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.
We've made it to Barcelona! The Tour is almost upon us, three weeks of bike racing ecstasy await, as well as more storylines than we could even begin to digest.
Remco Evenepoel has picked up where he left off at last year's Tour: slightly miffed, Arnaud De Lie has had yet more bad luck, and Movistar is pulling shapes we haven't seen since the '90s.
Oh, and Chris Froome has some big news.
The day we never expected 🫨
It's official. Chris Froome has retired from professional cycling. Who knows why he's been so reticent to say it out loud, when he hasn't been on a team for six months and has taken up a brand ambassador role with Škoda at the Tour de France this July.
And it was at a pre-Tour de France event with Škoda that someone in the audience utilised the Q&A section to ask Froome whether his racing career was over.
"Yes," came the short and simple response from the four-time Tour de France champion, according to Sporza who had eyes and ears inside the event.
"Unfortunately, there was that fall last summer," Froome then explained. "That wasn’t the way I wanted it to end. But even then, I knew it was over."
This needed to happen. It was weird he wasn't saying it publicly, for whatever his reasons were. We hope we'll get a glimpse of him in a Tour de France start village soon.
Spicy Remco 🌶️
A Remco Evenepoel press conference rarely disappoints, particularly at the Tour de France.
Last year his presser was dominated by the rumours that he was set to leave Soudal-Quick Step for Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe (he was), and this year the hullabaloo surrounds just how he'll share the team leadership with Florian Lipowitz, a topic he tired of pretty quickly it has to be said.
"Typical of a Dutchman to ask this," was Evenepoel's response to a Dutch journalist asking about the pair's individual goals this Tour. Not sure what the people of the Netherlands did to upset Evenepoel, but it must have been something.
"I want to win a stage, we want to win the team time trial and then take the yellow jersey with the team," Evenepoel said. "But of course, you want me to say that 'I' would like to stand on the podium, and that Florian says that too."
But Evenepoel wasn't done just yet.
Did we do a good job with this story?
