Race Design Thread

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 7: Vigo - Vigo, 148km

GPM:
Monte da Groba (cat.2) 11,4km @ 5,5%
Monte Aloia (cat.1) 9,5km @ 6,3%
Alto de San Cosme (cat.2) 5,4km @ 6,8%
Alto de A Madroa (cat.2) 2,6km @ 8,0%

The final stage is around Galicia’s biggest city - and strangely is shorter and arguably easier than the amateur race that follows this route too. More on that in a bit though. We are here in Vigo, a city of around 300.000 (and around half a million in its extended metropolitan area), one of the most important economic hubs in this part of Spain and the largest city of the province. It wasn’t always thus - in fact compared to most of the traditional cities we’ve visited on this route, Vigo might even be the youngest, having only been a small village settlement until the 15th Century. Nevertheless, it was large enough to be considered a city by the late 16th, when Francis Drake attacked it in retribution for the attacks on Britain by the Spanish Armada. A few years later the Turks attempted to attack the city, and as it was a relatively new city that had not had existing fortifications built as part of its structure, Felipe IV commanded the construction of new city walls, most of which survive to this day. They were effective, but did not stop the British/Dutch alliance from successfully capturing French and Spanish vessels carrying riches and resources in the Battle of Vigo Bay in 1702, an early naval battle in the Guerra de sucesión Española. The Brits would return 17 years later and occupy the city temporarily in a show of power after a Spanish fleet used Vigo as its departure point en route to supporting the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland. The city has grown rapidly in the 20th Century, especially under Franco as, as mentioned in the last stage, he declined to award the Industrial Development Zone title to Pontevedra despite its provincial capital status as punishment for the Galician regionalist sentiment harboured there, so Vigo was preferred. Nevertheless, the awkward geography of the city - hills to the east, sea to the west and north, and long stretches of tourist-friendly beaches well separated from the central fortifications - led to unstructured development and the city is now an odd, elongated shape having swallowed other urban areas especially to its southwest, but with most amenities concentrated in the new city centre which is to the east of the old town, with the beaches and resort facilities separated from the main body of the city by a long thin industrial strip which is undergoing redevelopment, meaning buses and lengthy walks proliferate for much of the city’s population. The post-Franco boom in regionalist sentiment and economic shifts hit Vigo hard, but it recovered well, and even saw its own equivalent of the Movida Madrileña, known as A Movida Viguesa, with the counter-cultural art and alternative music scenes of this part of the country rapidly converging on Vigo.

As can probably be imagined, as the largest city in the province, it is also the least Galego-speaking, with just 7,7% speaking exclusively Galician, and over half using Spanish only. The city has also attracted significant minority populations from Latin America, with the number of Venezuelans swelling in recent years in particular, but there are also many Portuguese and Brazilians who use their own tongue as well to obfuscate the linguistic statistics.

Vigo has a long history in the sport; it dates back in the Vuelta to 1936, when Vicente Carretero won, and has been a common stop-off point for the race ever since whenever it heads through Galicia. Other winners include Délio Rodríguez in 1941, René Vietto in 1942, Rik van Looy in 1965, Jan Janssen in 1967, António Esparza in 1987, Alfonso Gutiérrez in 1993, and Daniele Bennati in 2007. The Volta a Galicia has been coming here since its very beginning; Federico Ezquerra won there back in the first edition in 1933, when it finished the final stage, and subsequent stages to Vigo were won by the likes of Fermín Trueba (1935), Délio Rodríguez (1945), Alfonso Gutiérrez (1984), Acácio da Silva (1988), Laurent Jalabert (1995) and Gianluca Bortolami (1997) during its pro years, but it’s not been so common since the race went amateur, only appearing in 2004, 2005 and 2013, with the latter being won by Benjamí Prades, probably the highest profile of the three winners.

