A smattering of stories and side-quests from the weekend’s racing.
A harsh reality about being at a bike race is that there are always more things going on than there is time to write about. The stories of the day get prioritised – race reports, say, or features about a doomed breakaway – followed by little side quests, and then before you know it it’s bedtime and the attention of the cycling world moves on to the next thing.
We can’t always justify chasing everything that catches our attention – so at Escape Collective, we like compiling these little nuggets in our Reporter’s Notebook series, where the short stories can find a home, dumb ideas can be aired, and we can let you in behind the curtain on the experience of reporting on a bike race.
Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, which was held over two days on the weekend, always passes quickly, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t busily jotting away story ideas, listing riders to pester, or picking up leads to follow. Here are the stories I didn’t get around to telling from the weekend.
Chumma Chuggum Choo-Choo
It was a great weekend for Decathlon-CMA CGM, who scored a big win for their kind-eyed Dane, Tobias Lund Andresen. But before the race, I obviously didn’t have that on my radar: my main interest when talking to members of the team was to gauge their interest in a fun* (*by which I mean ‘stupid’) new nickname I am trying to make stick.
Every WorldTour kit is a piece of furniture
All the new kits of the 2026 men’s WorldTour, and the sofas that they look exactly like.
A huge global shipping firm with 150,000 employees and an annual revenue over US$55 billion, CMA CGM is a new arrival as a Decathlon co-title sponsor – and, you will correctly note, it’s a bit of a tongue-twister. Furthermore, as a collection of letters, it’s just so boring. Where’s the flair? Where’s the nice mouth feel?! So I’ve unilaterally decided to spice it up a little bit.
Unfortunately for my wicked little purposes, the rider I tried to get on board with this plan, Tord Gudmestad is both very earnest and a company man, leading to the following interaction:
Q. How would you feel if I told you that we like pronouncing it Decathlon Chumma Chuggum?
A. [Look of complete bewilderment]
Q. Instead of pronouncing the letters CMA CGM… it just rolls off the tongue better.
A. Uh, for me, it sounds a bit strange. You can try, you can give it a shot. But I give it a ‘no’.
The breakaway and the balancing act
The women’s race saw Petra Stiasny of Human Powered Health pick up the combativity prize courtesy of a 106 km solo breakaway. I’ve written about her day out, with interviews with Stiasny and her team director Clark Sheehan, and it was my favourite story to tell from the whole weekend – but there was something else mentioned in passing by Sheehan that felt interesting enough to get some digging of its own.
A not-so-doomed solo breakaway
After 106 km off the front alone, Petra Stiasny was the last finisher at Cadel’s Road Race. But, for the Swiss rider, that was a win in itself.
Mid-race, with Stiasny’s lead growing out to almost eight minutes and most other teams showing limited interest in chasing her back, race director Scott Sunderland was left with the unenviable task of trying to balance the non-racing implications of a blown-out race timetable, which was running well behind the slowest anticipated average speed.
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