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Cycling Legends Media, Everton (2025)

14/10/2025

🎶 Cycling Legends Podcast 🎶

And so to Il Lombardia, via Rwanda and a whole host of other places. The traditional end of the season is upon us already and the guys might have a few things to talk about, not just Tadej Pogacar. Okay, but quite a bit of Tadej Pogacar.

In other news, we begin the campaign for Remco Evenepoel’s assault on the Hour Record, Quinn Simmons impresses us once again, there is no ‘you’ in team according to the Dutch women’s gravel squad and - speaking of squads - just what is the link between Eddy Merckx and Scotland’s 1978 World Cup football squad?

📸 Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia, Como, 13 October 1973. Eddy Merckx wins his third Giro di Lombardia (as it was known then) some 4 minutes and 15 seconds ahead of nearest rival Felice Gimondi. Or so he thought. Merckx would later test positive for norephedrine - a decongestant - and Gimondi was subsequently awarded the win. In April the following year, a commission would ultimately accept that Merckx had not knowingly taken the banned substance, having been prescribed a cough syrup by his doctor while the Cannibal was suffering from bronchitis. His ‘victory’, nevertheless, was not reinstated.

Photo Credit: Photo News

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14/10/2025

It was Johan Museeuw’s birthday yesterday. Yes, The Lion of Flanders is 60, still riding his bike, still strong and still full of character. Strength and character were the hallmarks of his racing. Museeuw was the cyclist’s cyclist, admired by fans and rivals alike.

Swedish 2004 Paris-Roubaix winner Magnus Backstedt says, “Johan was always a competitor, always there trying to win. He really showed how hard he could fight when he came back and won Paris-Roubaix after a bad crash. That was an amazing story and an amazing performance.”

Museeuw’s bad crash was in the 1998 Paris-Roubaix, he was out of competition for a long time. His left knee was smashed, but an infection could have cost him his life. It was a serious attack of gangrene.

“For a whole month my knee was twice its normal size. I couldn’t even move, the only thing I did was lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, the pain was terrible. For 20 days they gave me morphine injections to kill the pain. I reached the extreme limit of pain I couldn’t have handled any more. It felt as if they had put a thousand needles in my body, but I survived,” he told Cycle Sport magazine when he started training again.

A key figure in Museeuw’s return, physiotherapist Lieven Maesschalck, remembers the struggle. “Johan’s rehabilitation was physically and mentally difficult. He suffered a lot of pain in hospital and afterwards he pulled himself through four hours of physiotherapy a day.

“At first, he could only bend his knee ten degrees, but to ride a bike you have to bend it 110 degrees. It took two months before he could get on his bike again, and then he started from behind zero because not only were some of the muscles around his knee wasted, some were destroyed. And he was still in terrible pain just trying to work the knee. To come back and win Paris-Roubaix twice from where he was then. Well, that was huge.”

It was huge, Museeuw won Paris-Roubaix in 2000 and 2001, and stopped straight after completing the great cobbled classic one last time in 2004. We hope he enjoyed his birthday.

You can read more stories about Johan Museeuw in the 4th edition of the Cycling Legends illustrated book series, Flandriens. Available now on our website - https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/cycling-legends-04-flandriens-by-chris-sidwells

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Photo: John Pierce Photosport International

13/10/2025

Cycling legends 01: Tom Simpson
Available now!

https://cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/cycling-legends-01-tom-simpson

13/10/2025

What’s the connection between the Tour de France stage town of Sestriere in the Alps, and the start of many old British time trials? They owe their locations to marker stones.

Ad Petram Sistreum is Latin for the 60th stone. In the case of Sestriere the 60th stone in Roman miles from Turin on the road from Rome to Canterbury. The road had granite or marble milestones, so when a settlement grew where the 60th stone was on the pass between Val Susa and Val Chisone, it was called Ad Petram Sisterium. That settlement is now Sestriere.

In the UK, milestones became part of growing conflict between racing cyclists and the authorities when in 1890, fearing official interference with all cyclists’ right to ride on public roads, the sport’s then governing body, the National Cyclists’ Union (NCU), banned bunched racing on them. The NCU told its clubs to hold races on cycle tracks and motor racing circuits only, but Frederick Thomas Bidlake thought the sport could continue in public if it didn’t attract attention.

