In winning Gent-Wevelgem, Biniam Girmay made history by becoming the first Black African to win a classic. While he and his team were delighted with the win, Girmay isn't necessarily comfortable with the limelight. "I don't like to be the famous guy," Girmay said after the race. Recording in Belgium between Gent-Wevelgem and the Tour of Flanders, Sadhbh O'Shea and Ben Delaney discuss what Girmay's win means for cycling, and what it means for the young rider from Eritrea. Sadhbh and Ben also talk...
Mar 30, 2022•30 min
Matej Mohorič was not the strongest climber or the fastest sprinter at Milan-San Remo. But he was strong enough to bridge the the front group over the decision final Poggio climb. And then, as his race will forever be remember, he dropped his dropper post and the best cyclists in the world on the technical descent and then held off his chasers on the flat 2.2km run-in to the finish. In this episode, Jim Cotton and Ben Delaney analyze Mohorič's power numbers at each critical section in comparison...
Mar 24, 2022•33 min
In 2020, VeloNews created the Monuments of Gravel by polling elite gravel racers and race organizers for their top 5 picks of the most import gravel races. The Mid South, put on by Bobby Wintle in Stillwater, Oklahoma, was a near-unanimous selection, as was Unbound Gravel, SBT GRVL, and BWR California. The fifth Monument, Rebecca's Private Idaho, was decided in a reader vote. This year, some 2,500 people signed up for one of the many events at The Mid South. Betsy Welch and Ben Delaney were amon...
Mar 16, 2022•32 min
VeloNews editor in chief Daniel Benson got a scoop on Netflix's planned docu-series on the 2022 Tour de France, including the eight teams that will be showcased. Daniel walks us through how the series could come together, and what it will mean for fans and the teams. But first, Jim Cotton and host Ben Delaney catch up on the highlights and hot takes from Strade Bianche, from Tadej Pogačar's dominant performance to the ongoing debate on gravel's place in professional road racing. Strade Bianche i...
Mar 09, 2022•33 min
The classics season officially kicked off with four races packed into two days: the men's and women's Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, and Omloop van het Hageland. VeloNews' Sadhbh was in Gent, Belgium, for the weekend, covering the races and talking to the riders. Jumbo-Visma's Wout van Aert rode away with the big prize of the weekend, and Fabio Jakobsen saved face for Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl on Sunday. Has the balance of power at the classics shifted? O'Shea also recounts the most ...
Mar 02, 2022•32 min
Andrew Hood is just back from Ruta del Sol, and he checks in with five key takeaways about some of the riders and trends for the 2022 season he picked up on while following the race around southern Spain. At Ruta, Andy also caught up with Pat McCarty, who is directing the American team Human Powered Health (formerly Rally Cycling). Hear Andy's take on his conversations with 19-year-old American Magnus Sheffield, who won a stage riding in his first year for Ineos Grenadiers. Andy's other Ruta rev...
Feb 23, 2022•29 min
Having twice coached at the Olympics, Rob Stanley is a performance scientist and men's endurance track cycling coach at USA Cycling. Previously he was performance scientist at the Japanese Cycling Federation. And he is currently wrapping up his PhD at Leeds Beckett University — in bike racing. Stanley joins host Ben Delaney to talk about the merging of his academic work and his coaching of athletes like Gavin Hoover, who just won the inaugural UCI Track Champions League. Stanley's PhD title is a...
Feb 16, 2022•50 min
Veteran cycling journalist Daniel Benson is the new editor in chief of VeloNews. Daniel comes to VeloNews after 14 years at Cyclingnews, where he was editor in chief for the past seven years. On this podcast, Daniel and host Ben Delaney talk about the 2022 road reason, rider salaries, the best races to watch, and why early season races matter. Daniel's sports journalism career of more than two decades includes experience reporting from a dozen Tours de France, several world championships, the To...
Feb 09, 2022•47 min
Was Marianne Vos right to play cat and mouse with her compatriot Lucinda Brand in pursuit of her record eighth world title? What did Tom Pidcock think about the course and his competition? The cyclocross world championships came to the United States for only the second time in history, and fans and racers traveled from around the world to attend. Host Ben Delaney and VeloNews web editor Greg Kaplan covered the weekend's racing in Fayetteville, Arkansas. On this episode, Ben and Greg discuss the ...
Feb 02, 2022•30 min
Philippe Gilbert has had one heck of a career. His wins include worlds, Paris-Roubaix, the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold, Il Lombardia, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Strade Bianche, and on and on. He's won stages in all three grand tours. And now, in 2022, he will race for this one last season before retiring. Can he win the one monument — Milan-Sanremo — that has eluded him? He would love to, of course, but his job there this year will almost certainly be to help his teammate Caleb Ewan. Andrew Hood in...
