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.
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Welcome back to Spin Cycle.
Can’t stop looking at photos of Jonas Vingegaard’s extra bibs at Paris-Nice? Don’t worry, we can’t either. It’s a perfectly normal thing to do.
Elsewhere, Ethan Hayter is giving out middle fingers but not to GCN who’ve wetted their beaks with autocratic regime money. Oh, and Jim Ratcliffe has gone with his begging bowl to foreigners who are stumping up the cash to try and un-break his bicycle team!
Hayter’s gonna hate 🖕
Here’s Ethan Hayter giving a TV motorbike the middle finger (or, as we read in French reports of the incident, le doigt d’honneur, which we much prefer) for an unknown infraction during the Tirreno-Adriatico time trial. It’s likely the moto was too close, or annoying him as he tried to put out an inhuman number of watts while tucked in an uncomfortable position on an uncomfortable bike.
The Brit, an unfailingly pleasant man (in our limited experience), received a fine of 500 Swiss francs and a 25-point deduction from the UCI rankings for “inappropriate behaviour”. If anything, his middle finger was used sparingly and with a curt politeness to make his point and then return to the job at hand.
Unfortunately, he finished eighth on the day, but re-won our hearts. That’s what most of the lycra boys care about anyway…
The spirit of Saudi gravel 💫🇸🇦
Oh boy. On the one hand, we’re glad GCN are back at it after a confusing few years of acquisition, funding, mass redundancies and then rebirth. Good people lost jobs, other good people regained jobs, and the money men lurk in the background supposedly providing inherent value via clicking around in spreadsheets (we’re happy to be proven wrong on this account but it may take a fair bit of convincing).
And yes, everyone has to put food on the table, but a paid sponsorship to Saudi Arabia for the video titled: “Riding Gravel In Alula Blew Our Minds” got exactly the response you would assume a 25-minute, paid-for puff piece advertisement for autocratic desert riding would receive.
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