Do not think, however, that this means Vigo is appearing less in cycling. It has hosted a lot of its own one-day races too. The first dates back to 1940, won by Délio Rodríguez, and brought back in the late 50s when Rik van Looy was the most prominent victor. In 2001, a smaller one-day race, the GP Cidade de Vigo, was introduced, being over around 150km in late August after the Volta a Portugal, and running until 2006 as a pro race (highest profile winner being the inaugural victor, Pavel Brutt), before going amateur from 2007 to 2019, with winners including veterans of the scene like José António de Segovia and Ángel Vallejo, and Venezuelan exile Leangel Linárez. From 2004 to 2007 there was also a parallel one-day race that ran the day before, making it a weekend of racing in the city, with Jacek Morajko the most prominent winner. A new version of this diptych was set up from 2012 to 2019, and winners of the new version included Frederico Figueiredo in 2012, Marino Kobayashi in 2015 and, then, they reintroduced it in 2021 when another Venezuelan import, Ricardo Zurita, won. It also hosted a stage of the GP Paredes Rota dos Movéis in 2007 and a stage of O Gran Camiño in 2022, with Magnus Cort victorious. There have been a few other iterations of criterium races over the years, most notably in the 1980s when Jesús Blanco and Alfonso Gutiérrez won multiple times. The most recent introduction is the Vigo Copa de España race which was introduced in 2021 and features a steep and dramatic climb to A Madroa as a Flèche Wallonne styled finale. It’s a different side of A Madroa than I am using later, but this is a pretty tough - and over 180km makes it long and difficult for the amateur calendar - race.

2023’s race was won by Guatemalan prospect Sérgio Chumil, ahead of young Finisher (Movistar feeder) rider Hugo Aznar and Telco’m leader Marc Cabedo, you can see the full stream here:

Vigo is also an area being developed for its tourist potential by modern Spanish and Galician governments; the airport is being expanded to deal with more budget flights, and also as a gateway for northern Portugal. The city also has a warmer climate than most of Galicia, thanks primarily to the Ría de Vigo being better protected from the winds across the Atlantic by the premier tourist attraction for the city, this being the Illas Cíes, or the Cíes Islands, a scenic archipelago that is home to a number of rare birds and plants, with its waters bountiful with dolphins and turtles, and which is only accessible in summer via ferry from Vigo and a couple of other smaller towns. The number of visitors is strictly limited; there is one campsite but tickets can only be booked from the port in Vigo, and ferry purchasers must also obtain a QR code to be scanned to show they have been booked in through the official channels. It has been a natural park since 1980 and is very strictly protected - no bins exist on the island, even in the bar/cafe at the harbour, so all rubbish must be brought back to the mainland. The terrain is manageable even for novice hikers, and the beaches are some of the best in Spain, thanks to the protected status and strict enforcement of rules around numbers and behaviours.

While the beaches of the Illas Cíes may be the most dramatic, it’s not like the mainland doesn’t have options, and we will actually be starting from Praia de Samil, the largest and most popular urban beach in the city, to the west of the city centre. We will hug the coastline for the first part of the stage, for around 20km until we arrive at Baiona, base of our first climb of the day - and our most gradual, although it has been a mountaintop finish in no less a race than the Vuelta a España, back in 2013 when Nicolas Roche won to take the red jersey. It’s a scenic climb with amazing views down to the coast, but it’s not the hardest climb you’ll ever see. Descending from here takes us down to the banks of the Minho, which serves as the border between Spain and Portugal for this part of the country, strangely where there is something of a narrow river crossing as opposed to the wider Rías further north. We follow the river round to Tui, known as Tuy in its Spanish form for the Franco era, connected to the Portuguese town of Valença by two bridges and the capital of O Baixo Miño comarca and an occasional host of the Volta a Galicia, with stages won by Íñaki Gastón in 1987, Álvaro Pino in 1988 and Frank van den Abeele in 1991. The second half of the stage is much heavier and harder for the riders, however.

