![\"Brian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/brian-smith-racing-motorola.jpg\" "\\"Brian")
Brian Smith racing for Motorola (credit: road.cc)<\/p>\nIn the cycling world, there aren\u2019t many who have worn more hats (or should that be casquettes?) than Brian Smith.<\/p>\n
Over four decades in and around the sport, the 58-year-old has raced as a professional, including for Lance Armstrong\u2019s Motorola team, won the British road race championships twice, managed a number of top teams, been involved in race organisation, co-founded the Braveheart Fund, and served as a mentor for young Scottish talent.<\/p>\n
Smith has also, of course, spent the last 15 years dissecting every bike race on the planet to within an inch of its life as a pundit for Eurosport, GCN, and now TNT Sports.<\/p>\n
Brian Smith racing for Motorola (credit: road.cc)<\/p>\n
And now, for 2026, he\u2019s acquired another new cap by stepping into the world of \u2018cycling brand and tourism consultancy\u2019 courtesy of Robert Thorpe\u2019s Wordsmith Studio. This new role sees him work with bike brands and up-and-coming races, such as the Czech Tour and the Tour of Hellas, to help get the word out there, thanks to some good old-fashioned, and some new-fangled tech age, promotion.<\/p>\n
And while Brian has been involved with the Czech Tour for a few years now, his relationship with the Tour of Hellas was something of an accidental discovery.<\/p>\n
Greece\u2019s national tour, a 2.1 ranked five-day stage race taking place in early May, has what you may call a meandering, intermittent history. It was held on and off as an amateur race between 1968 and 2004 (Matt Stephens finished third back in 1998), before turning pro as part of the Europe Tour in 2005.<\/p>\n
Pavel Brutt won in 2006, while Davide Rebellin finished second in 2012, the last race before another decade-long hiatus. It was eventually revived in its current guise in 2022, and won last year by Astana\u2019s Harold Mart\u00edn L\u00f3pez.<\/p>\n
![\"Tour](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/tour-hellas-2025-2.png\" "\\"Tour")
Tour of Hellas 2025 (credit: Tour of Hellas)<\/p>\n
Brian admits he didn\u2019t know much about the race until last spring, when Irish commentator Declan Quigley presented him with a rare solo comms opportunity at the race.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I do as a pundit is possibly the easiest job in the world,\u201d Brian tells the road.cc Podcast.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got over 40 years of experience, involving teams, events, everything, and I find it quite easy because it\u2019s something I love doing and I think anybody that really loves what they do thinks it\u2019s the easiest job in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut being a commentator is a bit of a challenge, and I always get nervous when I do it, because I always want to do my best. So, I went out to the Tour of Hellas, and I was blown away.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost people when they think of Greece, they think of going on holiday to a Greek island. But I didn\u2019t know that Greece has a ski area, that 80 per cent of the country is hilly or mountainous. Some of the places I was in felt like the Alps, in Switzerland.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd what blew me away as a commentator \u2013 because you have to do a little bit of homework around points of interest they\u2019re going to show \u2013 is that there\u2019s so much, there\u2019s too much, all the temples and history. It was surreal seeing Athens, the home of the Olympics, the Acropolis, the blue line.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, when I joined the Wordsmith Studio, I thought we could work with them and help them out.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Tour](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/tour-hellas-2025.png\" "\\"Tour")
Tour of Hellas 2025 (credit: Tour of Hellas)<\/p>\n
However, despite Brian\u2019s optimism about the Tour of Hellas\u2019s potential as a fledgling stage race \u2013 and as cyclo-tourism advertisement for Greece, which he reckons has the tools to rival Mallorca in the ubiquitous cycling holiday stakes \u2013 he admits the race is \u201cup against it for various reasons\u201d.<\/p>\n
One of those is what many deem to be cycling\u2019s congested calendar, a problem not helped by the organisers\u2019 bizarre decision to move the race from April to early May \u2013 placing it in direct conflict with the Grande Partenza of the Giro d\u2019Italia in neighbouring Bulgaria.<\/p>\n
That clash, Brian says, means any hopes of attracting more teams and marquee names to the race have essentially vanished, with WorldTour squads unlikely to stretch their already thin resources even further at a time when staff will be split across Bulgaria and Italy at the start of the Giro.<\/p>\n
