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All images © Taz Darling & Rouleur
Words: Guy Andrews | Photographs: Taz Darling
“Riders are assembling and adjusting their bikes, replacing sprockets and chains. With all this tinkering going on, it has the appearance of an amateur track meet, not the highest prize-winning track final in the world.”
© Offside / L'Equipe
You know how it is. The latest Rouleur arrives, so you tuck yourself away in a quiet corner of a warm room and get comfortable, all the better to digest and enjoy each and every article in its entirety. And as pictures and words sink in, each completed piece becomes the new favourite – at least, until the next one…
© Timm Kölln
The Peloton, Timm Kölln’s masterful new book capturing portraits of an entire generation of professional cyclists, launched in Berlin at Villa Pasculli last week.
Roger Hammond, Charly Wegelius and Mathew Hayman gave us their thoughts on the images.
It was the year where I felt fantastic [2009], but made a cock-up. We were on a sector of cobbles and I was thinking the feed zone was coming up, so I should stay out of trouble, but I just drifted back, taking it easy. You either need to be at the front or at the back in the feed zone: in the middle is carnage. So rather than take a risk riding on the grass, I dropped right to the back. We turned left into a crosswind and Saxo Bank put the hammer down and blew the race to pieces. I chased back on at the beginning of the next cobbled sector, but it was still a group of around 40 guys, and I was last across with George Hincapie. As we hit the cobbles, Boonen attacked, so by the time I got to the front of the group, the group had gone. I spent the rest of the day chasing with George and getting nowhere…
Camille J. McMillan
It has been my not inconsiderable pleasure this week to proof read the second edition of Le Metier, Michael Barry and Camille J. McMillan’s splendid book published earlier this year by Rouleur. The new, updated version – with added text from David Millar and Barry himself – will be available later this month.
Olaf Unverzart went to the Giro to capture Ivan Basso parting a sea of humanity en route to victory
The 2010 Rouleur photography annual is off to the printers this week and we have to say it is the best yet. Here’s a little taster of what is in store for you lucky people in a couple of weeks’ time.
Throughout the spring and summer, a print-out of a spreadsheet had a space on the wall of the Rouleur office between the prints and posters more obviously dedicated to possibly relevant things (at the office of a cycling magazine, I mean) like bikes and people who ride bikes and such. This spreadsheet had a few hundred cells this way, and ten or fifteen cells that way, and it bore the words ‘Spreadsheet of Doom’ (we are, generally speaking, a very optimistic bunch), appended with, in a smaller but equally illegible hand, ‘Don't panic!’ It would change every week, adding this rider or that print or this interview, or occasionally taking away the rider, print or interview. Each writer had a column, as had each biographer and each translator (if you're lucky, you might be able to count those people on two hands). In fact, the spreadsheet continued to changed every week – or every day, or several times a day – until the print deadline. It changed a few times after that as well. In spite of the advice that would usually be scribbled on the spreadsheet within minutes of a new print ("Don't, whatever you do, panic!"), it may have inspired a panic attack or two – and it certainly got to be a lot bigger than it was meant to.
photo by jtred23
Still mourning the last sun of summer? Bemoaning the passing of long, hot days, and five-hour rides stretching long into the evening? (The British reader may be struggling to recall any long, hot rides on home roads these past few months, but that is selective memory. Think hard).
Then snap out of it and embrace the beauty of autumn. Keats, to my knowledge, was not a cyclist of note, but he knew his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness alright. The fruit-laden trees have done their job once more, the sun is low and the temperature slowly receding, and it is all good. Autumn is quite the most enjoyable riding season.