While the real life race climbs Monte Aloia from the main road route, we take a smaller alternative via the Alto de San Fins. On the raw stats it seems longer and less steep but those stats only tell half the story. The regular route is 7,1km @ 7,8%, while our version is 9,5km @ 6,3% - but, that’s with a kilometre of descent in it. The final 3km of the Alto de San Fins average 10,7%, including two 20% ramps and at one point 450m averaging 16%. After the descent there is a final 2,7km at 7,5% with a toughest stretch of 590m at 9,5%. I’ve given it cat,1 for the overall climb but it could be arguably cat.2. However I’d almost certainly give San Fins in and of itself cat.2 so adding that final ramp I felt merited the cat.1 status. It crests 51km from home so it’s not super obviously an attack platform, but it’s the last day so we could see hell break loose.

We then have a 12km descent down via Chenlo to Mosende, and then in to a second meta volante in O Porriño, home of the architect António Palacios and host of a couple of stages of the Volta a Galicia; Gianni Bugno is the most prominent winner here, winning a stage in 1993 ahead of Johan Bruyneel. It has been used a couple of times in the amateur era too, with Fernando Torres winning here in 2002, Dmitry Puzanov and Asier Estévez in 2009, and Francisco Campos in 2016. This then serves as the base of the penultimate ascent of the race, the Alto de San Cosme. This is a stop-off on the tougher route to Mirador de Herbille, which served as the final HTF in the 2021 Vuelta a España, a dramatic stage which had drastic impact on the GC, though none as significant as Miguel Ángel López, 3rd on GC two days from the finish, having a disagreement with his team car, team manager Eusebio Unzué personally intervening, and causing López to get off and quit the race in full view of TV cameras in dramatic style. As a result, though, it means that some of the challenge of the climb gets a bit overlooked. That 2km at 11,2% toward the end of the climb is going to have some action I would suspect. Although again, 38km remain at the summit.

Then, however, we are descending back down toward Vigo itself and we will finish with one and a half laps of a 21km circuit. This circuit could have been a bit shorter but the attempt was deliberate to make the climbs a bit further out so that they would not be the be all and end all, as well as to give us a safe run-in what with the hilly profile of the Casco Vello and O Castro parts of town. We actually arrive at the town via the Porta do Atlántico, or Gateway to the Atlantic, a sculpture and fountain on a large roundabout in the new town. From here we head into Coia, a former industrial area undergoing rapid redevelopment as it helps connect the old town of Vigo to the beach areas to the west, as well as to the port area at Bouzas. We will head down to the waterfront road - although it’s not really a waterfront road at this stage because the Puerto Pesqueiro rather obstructs the view.

Puerto Pesqueiro is in the middle; in the foreground, the short distance ferry port, and in the background the cargo port

Casco Vello

It’s a very straight run-in until we get to the Casco Vello, where we head around Praza do Berbés and past the A Laxe shopping mall, turning right at the tourist ferry boat port which sends tourist boats across to the Illas Cíes, with a handful of right-angle turns as we head through the newer centre of town, with a final left hand curve at the entrance to the Casco Histórico, then we have a final 800m which is on an uphill drag at 4% up to Praza Fernando el Católico, near to the recently-redeveloped Urzaiz train station, now the Vialia Centre.

The first 5km or so of the circuit are just flat along a road at the bottom of the ridge until we get to the outlying district of Chapela. The side of A Madroa that we are climbing, from Chapela through Parada… is pretty brutal and País Vasco-tastic. The overall stats of 2,6km at 8% don’t sound too bad… but… the last kilometre of that barely averages above 1%. The first kilometre, by contrast, averages 13,7%, with 800m at 16,2% as the steepest part of the climb, and a maximum gradient of an eye-watering 26%. Overall the first 1600m average 12% and the summit of the climb (i.e. at Vigozoo, after the kilometre or so of false flat) comes at 13km from the line so this should be pretty selective. According to this article, this is the steepest road in the Vigo metropolitan area, so this should definitely be able to create some separation.