\u201cI genuinely think a lot of bike riders want to come to the race, everyone who was here last year, Matt White for Jayco, Pete Kennaugh at Astana, told me how much they loved it. But unfortunately the race is going to struggle to attract anybody because of the logistics.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want to step up. They\u2019ve got ambition to step up to the next level and to be able to do that, and you have to tick different boxes. You have to invite star riders, you have to invite better teams. It\u2019s got great potential. But moving it to May was a big mistake \u2013 and it was never flagged up by the UCI, surely they knew there was going to be clash.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s dog eat dog when it comes to races and dates. I remember the Tour of Britain going up against the Vuelta and it did attract good teams and good riders, because the details were good, the stages were good. So it\u2019s what teams are looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the other barriers facing the Tour of Hellas is the lack of an ingrained bike racing culture in Greece \u2013 something Brian again compares to the early days of the Tour of Britain.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s always a major fight. I was involved with the Tour of Britain back in these days when we were fighting with traffic on the roads, and the general public in the UK weren\u2019t educated in bike racing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were trying to keep the bunch safe, and there were cars driving towards us. In 1994, when I was national champion, a rogue driver pretty much drove me off the road, and almost ended my season.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s all changed now. I\u2019ve seen the evolution of the Tour of Britain in the years that I worked in race control from almost hand out the window, flashing lights, trying to move cars out the way to cars actually stopping now. And instead of the \u2018window down taking a picture\u2019, they\u2019re getting out of the car.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re starting to engage with the race. And the whole education of a bike racing culture has changed massively since I worked with the Tour of Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Royal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/ab24277.jpg\" "\\"Royal")
Royal Mile, 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships, Men’s Elite Road Race, Edinburgh to Glasgow, Scotland (credit: Alex Broadway\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n
Of course, that embrace of cycling culture in the UK has resulted in the news that the Tour de France will visit Britain for the third time in two decades in 2027<\/a> \u2013 with a groundbreaking double Grand D\u00e9part for both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s races, and crucially for tartan-wielding Brian, an unexpected first stage in Edinburgh (though he admits he would have preferred a Paisley start for cycling\u2019s biggest race).<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s great. When Gary Verity brought the Tour to Yorkshire in 2014, I spoke to British Cycling about the potential of one day taking the race to Scotland,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I was told it would never happen because of the logistics. So it was quite a surprise, and Paul Bush really championed the fact we can get Scotland on the map \u2013 this has been 20 years in the making. And how times have changed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe start of the Tour de France, the biggest sporting annual event in the world, to come into Scotland\u2019s just huge. We\u2019ve had the worlds, now we\u2019re getting the Tour de France. I\u2019ve got some friends in the Borders, and they\u2019re absolutely over the moon. They were just pleased when a stage of the Tour of Britain passed by.\u201d<\/p>\n Pressure<\/p>\n The Tour\u2019s inaugural visit to Scotland has also coincided, as fate would have it, with the emergence of Scotland\u2019s first bona fide grand tour contender since Robert Millar (now Philippa York) in the 1980s: Oscar Onley, following the 23-year-old\u2019s revelatory fourth place at last year\u2019s race.<\/p>\n \u201cIt couldn\u2019t come at a better time for Oscar, could it? Especially going through the Borders,\u201d says Brian.<\/p>\n However, the 58-year-old isn\u2019t convinced that Onley\u2019s big-money move to the Ineos Grenadiers<\/a> was the right decision for Britain\u2019s next big Tour hope \u2013 despite the transfer to Ineos marking a homecoming of sorts.