Jan 26, 2022•30 min
America's national champions Clara Honsinger and Eric Brunner are both headed to the world cyclocross championships in Fayetteville at the end of January, but they have chosen very different routes to get there. After they won their respective national titles in mid December, Honsinger returned to Europe for more racing at the elite level in Superprestige and World Cup competitions. Brunner, despite being on a hot streak of winning four races in a row, opted to head home to Boulder, Colorado to ...
Jan 19, 2022•42 min
The world cyclocross championships are coming to Fayetteville, Arkansas Jan. 29-30. Who are the podium contenders and why? Why aren't Wout or Mathieu coming? How will the course determine the race? And where should fans go to watch, eat, and enjoy the scene? To answer all these questions and more, Ben Delaney is joined by six-time national cyclocross champion Tim Johnson, whose broadcasting career recently included calling the World Cup in Fayetteville on the course that will be used for worlds....
Jan 12, 2022•40 min
VeloNews and Peloton have been teammates under the Outside umbrella since January of 2021. Now, in January of 2022, VeloNews magazine is merging into Peloton magazine. Further, authors and photographers from our sister brand CyclingTips are also now contributing their talents to the new Peloton magazine. To talk about the history and future of VeloNews and Peloton, host Ben Delaney is joined by Peloton founder Brad Roe. Also joining the show are two journalists who worked for VeloNews for many y...
Jan 05, 2022•59 min
In with the new, and out with the old! In 2021, that meant in with more electronic groups, and out with shifting cables. On the top end, new 12-speed semi-wireless Shimano Dura-Ace and Ultegra groups were big news, and the more affordable Rival eTap AXS group in SRAM's third-tier slot was also worthy of praise. What else made the list of the biggest gear stories of 2021? Tune in and check it out.
Dec 22, 2021•48 min
What a year it has been! From the first-ever Paris-Roubaix Femmes (finally!) to the ban of the supertuck (on April Fool's Day, no less) to Wout van Aert hitting a Tour de France triple (mountain stage, time trial, Champs Élysées final sprint), this season was a wild ride. Listen in as the full VeloNews European contingent of Andrew Hood, Sadhbh O'Shea, and Jim Cotton join Ben Delaney to count down the 21 biggest cycling stories of 2021.
Dec 15, 2021•55 min
If you could go anywhere in the world to ride right now, where would it be? For Olympic gold medalist Annemiek van Vleuten, that answer is sunny Colombia. And while Ineos Grenadiers are in Mallorca and Deceuninck-Quick-Step heads to Calpe, other riders head to some unusual retreats. Sadhbh O'Shea and Ben Delaney discuss who is going where, and why. American Tokyo Olympian Gavin Hoover just won the men's endurance competition at the inaugural UCI Track Champions League, which had him and the othe...
Dec 08, 2021•46 min
Pete Stetina left the world of pro racing to go gravel in 2020, opting for the freedom of a solitary project over the support and constraints of a WorldTour team. Then Covid hit and Stetina, like people the world over, had to adjust. Thus, this season was his first full year of racing gravel. On this podcast, he reflects on the highlights and lowlights of traveling the United States by van, engaging with the cycling world on social media, and how having one mid-race beer proved more popular than...
Dec 01, 2021•53 min
This year, American Ashton Lambie set a world record by breaking the four-minute barrier in the individual pursuit in Mexico. Later, at the world championships in France, he toppled world time trial champion Filippo Ganna of Ineos Grenadiers, among others, to take the world title in the individual pursuit. And unlike Ganna, who trains with the full support of one of the world's richest WorldTour teams, Lambie trained on his own — often in a big shed in Montana. Listen in as he reflects on his ex...
Nov 24, 2021•56 min
Christopher Blevins has been racing bikes since he was 5 years old. Getting his start in BMX, he won 8 national championships in that discipline before he was 16. At age 12, he started racing road and mountain bikes, and winning national titles in those disciplines, too. In the past couple years during, during all the racing and training in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, Blevins earned his degree from California Polytechnic State Institute in San Luis Obispo. And this year, in addition to goi...
Nov 17, 2021•56 min
Four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome joined his Israel Start-Up Nation teammates for a weeklong camp in Israel to bond, visit historical sites, and connect with Israeli cycling fans. VeloNews European Senior Editor Andrew Hood spent the week with the team, and on this podcast he talks with Froome about his experience with technology for performance, recovery, and personal investment. Isreali-Canadian billionaire and philanthropist Sylvain Adams is the team owner of Israel Start-Up Nation...
