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
Enter your email address to get our unique spin on news from the world of cycling delivered directly to your inbox!
Get our unique spin on news from the world of cycling delivered directly to your inbox!
Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle, Escape Collective’s news digest.
The world is a weird place. Regular readers of this newsletter may have fairly assumed that photos of two millionaires on a yacht would have irked us, but in actual fact it’s provided a heartwarming boost as winter draws in.
And really, things could always be worse. For instance, you could be on Eli Iserbyt’s streak of not having normal cyclocross weekends.
F(room)e for one more?
Yes, life as a pro cyclist, regardless of the size of your salary, is a rough one, requiring all sorts of sacrifices. But when you find yourself lying on a yacht in Miami while attending a charity event, snuggling under a blanket with Mark Cavendish or Chris Froome – depending on which man’s perspective you’re choosing to view this from – then life maybe isn’t so bad at all.
Witness a giggling Chris Froome in the left photo, momentarily without a worry in the world. Or consider the Froome selfie on the right, which you can easily imagine having the caption “Sunsets with this one x.”
Never knew a cure for the Monday blues was seeing photos of Froome and Cavendish on a yacht in Miami but here we are!
Wild West Country 🤠
In another heartwarming example of “This is why we can’t have nice things,” the 13-mile Bristol & Bath Railway Path, which unsurprisingly cuts along the old railway route between the two southwestern British cities, is a traffic-free haven furnished with various cafe stops. I frequently bob along up and down it and can confirm it is a rare delight in an otherwise largely bike-unfriendly urban world.
But recently there have been reports in a Bristol cyclists Facebook group that the route is becoming a target for “bikejackers,” with cyclists being ambushed by a few men on e-bikes with knives and taking bikes off of people.
This sucks and there doesn’t seem to be an immediate answer as to what should or could be done. And while we don’t want to make light of the situation, reading the details of some of the incidents does make living in the UK sound like more of a fairytale than it is.
For instance, one of the victims reached the Chocolate Factory housing development, whereupon he was pushed off his bike and threatened before the thieves on e-bikes set off towards Fishponds. Yep, both real places, unconfirmed as to the actual level of chocolate, fish or ponds, however.
Feed Zone 🥖
🇬🇧 British Continental team Trinity Racing, which Tom Pidcock and Ben Healy previously raced for and was the UK’s principal development squad, will close down at the end of this year, Cycling Weekly reports. Cornish outfit Saint Piran now remains as the only British Continental squad.
💸 In a super interesting interview by Šport na Sportalu with Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe nutritionist Tim Podlogar, he recalls another media appearance in Velo by the team’s head coach Dan Lorang who said Red Bull didn’t actually put much money into the WorldTour squad in 2024. This then limited the amount of extra performance help that was able to be made available to Primož Roglič when he arrived, adding: “I personally couldn’t bear to see nutrition end up being the reason we didn’t win the Tour.”
Cycling on TV 📺
Tuesday November 19th – Friday November 22nd
No live racing …
As now customary for weeks without televised racing, an extracurricular recommendation! The synopsis for ‘The Man Who Wanted To See It All’ reads: “Heinz Stücke left Germany in 1962 with a bike, a tent and a goal: to see everything in the world. Now for the first time in 50 years, he’s come home.” It’s available to watch on Netflix. And please do send in any recommendations you have for cycling off-season viewing.
😪 Eli Iserbyt can’t catch a break of the week 😪
The Kamp-stamp, the beer shower, and now another cyclocross weekend where Eli Iserbyt has not had a quiet one, as much as he probably would have liked to.
Iserbyt picked up his fourth second place of this season at Flandriencross, after getting his finger caught in a spoke from a crash that was caused by a collision with a photographer who was leaning way too far over the barrier.
“You don’t really see it on TV, but I was completely caught by a photographer,” Iserbyt said post-race.
“That made me shoot out of that track at high speed, I fell and everyone rode on top of me. We rode briefly against the wire and the photographer bent over with the first four. Then he grabbed me by my shoulder, so that’s a real shame. You don’t expect someone to get that far over a wire. Certainly not with a camera that’s half a meter long.”
That’s enough karma now, universe; time to leave Eli Iserbyt be.
And finally …
It is probably very annoying as two very famous sportspeople entering transitional stages in their careers/lives, that everyone keeps asking what their plans are going forward, as depicted in this skit from Mark Cavendish and Formula 1’s Valtteri Bottas where they ask each other “What’s next?” over and over again. We’d love to know which one came up with it … and, politely, why.
One surefire way to get everyone to stop asking you, at least in Cavendish’s case, is to just tell everyone rather than teasing various potential futures. Maybe post-Froome-yacht-snuggle, he’s re-evaluating once again. I would be.
🧺 Send us yer laundry pics
“This week I come to you from a laundromat in downtown San Francisco,” writes Dean Harris, attaching today’s featured laundromat. “I particularly enjoyed the slogan on the wall and thought it would go nicely in your Airbnb from this year’s TDF, assuming they have room for one more slogan.”
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 Dean Harris 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.
Every edition of Spin Cycle is available for free so please share it with your friends and help us enjoy limitless growth. You can give them this link to take them to our most recent edition.
And if you’ve been forwarded this email from someone else and want to receive it straight into your own inbox while it’s still hot, you can sign up by clicking the button.
Spin Cycle
Enter your email address to get our unique spin on news from the world of cycling delivered directly to your inbox!
Get our unique spin on news from the world of cycling delivered directly to your inbox!
Did we do a good job with this story?