Subida a Buraca

We then descend through the Rua do Areeiro back into the city’s confines, but although we arrive above the station and so we aren’t going to descend directly down past what we already climbed, that would not work. So instead we head around Castelo do Castro, the hilltop ruins in the city centre, which we pass around 6km from the line. These are the remains of a 1665 hilltop fortification constructed during the War of the Portuguese Restoration, although it wasn’t the most effective due to an irregular shape and the multiple landing spots along the coast; it was occupied by the British twice in the early 18th Century and by the French once in the 19th. Nowadays it is more a scenic area with views over the city and lush green space which is a popular spot for the Vigués population to walk.

From here we head out towards Plaza Independencia, and then back along the coast for the finish. This one should give us a nice finale as if there are big gaps created, then riders will have to make Monte Aloia or San Cosme count; if the gaps are small, a shootout on A Madroa should still be pretty effective. This will hopefully give us a week-long race which has some varied options and can show off a bit of everything Galicia has to offer, and something for almost all types of riders, with something akin to a Vuelta al País Vasco at a lower level in terms of the short walls and medium length climbs being the main decisive factors, but with a local flavour distinct to Galician cycling that gives it an identity of its own as opposed to that of Asturias, Castilla y León or País Vasco.

 

[Netserk]

I've wanted to use Machucos as a pass, but while the Vuelta often finishes in the middle of nowhere I still find it difficult to find a good stage finish location for the purpose.

I think it would work well with Lunada afterwards (it's stunning too), but the best finish location I could come up with is Lunada Park just after the summit. Unfortunately that's in a different region, so I guess that's an implausible solution for the Vuelta? I just don't see a suitable finish on the ascent of Lunada.

Amurrio > Lunada Park

172.0 km, +5513 m. Bike ride in Ayala / Aiara, Euskadi

ridewithgps.com

 

[Libertine Seguros]

So my last few projects in the thread have all been stage races. Not long ones - 5, 8 and 7 stages respectively - but nevertheless like I was saying to Samu in another thread recently, I do try to vary things in here, and it is also definitely very much a truism that one-day racing is highly underrepresented in the thread. The reasons for that are manifold; most of the biggest existing races have fairly set routes that don’t allow for too much flexibility, whereas the biggest stage races give the entire geography of a country (and beyond, within reasonable limitations) as scope, so freedom to come up with many different ideas for the same race is there (as is probably evident from things like Eshnar’s all-mountain Giri or the fact I’ve now got through no fewer than 11 Vueltas, with a no-mountaintops repetition rule in place). With the possible exception of Lombardia, the routes for most of the major classics are pretty set, other than a bit of what order you do the obstacles in for ones like RVV or Amstel Gold. While we’ve seen a few goes at revitalising races of diminished status like my revamp of Paris-Bruxelles or the Frankfurt Maitagrennen, and people have attempted some new routes and created their own races, often when using areas that are known to cycling, there’s less fun in wrestling a new one-day race than a stage race because of the increased flexibility the latter offers; and in areas that are not known to cycling, often the traceur wants to showcase as much as possible of the area in question and this results in a tendency toward stage races.

One area that offers a bit more room for manoeuvre is championship courses, however. I’ve had a number of these over the years, tweaked or amended, some that have been posted, some that haven’t, and some bits of inspiration that have hit recently. The thing is that these can change their focus or the type of rider that they suit, in much the same way as real championship courses do; take the World Championships - the kind of rider that would contest, say, 2011 in Copenhagen is completely different to the one that would contest, say, 2018 in Innsbruck.

I’ve often suggested an informal rule for suitability for the World Championships or Olympic Games Road Race, and that is that as this race is in effect the sixth (or seventh in Olympic years) monument, these races serve as appropriate boundaries for how easy or difficult said races should be. Every type of rider has a monument they can contest, from sprinters through to escaladores, but no monument is exclusively for one type of rider (with the possible exception of Roubaix, but that has an aura out of its uniqueness that overrides that). Therefore a sprinters’ Worlds shouldn’t be flatter than San Remo, and a climbers’ Worlds shouldn’t be more mountainous than Lombardia.

