Tag: Le Tour de France 2010

Back! Just a quickie before the Giro starts (well, only three days after the Giro started, but near enough). March and April saw a nice turnaround in the fortunes of the team: only two fractured collarbones and two major concussions! MUCH less hectic! We also put in some very good results, popping up with wins in both individual stages and overall races (on one memorable day we won three times: two stages and an overall race. Very nice!). We also had some very strong showings in some of the biggest one day races on the calendar. Very nice indeed! March also saw a grand turnaround in the life of Tobias, with the arrival of Mands to sunny Girona. Good times!

This 23 year-old is a force of nature and has to be one of our best medal hopes at the Commonwealth Games; she’s been rampant recently in the European Championships and World Cups; Ms. Katie Archibald recently kindly took time to speak to VeloVeritas about her autumn adventures and her future ambitions:

Three times the cross country mountain bike event has been in the Commonwealth Games (introduced in 2002, it didn't feature on the programme in Dehli four years ago) and three times Canada have topped the womens' podium. This time it was the turn of Catharine Pendrel, who took control of the race midway round the first of five laps and wasn't challenged again, soloing to a 70 second win over her teammate Emily Batty, with Australian rider Rebecca Henderson third a further 12 seconds back, after a race-long battle with Batty.

C’est la vie. After filling most of Saturday with a dozy nine hour drive, the team arrived in the medieval village of Sillans-la-Cascade. We were greeted with a hearty four-course feast, courtesy of the host family who would be looking after us. This set the theme for the week; each meal was both tasty and enormous. With 1000km to ride in the next seven days plenty of fuel was certainly welcomed.

So I'm home now after the Volta ao Algarve, which, like always, proved to be very hard. The stages were all mammoth 200k slogs on twisty-turny roads through the hills. The stage finishes were a bit sketchy and the whole thing was topped off by a 35km TT through the hills on bad roads which were wet for the first half of the race.

If you're heading to Mallorca on holiday or for a training camp it makes a lot of sense to hire a bike over there rather than take your own machine to the island. I recently spent a couple of weeks in Pollença in the north east of Mallorca, on a family holiday - and for simplicity I decided to do just that. Here's how it went...