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.
Men’s WorldTour racing is back! Thank you, Tour Down Under! We did it everybody, another off-season in the books. But with three weeks post-TDU until the UAE Tour, is this a false dawn? Don’t think about it. Positive vibes only. Our very own Matt de Neef is on the ground in Australia providing superb coverage of the race, so make sure you check that out.
But first, we’re off to South America for our first item today.
You can’t go out like that, you might get a bit Chile 🥶 (sorry, that’s one of the worst ones yet)
Here’s Tom Pidcock at a training camp in Chile, no sleeves, short socks, descending an off-road path on his new (and pretty expensive as I recall) Pinarello.
Is this the most Pidcock thing we’ve ever seen? It may be. A real prefrontal lobe development sort of exploit that makes me mourn my own youth. In our opinion, Pidcock’s stock has never been higher.
Pidcock and six teammates flew out to Chile for an altitude camp due to the competition for prime altitude spots in Europe (Pidcock’s Instagram post from their trip includes a video of Fred Wright suncreaming his back and his other teammates lining up to shave their leader’s head).
“The reason is simple,” Pinarello-Q36.5’s Head of Performance Kurt Bogaerts told Het Nieuwsblad recently. “It was a matter of finding solutions to [be able to] go on an altitude camp.
“You need to be able to go on a training camp somewhere with a good climate for training, so you don’t have to constantly improvise,” he continued. “On Teide, there’s only one hotel at altitude, plus a few other lodges. So, the availability is very limited. The advantage is that it’s the beginning of summer in Chile. On the mountain itself, it will still be 15-20 degrees Celsius.”
The problem of acquiring good altitude training lodgings is one of the many small reasons Remco Evenepoel decided to leave Soudal-Quick Step for Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe last year.
“Red Bull is more professional and forward-thinking. Let me give you an example,” Evenepoel said in December. “[Red Bull] booked hotel rooms on Mount Teide for the entire spring three or four months ago. That wasn’t the case with Soudal-Quick Step. There it was more freestyle: ‘okay, we’re going there for a training camp now.’”
However, according to Het Laatste Nieuws this week, Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe were too late to secure rooms at the Hotel Parador for Evenepoel’s post-UAE Tour altitude camp and so they will be staying in an apartment instead. Oh, the horror! Primož Roglič leaving dirty cups in the sink. Florian Lipowitz drying his underwear on the back of the sofa. Thoughts and prayers with our Belgian superstar.
A shorts issue that is not black and white 🩳
We are as confused as ever with the Ineos Traffic Cones will they/won’t they shorts-mageddon saga.
Sam Watson won the prologue for the British team (before some argy-bargy on stage one) and got up on the podium having changed from his black-bottomed skinsuit into his team-issue white-ish shorts.
But in the same prologue, we saw Lucas Hamilton completing his effort with a white-bottomed skinsuit.
And then Oscar Onley posted this photo on Instagram showing his new Ineos teammates wearing a mixture of shorts – we’re also pretty sure we’ve got at least two shades of white on show in the two different hemispheres.
We have no idea what’s going on or what the protocol is. So we messaged Ineos Grenadiers with a humble request to clear things up, because if we’re confused, we’re sure a lot of other people are too.
Did we do a good job with this story?