I’ve posted a few Worlds/Olympics/Championship race designs over the years in the thread, but these have been sporadic. In the universe inhabited by the races of the thread, my World Championships have been held in the following:
Sochi, Russia
Kyiv, Ukraine
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia
Bilbao, Spain
Aosta, Italy
Caracas, Venezuela

All of these were somewhat hilly (Kyiv was a bit of a different one because of using the cobbled climbs rather than significant hills), and Aosta was downright mountainous, so I thought I’d kick off posting a few World Championships courses with an example of what I would see as a suitable “sprinter’s Worlds”.

World Championships RR: Aachen, Germany

I’ve posted a stage into the city of Aachen before, as part of my most recent two-week Deutschlandtour. That stage is here and featured some mid-stage hills before a flat and straight run-in. The stage was deep into week 2 and was therefore intended as a breakaway stage, hence the hills making things hard for the sprinters but a run-in that didn’t make it too easy to use those hills and make it a GC day. This is what I had to say about the city back then (omitting the potted history of its sons and daughters for sake of brevity):

Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle to the French, is a border city close to the Dreilandecke between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and for most travelling by train along routes in the area, will be the first (or last) German station visited. It is Germany’s westernmost city and one of its oldest, having been on the Roman side of the Limes, and having been a spa settlement during that era, before becoming the Imperial residence of Charlemagne, who commanded the construction of the city’s iconic cathedral, which was completed in the year 798 and still stands today; the great emperor’s remains were interred at the cathedral and remain there to this day. A number of renovations have been undertaken, but it remains the number one tourist attraction in the city, helped largely by a large number of pilgrims and its role as the church of coronation for Holy Roman Emperors to be crowned “King of the Germans”.



Aachen is also on the Benrather Line, which historically divided Low German and High German dialects, although its modern dialect bears more resemblance to the Ripuarian language spoken around Köln, and Lëtzebuergesch and similar Mosel-Franconian dialects. As a high religious centre it has also been a major source of manuscript production during the early Middle Ages, although its religious importance led to its downfall to a certain extent, with Spanish troops attacking the city and deposing all Protestants in the early 17th Century, which also led to the relocation of the coronations of Holy Roman Emperors to Frankfurt, then a role in the Thirty Years’ War, and then being ravaged by fire in 1656.

The city rebuilt itself as a destination, ostensibly as a spa town, but also because of a reputation for prostitution, a sharp decline for a city which had built its reputation on emperors and high religion. It was one of the cities of the short-lived Rheinische Republic, which was proclaimed in the city in 1923 during the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in the inter-war years; this state was never recognised and promptly faded from relevance less than two years later, returning to the German ownership that everybody else thought it had had all along. It was highly damaged in World War II following a siege in September and October 1944, and despite the rebuilding of its historic centre, with the traditional architecture, the focus of the city has moved more toward the outlying areas of the city where it has become a technology hub. The city also claims to host the world’s first modern discotheque, with the Scotch Club having been opened in the 1950s.

Unlike with that stage design, however, I am not putting my circuit here in the centre of the city, with Charlemagne’s cathedral or the Elisenbrunnen taking centre stage. A safe sprint was not really plausible there. “Now, Libertine, isn’t Aachen kind of in a really hilly area?” I hear you ask. Well, yes. It’s on the German side of the Drielandenpunt where the Dutch, Belgian and German nations meet, in Amstel Gold territory to the west and the foothills leading to the Ardennes to the southwest. A pure flat sprint would be pretty uninspiring, no? But the thing is, this means that we have the options of some small sized obstacles, not big enough to turn this into a puncheur’s race but enough to make the sprinters have to earn the right to contest the victory. And that’s realistically what a sprinter’s Worlds should be about. Placement of obstacles is also key. Geelong was a sprinter’s Worlds, as evidenced by being won by Hushovd and Bronzini; but the actual obstacles on the course were notably harder than Valkenburg two years later, which was a puncheur’s Worlds with the finish being just a kilometre after the Cauberg. My route isn’t as hard as Geelong was, and has more in common with Valkenburg (after all, similar part of the world) but it is nevertheless one where the sprinters will be the ones you would expect to have the most chances. But, crucially, other types of riders will believe they have a chance too.