Nov 10, 2021•29 min
Molly Cameron is a veteran bike racer who has also run a women's team, put on bike races, and owned and operated a bike shop. Cameron has been out as a transgender woman for two decades, and has raced at a high level in both the men's and women's fields. The UCI cyclocross pro recently won the Wafer edition of Belgian Waffle Ride Kansas — beating VeloNews Podcast host Ben Delaney and Scott Moninger — and enjoyed the 6.5-mile cyclocross course that was inserted into the end of that race. On this ...
Nov 05, 2021•57 min
Brendan Quirk's rise — from Competitive Cyclist and Rapha to working with the Waltons and USA Cycling — tracks with the rise in importance of his home state for cycling. Arkansas has become a hotbed for American cycling for a few reasons, and Brendan Quirk is one of them. Newly elected as USA Cycling’s chairman of the board, Quirk talks on the VeloNews Podcast about his career’s trajectory, and exactly how and why his home state of Arkansas is booming for cycling. Quirk co-founded Competitive Cy...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Virtual bike racing is a thing. A big thing. Consider this: Every Tuesday more than 10,000 racers on 1,800 teams race each other in leagues through a series called ZRL, which is now in its fourth season. And then of course Zwift has scores of races every day of the week that are open to anybody on the virtual cycling platform. To explain this phenomenon, and to offer advice on preparing for and competing in Zwift races, Ben Delaney talks with Eric Schlange, the founder of ZwiftInsider.com, a sit...
Oct 20, 2021•47 min
Well before he co-authored three Feed Zone cookbooks with Dr. Allen Lim, Biju Thomas was cooking for cyclists all around the world. He's been the chef for everyone from Lance Armstrong to Peter Sagan, and he's cooked in fancy hotels and in parking lots. Thomas is now the resident chef at Outside, the parent company for VeloNews and VeloPress, the publisher of the Feed Zone cookbooks. In this episode, Thomas talks with Ben Delaney about how he got his start in cycling and cooking, and he gives ad...
Oct 14, 2021•48 min
American Neilson Powless' spring didn't go like he expected; instead of racing the classics he got Covid. But a win at Clásica de San Sebastián followed by a fifth place at the road world championships hailed an excellent return to form. On this podcast, Powless checks in from his hotel in Italy, while Sadhbh O'Shea chats with world champion Elisa Balsamo at the Women's Tour in England.
Oct 07, 2021•35 min
On this podcast we celebrate Belgium and Belgium-adjacent racing. Andrew Hood checks in as he travels between the raucous party that was the world championships and Paris-Roubaix. Fred Dreier speaks with Belgian Waffle Ride founder Michael Marckx on the dusty boom that is gravel racing. And Ben Delaney talks tech, with the results of VeloNews lab testing on 15 Paris-Roubaix tires and a new Trek Checkpoint just going live this week.
Sep 30, 2021•46 min
Andy Hood, Sadhbh O’Shea, and Ben Delaney are in Belgium for the road world championships, and on this week’s pod they weigh in with their takes on the time trials — including the relay format — and their prognostications for this coming weekend’s road races. Also, a UCI-sanctioned gravel world championships? It’s true. Hood broke the story, and the trio discuss what gravel racers, gravel race organizers, and the UCI are saying about the 2022 event. Tune in for this week’s VeloNews Podcast....
Sep 23, 2021•49 min
It's Fred Dreier's final episode of The VeloNews Podcast! Fred is joined by Sadhbh O'Shea, Andrew Hood, and departed editor Spencer Powlison to offer unvarnished opinions on some of the biggest cycling stories of the last five years. Why is Chris Froome so polarizing? Annemiek van Vleuten or Anna van der Breggen? What will we remember most about Peter Sagan? The list of questions is long, and the takes are weird. It's a fitting sendoff for the founder of The VeloNews Podcast. This week's episode...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 275
The Vuelta a España concluded this week, and the race also delivered one of the biggest controversies of the 2021 WorldTour season. Colombian star Miguel Ángel López quit the Vuelta on the penultimate stage after he was dropped from the front group, and afterwards reports circulated that López was unhappy with the tactics of his Movistar team. The story has developed into a war of words between the Spanish team and López's camp, and now, the rider and the team may have an irrevocably damaged rel...
Sep 08, 2021•53 min•Ep. 274
On this week's episode of The VeloNews Podcast we discuss the latest controversy in U.S. gravel racing. Earlier this month a storyline emerged from SBT GRVL about the CINCH cycling team using team tactics to help its star rider, Lauren De Crescenzo, win the race, The news caused a stir in the U.S. gravel scene, with multiple riders taking to social media to contemn the team tactics, as well as CINCH owner Tom Danielson. The rules governing gravel races, however, do not forbid teammates from sett...
Sep 01, 2021•49 min•Ep. 273