Bidlake started organising time trials and encouraged others to do the same. Competitors started individually at intervals, with the fastest going off first so no bunches could form. They were also dressed from head to foot in black, and the courses they raced on had alpha-numeric codes, rather than geographical locations. The codes were only known to organisers and competitors, and race starts and finishes were often identified by milestones.

But it’s in France where marker stones, the sort in our photo- bornes kilometriques, achieve their iconicity in cycling. They come in several shapes and sizes. The most basic are made from cement, painted white with a red or a yellow cap, and carry the road number and the distance to the next town. Other bornes mark the borders between departments, or contain local information, but the most famous are the bornes found on mountain passes.

Bornes have become such a part of French cycling that older French riders often refer to rides they’ve done as being so many bornes in length, rather than so many kilometres. You can buy souvenir copies of famous bornes from Planet Borne in France.

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12/10/2025

Tim Gould from Derbyshire is the first British cyclist ever to win a mountain bike world title. He was also the first man to beat a horse in a very different race, but more of that later.

The world title was in the 1989 uphill race, which was a spectacular event in early mountain bike worlds series, but is no longer part of the discipline. Gould, who was an excellent cyclo-cross rider and could hold his own in a road race, only did his first mountain bike race the year before. We’ll let his then team manager Simon Burney, who is now a high-up with the UCI, tell the story.

“The race was a cross-country held in Peebles, Scotland and Tim and David Baker got first and second quite a few minutes ahead of anybody else, so we decided to have a go at the World Championships that year. It was an unofficial worlds, not under the umbrella of the UCI yet, held in Crans Montana in Switzerland. Two Americans, Mike Kloser and John Tomac, were first and second, with David in third and Tim in fifth,” Burney says.

“The following year the world championships were held in the America ski resort of Mammoth Mountain, which lies at an altitude of around 9000 feet. Tim had won a US cross country race at Big Bear, shortly before the worlds, so he was in good shape.

“There was a downhill and an uphill race, as well as the cross country at Mammoth Mountain. Tim won the uphill race and finished top ten in the cross-country, but David was quite badly affected by the altitude and didn’t perform as well as he’d hoped.”

In the same year, Gould took part in the Man v Horse challenge race held on a cross-country route in the hills around Llanwyrtid Wells in Wales. The first Man v Horse was in 1980 and was a challenge for runners and horse riders. Horses won the first few editions, so to even the odds mountain bike riders were allowed to compete in 1989, and Gould won.

📸 Cycling Legends Collection
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11/10/2025

Nicole Cooke (left) was the first British woman to win a real Tour de France when she won La Grand Boucle in 2006. Millie Robinson had won a race called the Tour de France in 1956, but its stages were confined to Normandy, so it was really a Tour of Normandy.

Cooke won La Grande Boucle again in 2007, but a knee injury caused her to miss the world championships. She also lost the lead in the women’s UCI World Cup that she’d held all year, finishing a narrow second to Marianne Vos of the Netherlands.

The 2008 Olympic Games were held in Beijing, China, with the women’s road race the first event of the Olympic cycling programme. No British cyclist, male or female had ever won the Olympic Road Race, but Nicole Cooke scored an imperious solo victory in China.

It was the first British gold of the Games in any sport, the first cycling medal, and the prelude to a landmark British Olympic cycling performance. Team GB finished on top of the cycling medals table, with eight golds, four silver medals and two bronze.

The British Cycling Performance Plan, funded by the National Lottery, had kicked in by then, but Nicole Cooke could have won without it. She followed her own course, lived and raced in Europe just like the old British road race best had. She trained and raced with enormous drive and dedication and was a deadly competitor, a winner.

Later in 2008 Cooke became the first cyclist ever, male or female, to win the Olympic and world road race titles in the same year. She won the Transworld Sport ‘Female Athlete of the Year’ and the Sunday Times ‘Sportswoman of the Year’ awards, and continued racing with great success until 2012, when she announced she would stop.

When she did, she spoke out against doping and sexism in cycling in her award-winning autobiography, The Breakaway. In 2017 Cooke gave written and oral evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into combating doping in sport. Cooke’s evidence didn’t paint a pretty picture. If elite cycling is better now, much of that is due to Nicole Cooke’s bravery.

