It's Leicester's Saffron Lane velodrome, August 1974. The newly crowned British 20 kilometre champion, Maurice Burton waves his bouquet. Sections of the crowd are booing. Is it because the champion rode a tactical race, not killing himself in the winning break, conserving his sprint? Perhaps, but Burton has just made history, he is Britain's first black senior champion.
VeloVeritas is back at a Grand Tour, La Vuelta 2019. This year it kicks off with a super-fast team test around the salt lagoons of Torrevieja before heading straight into the mountains on stage two - no 'easing in' to this race. Martin and Ed have taken advantage of the hospitality of VV amigo and local resident, Al Hamilton - formerly of the Dear Green Place that is Glasgow - to catch the primero quatro tappas.
Ah, the Girvan-and VeloVeritas are right there, with Evan Oliphant (Plowman Craven) and Gary Hand (Endura) keeping us abreast of what's going on in South West Scotland.
So my latest update on the Dan Patten Blog tells about the run of bad luck which continued through July and into August, including a collision with a car and less than a week later getting taken down by a bidon during the third stage of the Ronde van de Provincie Antwerpen.
The Ribble Weldtite team have had their fair share of problems in recent weeks, with Covid taking riders out of competition, as well as crashes, mechanicals, untimely punctures, bad luck and some poor tactics putting that big win out of reach. Ribble-Weldtite DS Colin Sturgess once again takes us behind the scenes to catch up with what the team have been doing since the Tour Series.
172 starters on a Wednesday afternoon... only in Kermis Belgium. This was a hard race from the off, again typical of Belgium. With only one amateur race taking place on this day it meant this race was full-on. A couple of crashes in the peloton on the same corner on consecutive laps didn't help matters...
We first spoke to Harry Tanfield a couple of years ago having seen him ride well in the Gordon Arms time trial – most recently we spoke to him after he won the David Campbell Memorial road race in Fife back in the spring of 2016. So when we opened this week’s ‘Cycling Weekly’ and there he was spread across two pages as the UK’s number one rated Elite rider we thought we best ‘have a word’...