Tag: Le Tour Méditerranéen 2010

Ed Hood was in Belgium last weekend for the Gent Six Day to see the farewell to ‘t Kuipke Keizer’ Iljo Keisse and when in Belgium in November you have to go to a cyclo-cross, so Ed and his pals visited the Telenet Superprestige Merksplas, the "Flemish Strawberrycross".

Colin Sturgess exploded on to the UK cycling scene in the 80's - within a couple of seasons he was world professional pursuit champion. But his enormous potential was never full realised.

I didn't make it up to the Phil Young memorial race this year, work got in the way. I need to get my values sorted out. I should put the memory of a friend before commercial activity, but when you are under client pressure to get a job finished, it is difficult. Phil had his priorities right, though: "the bike" was number one, and everything else was organised around that.

Quickstep's win total for the year now stands at 24 with the victories not just down to one man but spread across the team – remarkable. How do they do it? To find out, we got in touch with our old friend and key leadout man in the QuickStep machine, Michael Mørkøv - who was instrumental in Jakobsen’s most recent triumph and similarly ‘pilot fished’ Hodeg to a stage win in the Tour of Catalonia – to get ‘the word’ from the horse’s mouth.

I said this morning that I would talk to you from Caen; well it’s actually Lisieux, around 50 kilometres east of Caen, here on Le Tour de France 2006. It took the usual hour to get to the start this morning. Beauvais was ‘en fete’ for le Tour - not the grotty part of Beauvais you encounter en route to Ryanair’s tent at the airport but the nice, old part complete with Gothic cathedral.

Our chum, Graham Robson suggested we catch up with Neil Mapplebeck who raced in the tough school that was 70’s and 80’s Dutch ‘Total Cycling’ with ‘all-time greats,’ Kuiper, Raas, Knetemann, Schuiten and Zoetemelk just some of the names from that era.