<\/p>\n \u201cPressure. Pressure\u2019s the word. If I was giving him a bit of advice before he made that move, I\u2019d have suggested that he should stay at Picnic-PostNL. And the team could have invested in two or three riders, which they did with James Knox.<\/p>\n \u201cI was led to believe that this was so late in the day this happened that Oscar\u2019s flight to the Tour Down Under was already paid for [by Picnic], that\u2019s how late it went.<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, it\u2019s big money. But I think it\u2019s a desperate move by the Ineos Grenadiers, because they\u2019re under severe pressure to deliver in grand tours, especially at the Tour de France. If the figures I\u2019ve seen published are true, it\u2019s a huge amount of money to buy a rider out of their contract.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel as if Picnic-PostNL developed him and it\u2019s a group he enjoyed being part of, more of a family team who were there to support him, asking him to do the best he can.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd now he\u2019s been taken out of that environment, to an environment where it\u2019s \u2018we have to deliver\u2019. And there\u2019ll be huge pressure on him to deliver a big performance. Can he do it? I hope he does. But he\u2019s up against some anomalies in cycling, probably the best ever era of grand tour riders.<\/p>\n \u201cCan Oscar Onley beat Poga\u010dar, Vingegaard, and Evenepoel? That\u2019s the big question. I think he\u2019s better looking at a Giro or a Vuelta if he wants to win a grand tour for them. And the big thing he\u2019ll have, which I don\u2019t think he would have had with Picnic, is the pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n >\u00a0British cycling is on the cusp of a new golden era in 2026\u2026 But will anyone in the UK care?<\/a><\/p>\n Pressure, Brian notes, is endemic throughout the cycling world, creating a culture, he says, in which riders are \u201cused and abused\u201d by teams desperately trying to eek out that last percentage point \u2013 or marginal gain.<\/p>\n The pressure of life as a pro cyclist, both internally and externally, led Brian to suffer with bulimia during his racing days and later osteopenia, the result of minimal weight bearing and poor education, he says.<\/p>\n It is also, Brian points out, leading to a spate of early retirements and the proliferation of cycling\u2019s word of the 2020s: burnout.<\/p>\n \u201cWas Simon Yates retiring<\/a> a surprise? Probably not,\u201d he says. \u201cThey go away to these training camps for weeks, Tom Pidcock\u2019s in Chile \u2013 there\u2019s nothing there.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pressure, pressure, pressure the whole time and some people just say that\u2019s enough. What did Poga\u010dar say at the Tour de France? He\u2019s not doing the Vuelta, and there was talk of one word: burnout. Burnout. They\u2019re racing 80 days a year \u2013 in my day we raced 120.<\/p>\n \u201cBut there\u2019s no place to hide now. I can totally understand it. The teams are abusing these athletes, it\u2019s abuse. They\u2019re looking at riders as Formula One cars.<\/p>\n \u201cAny tweaks they can do to help performance, they\u2019ll do it irreverent of whether the car crashes, is it going to save the life of the driver? They\u2019re probably not thinking about that. They\u2019re just thinking about performance and speeds.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bike riders don\u2019t help themselves either. I think most bike riders think like, if you do this training, have this diet, and take these supplements or don\u2019t take these supplements, and then you\u2019ll have health problems down the line, they don\u2019t care, especially the youngsters. And they\u2019re relying on their teams to look after them.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd cycling, at the top end of our sport, is not healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0road.cc\u00a0Podcast is available on\u00a0Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, and\u00a0Amazon Music<\/a>, and if you have an Alexa you can just tell it to play the\u00a0road.cc\u00a0Podcast. It\u2019s also embedded above, so you can just press play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the cycling world, there aren\u2019t many who have worn more hats (or should that be casquettes?) than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-399958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Oscar](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/zw108563.jpg\" "\\"Oscar")
Oscar Onley on Superbagn\u00e8res, stage 14, 2025 Tour de France (credit: Zac Williams\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n![\"Brian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am25091.jpg\" "\\"Brian")
Brian Smith with Sweetspot’s Rob Kennison (credit: Allan McKenzie\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n