Spin Cycle is Escape Collective’s news digest, published every Monday and Friday. You can read it on the website (obviously) or click here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle.
Hooray! Opening Weekend is so close we can taste it. Well done everyone for getting here. Cherish every moment from this point until late September-ish.
Throughout it all, we’ll continue to bring you the weird and wonderful from the more obscure corners of the cycling world. These days, most of that exists thanks to the internet, and today is no different. We have star riders being too polite with airlines that have done them dirty, a trip into the slightly hazardous team-approved content mines, and French riders are livestreaming again!
Come fly with G ✈️
Geraint Thomas broke his five-month Twitter silence to say the following:
“Hi Air France,” the Welshman began. “Any chance after four months of multiple emails and phone calls, you could get back to me please.”
“Hello Thomas,” the (hopefully) automated response began, “we are sorry for the delay in the processing of your claim. We invite you to send a new message to our customer service on WhatsApp to be assisted promptly. We remain at your service.”
To which one person replied: “Air France if you can’t get back in touch with a maillot jaune winner and a genuine nice fella then we are all buggered, just respond to his emails.”
And judging by the other replies, Air France is not an airline you want to do business with. Although, we are slightly concerned that Geraint Thomas is still so calm after four months of, we’re guessing, his luggage being lost. We would have chained ourselves to the door outside Air France HQ by this point. Doesn’t matter what was in your bags, it’s the principle.
One thing that presumably wasn’t lost in his luggage was his laptop, as he’s only started to use one since becoming support staff at Ineos.
“I’m adapting. Lots of meetings, calls … and learning how to use a laptop. I’d never used one before,” Geraint Thomas joked to AS about his new life behind the wheel of the team car, but all the best jokes have a hint of truth to them.
The content machine never stops whirring 🫨
Will the ‘content’ arms race ever subside? Maybe when we eventually all get thoroughly bored of rotting our brains with too much screen time, but for now people will continue industriously pumping out things for our ears and eyeballs (us included!).
First up in today’s social media triptych, we have F1 driver Ollie Bearman on BBC Radio 1’s Greg James show playing his ‘Sit Down Stand Up!’ game, whereby the guest calls up a mate and has to guess whether they’ll be sitting down or standing up when they answer the phone. Yes, really.
In quite a genius move, Bearman calls up his Monaco pal Tadej Pogačar, who he guesses will likely be training at the time of recording and so sitting down on his saddle. Or if not, he’ll be relaxing at home honouring the time-honoured pro cyclist tradition of ‘don’t stand when you can sit’.
Unfortunately, when Pogačar picks up, he admits he’d ‘only’ done a two-hour ride that day and so was at home standing up. I like the idea of trying to explain to Tadej Pogačar who Greg James is.
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