Tag: Leven

As a man who’s incurred the wrath of the UCI and the professional teams for ‘fessing up,’ and is in London this weekend to take part in the "Change cycling Now" meeting, we thought that it would be interesting to get Jörg Jaksche's views on the current situation. If you read the first interview, you’ll remember that at the end of 2010 he was living in Austria, still without a team and wondering about his future – two years later, here’s what he told us...

When last we spoke to Mark Stewart, back in April, he’d just been cut adrift from the GB track squad on the strength of an admittedly below par ride in the World Points Race Championship, despite an excellent series of World Cup results over the winter. The other day, when we rang Mark we were back to speaking to ‘our Mark of old’, the new 2020 New Zealand Omnium Champion, full of enthusiasm for life and his sport.

It must be the water in Mol in the Province of Antwerp, Belgium; not only is it Tom Boonen’s home town, it’s also the home town of the man who was in the team car behind him for so many of the ‘Tornado’s’ triumphs; Wilfried Peeters, sport director with the Deceuninck ‘Wolf Pack’ was a ‘Man of the Northern Classics’ in his own right.

The last few seasons have seen few youths or juniors names grace the start sheets in Scotland, but 2006 saw a few of those 'green shoots of recovery' the politicians tell us about. The man charged with nurturing the crop is Gary Willis, so VeloVeritas decided we should ask him some questions. First off, we spoke a little about the job itself.

Ciao! It was gone midnight when we hit the hay, last night. There was no thought of food, just sleep, it seemed to take an age to get off the mountain at Pratto and get to our digs at Racconigi - maybe it was just because we were so tired. Breakfast was chronic, stale bread, no cheese, no ham and everything else in polythene wrappers. First mission of the day was to meet Stuey O'Grady at the CSC press conference. He's a buddy of Martin's pal, Pete Jacques.

She’s Sarah Rowe these days but in the world of cycling she’s remembered as Sarah Phillips; Scottish Champion at 10 and 25 miles in 1988, 1990 and 1991 with Scottish records at 10 miles with 22:43, 25 miles with 57:18 and 50 miles with 2:00:51 achieved during 1990. Here’s her tale...