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.
A week of lull in between the Tours de France was always going to feel weird, but luckily we have updates on our three main guys from the men’s race as to what they’ve got up to in the aftermath, and boy is it a spectrum of activities.
And yes, there were some odd goings-on at the post-Tour criteriums as always, but we also pop over to Denmark, where a certain Wout van Aert was back racing.
Post-Tour afterglows 🌇
You’ve just ridden your heart out to finish second at the Tour de France behind Tadej Pogačar, proving your ‘haters’ wrong, living up to the expectations of your new team that paid the big bucks to hire you, and most importantly reminding yourself just how good you are.
But, if you’re Remco Evenepoel, that doesn’t mean you pass up the opportunity for a photo with a fake Charlie Chaplin while wandering around Paris.
Elsewhere, Jonas Vingegaard was seemingly less cheery as he was papped suffering the queues to get into the Tivoli Friheden amusement park in Denmark along with the hundreds of other parents trying to keep their children entertained during the summer break. Racing the Tour de France is tough, but from his expression, this may be tougher!
Respect for queueing alongside the regular folk, though. Very Danish behaviour.
And lastly, in more ‘maybe we should let the pros live without a camera in their face for five minutes’, someone recorded Tadej Pogačar’s speech at dinner the Sunday evening after the Tour had finished.
“All the staff you did amazing,” Pogačar says. “Also when we are err … little angry c***s you still tolerate us.”
Any guesses on who taught him that word? Sure, it’s rude, but that is some top-level second-language swearing.
The week of living Danishly 🇩🇰
Wout van Aert returned to winning ways at the first opportunity over at the Tour of Denmark, which means those who signed up for WVA Mobile will already be enjoying an extra 2GB of data.
The very next day, Wout van Aert won again, securing users another 2GB of data (don’t use it all at once!) But this time his customers had to sweat it out, as organisers initially declared Alpecin-Premier Tech’s Jensen Plowright the winner before double-checking the photo finish and confirming Van Aert had won the sprint.
But more amusingly, look at some of the categorised climbs over at the Danish stage race. We’ll see your 1.2 km long, 2.2% average gradient on stage 1 and raise you…
…the final categorised climb from the fifth stage. Come on now!
What the race is lacking in appropriate categorised climbs it is more than making up for in podium prizes, with the best young rider each day being given a Lego road bike.
But it’s not only Henrik Pedersen of Uno-X Mobility (renamed Faxe Kondi for the race) who are getting in on the Lego action.
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