Spin Cycle is Escape Collective’s news digest, published every Monday and Friday. You can read it on this website (obviously) or click here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle,
I am currently en route to Belgium for Holy Week. I'm scooping my American colleague Dane at St. Pancras for our Eurostar voyage across the Channel (and can't wait to see him marvel at the civilised wonders of subterranean cross-border public transportation), and then we'll be joining up with Caley and the Escape Collective members who are on our Classics trip.
It's going to be a lot of fun, but first we have some cleaning up to do from this week before we go full Belgium mode (not sure exactly what this entails, mostly frites, bike racing and dark beers).
The pranker becomes the prankee 🤪
In our opinion, April 1st is the worst day on the internet. This is because we are absolute suckers and despite being on high alert always get got by at least one April Fools. This year it was the news of a purported new climb at the Tour de France that reached 3,110 metres of altitude (we should have known better, seeing as the French journalist cited as the source of the news was Philippe d’Avril).
Anyway, other examples of April Fools this year include Pro Cycling Stats posting theirs two whole days early (which is not how it works), claiming that American visitors to the website would need a paid subscription to access it in retaliation for the new tariffs.
Paris-Roubaix had a good one, pretending to use a street sweeper to clean the cobbles instead of the lauded goats.
And then Geraint Thomas tweeted, with more than a drop of sarcasm, that he was "enjoying my final year so much on the bike, I’ve decided to add the Vuelta to my programme."
His Ineos Grenadiers teammate Laurens De Plus helped us all out by replying with a pinocchio and clown emoji, but that didn't stop Pro Cycling Stats from updating Thomas' schedule on its website, and in one fell swoop the pranker became the prankee. Life comes at you fast, Pro Cycling Stats, time to hang an "I got got" flag from your branded caravan at the roadside of a bike race.
Whatever happened to the woman who threw a hat at Mathieu van der Poel? 🤔
In light of spit-gate at the E3 Saxo Classic, we remembered how around this time last year, Mathieu van der Poel had to deal with another unruly 'fan' who deserved jail time.
Remember the woman at Paris-Roubaix who threw a cap at Van der Poel's back wheel? Well, she was supposedly offered a deal whereby the French cycling union would drop all charges if she admitted wrongdoing and volunteered with Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix who maintain the route and clean and prepare the cobbles ahead of every Sunday in Hell.
So, has the hat-throwing woman been back to the scene of her crime to help out?
Did we do a good job with this story?
