Sports Poets Society

Classiche, blasonate corse a tappe, maglie verdi… Il velocista per eccellenza Sean Kelly le ha vinte tutte. Poi, nel 1988, ha aggiunto un Grande Giro al proprio palmarès trionfando alla Vuelta. Cyclist gli chiede come ha fatto a portare a termine un’impresa probabilmente irripetibile  JAMES WITTS, Cyclist Immaginate se Peter Sagan, il velocista più premiato della nostra epoca, riuscisse a dominare un Grande Giro non solo nelle galoppate finali delle tappe pianeggianti. Immaginatelo a scalare al fianco dei campioni la classifica generale, e a sbaragliare gli avversari nelle crono. Oggi, sembra pura fantasia. Eppure 31 anni fa l’irlandese John James Kelly, detto Sean, ci è riuscito sfidando tutte le probabilità. Tra il 1977 e il 1994, anno del suo ritiro, Kelly ha raccolto 193 vittorie, comprese quattro maglie verdi al Tour de France e dieci Classiche di un giorno. Nella tarda primavera del 1988 il ciclista originario della Contea di Tipperary ha tagliato il tr...

No. 13: 7-Eleven. How a US convenience store helped to take road racing beyond its traditional European heartland  Words GILES BELBIN Cyclist, ISSUE 86 - May 2019 With one day remaining of the 1987 Tour de France, the manager of the 7-Eleven team, Jim Ochowicz, was a happy man . The US squad had enjoyed a remarkable race. Davis Phinney and Dag Otto Lauritzen had both won stages, while the team’s 23-year-old Mexican rider, Raúl Alcalá, had secured the young rider’s competition.  For a team that had arrived in Europe for the first time as a professional outfit just two years earlier, such returns on the sport’s grandest of stages represented a huge achievement. Before the final stage into Paris started Ochowicz told his riders he was proud of them. ‘You looked like a team,’ he said. ‘Today, let’s go finish things off.’  That was exactly what they would do. With one-lap remaining of the iconic Champs Élysées circuit that is the traditional finishing st...

https://cyclist.com.au/travel/col-dizoard-france-high-point/ At 2,361m, the Izoard is one of the highest cols at the Tour de France and has been the scene of many epic rides in the past. Cyclist tackles a true classic. It is early summer in the French Alps but somewhere along the road from the fortified mountain town of Briançon to the upper flanks of the 2,361m Col d’Izoard we seem to have cycled through a wormhole and ended up at Christmas. Snow-dusted ridges surround us like walls of a winter castle, and in the open bowl beneath them are pine forests, slabs of snow, and a cosy chalet with a sloping roof. Looking down on this solitary mountain refuge – built by Napoleon III in 1858 and miniaturised by its epic surroundings – gives the impression we are cycling inside an enormous snow globe. All it needs is a divine hand to shake us around, and the snow will rise up from the curved slopes of the Izoard into the glass sphere of blue sky above, and sprinkle down in flakes al...