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Bicycle Racing News and Opinion,
Thursday, December 15, 2022

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2022 Tour de France | 2022 Giro d'Italia

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. - Theodore Roosevelt

Les Woodland's book Dirty Feet: How the Great Unwashed Created the Tour de France is available in print, Kindle eBook & audiobook versions. To get your copy, just click on the Amazon link on the right.

Upcoming racing

• Dec 26: Gavere Cyclocross
• Dec 27: Heusden-Zolder Cyclocross
• Dec 29: Diegem Cyclocross
• Dec 30: Azencross-Loenhout
• Jan 1: GP Sven Nys Cyclocross
• Jan 14 - 22: Schwalbe Classic & Tour Down Under
• Jan 22 - 29: Vuelta a San Juan
• Jan 25 - 29: Challenge Illes Balears-Volta Ciclista a Mallorca
• Jan 28 & 29: Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race

Latest completed racing:

• Dec 10: Exact Cross Essen
• Dec 4: Scheldecross Antwerp
• Nov 20: Vlaamse Druivenveldrit Overijse Cross
• Nov 5 & 6: European Cyclocross Championships
• Nov 1: Trofee Oudenaarde-Koppenbergcross
• Oct 29: Superprestige Ruddervoorde Cyclocross
• Oct 11 - 18: Tour de Langkawi

Here’s the team’s post:

Luca Mozzato will be the 30th rider in the Arkéa-Samsic team for the 2023 season. The Italian sprinter wants to win races, but he can also be part of a train to help the other sprinters in the team to achieve success.

Luca Mozzato in his 2021 kit.

Mozzato: “Signing for Arkéa-Samsic is a great opportunity for me considering the situation I was in the last few days. I am also happy to stay in France, to continue to wear the Breton colours within an even stronger team, which will enter the UCI WorldTour in 2023. Arkéa-Samsic is a structure that has been established in the professional peloton for many years. I feel good in France. I speak the language and I like the races on your national calendar. I feel that I will integrate very quickly. Like any rider, I have the objective and the desire to win, and for me this would coincide with unlocking my victory counter in the professional peloton. Of course I can also help the team in order to help the other sprinters to win. I have individual ambitions, but the collective word also counts for me. I will play the role that the team managers give me. Finally, I like racing on Bianchi bikes and it motivates me a lot. I have already ridden a Bianchi bike in the past. It was in the junior ranks, and that season – 2016 – I finished 4th in the Junior World Championships in Doha. I’m really looking forward to testing the Oltre RC, I can’t wait to join the Arkea-Samsic team and be in 2023.

Emmanuel Hubert, General Manager:
“Luca Mozzato is a young Italian sprinter, and he can be considered as one of the great promises of Italian cycling. Only 24 years old, he is already 66th in the UCI world ranking. Luca also appreciates the Breton races since last year he finished 2nd in the Tro Bro Léon behind Hugo Hofstetter. This makes him somehow the most “Breton of the Italians”. He also finished in the same position in the Grand Prix Marcel Kint, then 3rd in the Tour de Vendée and 5th in what is generally considered as the classic for sprinters, Paris-Tours. He also showed himself in massive sprints on the roads of the Tour de France. Often placed, Luca Mozzato had to take a step forward by quickly getting his first success in the professional ranks, under the red and black colours of Arkea-Samsic. This will undoubtedly allow him to win more and more races. He will also benefit from a real train capable of carrying him when he is appointed number one sprinter. We also expect him to be involved in our sprint team as a team member for other sprinters when he is asked to do so”.

Here’s the team’s post:

The cycling year 2022 was an absolute dream season for Christophe Laporte. The rider managed to win five races in his debut year for Team Jumbo-Visma and played an important role in the great success of the team in the Tour de France as well. Time to look back at the phenomenal season of the Frenchman.

Cycling history in Paris-Nice
The first World Tour victory for Laporte is one for the books. An acceleration by Team Jumbo-Visma at the end of the race releases the remaining peloton. Wout van Aert, Primoz Roglic and Laporte cross the line with the three of them, after which the victory is awarded to Laporte.

2022 Paris-Nice stage 1: The triple Jumbo-Visma finish. ASO photo

Important role in the spring classics
In his first race for the team, Laporte finished eighth in Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne after an exciting final. The E3 Classic is almost a copy of the stage win in Paris-Nice. Laporte and Van Aert cross the finish line together with a considerable lead over the rest of the peloton. Two days later, the Frenchman finished second again, this time in Gent-Wevelgem. He also shows himself well in front in the Tour of Flanders and achieves a top ten classification.

Phenomenal Tour de France
Laporte played a very important role in Van Aert's green jersey win in the Tour de France. In addition, the Frenchman crowned a great Tour de France with a stage victory. He won the nineteenth stage by breaking away from the peloton in the final kilometer. It was the first victory in a grand tour for the 30-year-old Laporte.