📸 Cycling Legends Collection
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10/10/2025

Andy Hampsten (2nd right) became the first US male rider to win a European national pro stage race when he won the Tour of Switzerland in 1986, just weeks before Greg LeMond won the Tour de France. Hampsten made his own grand tour history in 1988 when he won the Giro d’Italia. Fantastic results, especially when he came from somewhere far from US cycling hotspots.

“Yeah, North Dakota. The only people with road bikes near me were a group of 8 or 9 hippies. Some of them had European 10-speeds, and there was one bike shop, we’d hang around that,” Hampsten told Chris in an interview for the Cycling Legends Podcast.

“Those showed me useful things like how to sit on a wheel, but there were so few races, and you’d have to travel hundreds of miles to get to them. All I could do to discover what racing was about was listen to the guys translating French cycling magazines or, just occasionally, a copy of Cycling Weekly would turn up from England,” Hampsten says.

In the summer of 1977, when Hampsten was 15, he visited England. “My mum’s sister married an Englishman, and they lived in Cambridge with their two daughters, so once every five years we’d pack up the house and go over for the summer. In 1977 me and my elder brother Stephen, who was also into cycling, went over, and we joined the Cambridge Town and County Cycling Club. We spent all summer riding with them. It was heaven.”

“There was a 10-mile time trial on Thursday evenings, and three regular training rides a week. At weekends a guy called Robbie Parker would load us all up in his van and we’d go to races up and down the country. That was my introduction to European cycling. I didn’t win anything, I just enjoyed it,” Hampsten says.

He started racing in the US the following year. “I really enjoyed the lifestyle, meeting new people, travelling lots, sleeping on other people’s sofas. Cycling was a good way of doing the things independently. I was very shy at the time, but it gave me freedom, and some confidence.”

📸 Cycling Legends Collection
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09/10/2025

So, who’s up for next year? 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

09/10/2025

Graeme Obree; well, in the early 1990s Graeme Obree turned cycling upside down. Look at what he did, a kid from Scotland who wasn’t part of any pro or national team, on a bike made from bits in his back yard, broke the Holy Grail of cycling, the World Hour Record and was world pursuit champion.

He did it by looking at the demands of going fast for specific periods of time and in specific conditions on a bike and addressing them with logic rather than tradition.

Graeme is most famous for his bikes, or rather the cycling positions his bikes allowed him to adopt; the praying mantis on his first bike and the Superman in a later iteration. What is less known is that Obree applied the same logic to training. He addressed the specific demands of his objectives.

So, for the Hour Record the demand is riding the fastest possible pace that can be maintained for one hour and doing so on a cycle track in the most effective aerodynamic riding position. Obree didn’t have access to a track to train on, so his key training sessions were riding for one hour as hard as he could ride for one hour, and no more, on a home-made turbo trainer set up so in the same position he used when riding his race bike.

One hour flat out on a turbo trainer is physically and mentally exhausting, and most training for the Hour try a 30-minute race pace trial, then leave riding one hour at record place to the record attempt. Obree did the full hour several times in the run-up to his records. He spaced the sessions with several days of easy riding in between to recover, but that’s how his logic told him to do his specific training for the record.

Later, when preparing for the individual pursuit, his training consisted of a warm-up then he would ride flat out for five minutes, then pedal easy for a bit to cool down, and that was it. Except he did one such session in the morning, and the same training session in the afternoon. That matched the qualifying and finals of a championship pursuit.

📸 Cycling Weekly
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08/10/2025

Cycling Legends Podcast - LIVE!

Recorded live without a safety net (or any internet) at Harworth and Bircotes Town Hall on 12 September 2025 before an actual audience, Chris and Gary were joined onstage by Joanne Simpson to remember her father, Tom, and celebrate his World Championship win 60 years ago.

Simultaneously, joyful, funny, poignant and at times deeply personal, you’ll want to hear this.

Special thanks to Lee Stewart at Harworth and Bircotes Town Council who went over and above the call of duty to help make the whole thing happen.

🎶 Cycling Legends Podcast - available on all good podcasting sites.

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