch team, and having won the Giro d'Italia and a stage of the Tour de France last year was still clearly in his prime.
Yates' statement didn't give a specific reason for his immediate and surprise retirement, apart from saying it's something he'd been thinking about "for a long time" and it felt like "the right moment" to hang up his wheels.
Luckily, one Visma DS has shed more light on the reason for his retirement than the official announcement provides.
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