Overall victory in the Tour of Denmark
One month after the Tour de France, Team Jumbo-Visma lands in Denmark. The team continues where it ended in Paris, winning races! Olav Kooij wins two bunch sprints after good preparation by Laporte. The leader himself wins the last stage and so the general classification.

Silver at the World Championships and solo in Binche
World champion Remco Evenepoel has already arrived minutes when the peloton prepares for a bunch sprint for the other podium places. Laporte beats many top sprinters, climbs the podium in Wollongong and takes the silver medal to France. He then closes his great season in Belgium with an excellent solo in Binche-Chimay-Binche.

Team ED Education EasyPost uploaded this advice from Tejay van Garderen:

When Team EF coach Tejay van Garderen turned pro a little over decade ago, base training still meant long, slow days in the saddle. He and his teammates would grind out endless kilometres, through rain and snow. It would be months before they did their first real intervals. The idea then was that slow endurance work would give them a base of aerobic fitness they could use to get fast later on. Looking back, with his wealth of WorldTour knowledge and experience, Tejay now thinks that a lot of those kilometres were a waste of time and effort.

Tejay van Garderen racing in the 2018 Tour of Switzerland. Sirotti photo

“I started out with that completely old-school, just-long-base-miles thinking,” Tejay says. “We would show up on the group ride and just pull through for hours. Three hours into the ride, you would stop at a coffee shop and warm up, grab a pastry and a coffee, and then do the other three hours home. We were bundled up with these balaclavas and thick gloves and just going out there for hours and hours on snowy days in Boulder. I look back and I’m like, that was probably not all that smart. Now, the thinking has just totally flipped around.”

Pros now focus on building strength and power early in the winter, adding volume later. Tejay encourages his Team EF Coaching athletes to do the same. Ambitious amateurs should be reassured. You don’t need to spend months away from family and work doing 30-hour weeks at warm-weather training camps to be competitive. Tejay points to the world-class cyclocross racers who make the switch to road racing in the spring and track racers who have gone on to be champions on the road.

“It is not like the guys who race ‘cross are adding in six hours on top of their cyclocross races,” he says. “They are just doing super short, high intensity, quality riding. Look at the Great Britain track programme. Those are all really short, super high intensity events. The guys who came from that were the ones who ended up being good in grand tours.”

A winter of COVID lockdowns also changed a lot of minds.

“Everyone was stuck inside,” Tejay says. “A lot of racers couldn’t even ride their bikes outside. And they started doing these indoor competitions that were 45 minutes to an hour long and super high intensity. Once things opened up and they were able to get outside, they added the volume in on top of that, and the speeds just shot up. That was thanks to that different approach of first the intensity and then the volume.”

Tejay is not saying that you should jump straight into Vo2 max intervals if you have taken some time off the bike this fall. First, you need to take a couple of weeks to get used to pedalling again. Regular one-hour to two-hour rides are enough. Go to the gym a few times per week to work out any strength imbalances.

“You have to give yourself a couple of weeks just to get comfortable again on the bike and make sure that your ligaments and your joints and everything are working properly and then you can add in a little bit of tempo and after a couple of weeks start with the intensity,” Tejay says. “If there is a warm weather day, and it is the weekend, and you want to go for a long ride, of course that is not going to hurt you, but it is not like you have to toil away in freezing cold temperatures just because you have to get the hours in. Keep it short and engaging with the quality.”

That principle—keep it short and engaging with high intensity sessions—should guide you through the winter. A well-thought-out programme with specific intervals is going to be much more effective and time efficient than just going out and riding for hours.

“If you only have ten hours a week, and you think, ‘Oh man, I don’t have time to get all of these base miles in, because I have a job’, I think you can put yourself at ease, because all those base miles aren’t actually necessary,” Tejay says. “The quality is what is going to give you the most bang for your buck.”

High quality training should be exciting.

Tejay encourages you to have a go at cyclocross yourself. It’s a tonne of fun and just about the hardest workout you can do in an hour. It’s also one of the best ways to improve your bike handling skills. He would add it to your programme.

Or try indoor racing. Riding your home trainer no longer has to be boring. Wahoo X offers immersive, indoor workouts and gives you the chance to race online against cyclists from all around the world. You’ll finish each session full of adrenaline and excited to race again, instead of dreading another day of toil.

You don’t even have to ride a bike to get in a high-quality workout. Some winter days are better suited to other sports. Go cross-country skiing or hike on snowshoes. It will do your body good to get out of your crouched cycling position and go through a fuller range of motions.

“Your internal motor will get the same benefit,” Tejay says. “Your heart and lungs don’t know the difference between pedalling a bike or going skiing or out on a jog. Those are great ways to balance out some of those monotonous motions that you put yourself through on the bike. When it comes to transferring muscle fibres over, you have plenty of time throughout the season to get those dialled.”

You can read the entire article here.

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