The circuit is just under 15km in duration. For a traditional circuit-based Worlds, I would suggest 11 laps for the elite women (163,9km), 13 for the U23 men (193,7km) and 18 for the elite men (268,2km).

The start/finish is on Krefelder Straße, heading southwest towards the city and outside the football stadium Tivoli, home of Alemannia Aachen, a formerly well-established team at the second tier who even enjoyed a Bundesliga stint but are now mired in the Regionalliga, which their 30.000-capacity stadium is way too big for. There’s actually a 500m climb at 5,4% into the city from a little further on this road, but we aren’t going to be including that. The other thing that is bonus about this is that with all the parking and trappings of a sports complex around a 30.000-capacity ground there will be ample space for the race’s media and organisatorial trappings.

Finishing straight, riders heading away from camera

The finishing straight is an uphill false flat which continues for the first part of the lap, before we take two right hand corners to head back on ourselves around the rear of the sports complex. Wide roads here continue, as these are used to access training facilities and other sporting halls, arenas etc. as part of the Tivoli complex. This also takes us onto Soerser Weg, which leads us onto our first climb of the circuit, to Berensberg. It’s not a long or particularly challenging one - 750m at 6,3% (due to rounding Climbfinder totals it as 800m at 6,1%) - but does ramp up to 12% in places, with the last 500m of uphill at 8,3%. It is, however a wide open, comfortable road so I wouldn’t expect this to be too selective in terms of just pure attrition, it’s going to have to be tactical moves and decisions about who to follow and who to let up the road that decide who gets away here. It is at the 3,6km mark in the circuit, so would be 11,3km from the line the last time it’s raced.

This then leads us into a 3km flat stretch from the summit along to, and through, Kohlscheid, a small town which is part of the Herzogenrath municipality that serves as a border zone with Kerkrade in the Netherlands. Here, we descend down into the valley of the Wurm, a river whose source is close to the hot springs of Aachen and serves as a tributary of the Ruhr, via Am Langenberg. Climbfinder records the descent as just over 650m at 7,5%, with a maximum of 12% and slightly narrower than the previous parts of the circuit, although still plenty wide enough to be negotiated safely. After hitting the bottom of the descent we cross the Wurm at the picturesque Alte Mühle, and the second climb of the circuit begins.

Alte Mühle

Steep ramps into Bardenberg

Climbfinder records this ascent as being 520m at 9,6%, which is very much a serious ramp, but also pretty short and the more durable sprinters should be able to power over this and stay close enough at hand that they can work their way back on. It’s notably steeper than Berenberg, but actually has a lower maximum, staying very consistent throughout and maxing out at 11%. This is at the 8,3km mark on the circuit and therefore is 6,6km from the line. On the profile above I have put the GPM at the end of the false flat through the town simply because the gaps between waypoints meant Cronoescalada didn’t give as accurate a figure.

There’s a few twists and turns, but no sharp corners, as we head along an elevated plateau - if anything it’s uphill false flat - from Bardenberg to the town of Würselen, the home of footballers Torsten Frings and Jupp Kappelmann, who have both been part of German World Cup squads (Kappelmann was even part of the World Cup winning squad in 1974, but did not play to win a medal), and two-time Olympic gold medallist equestrian Nadine Capellmann, who won dressage gold in the team event in 2000 and 2008. Here we turn right, and there are a couple of corners as we head along here, then at 2,9km from the finish there is a downhill right-hand sweeper… and this is the last proper corner on the circuit. This is more or less the entirety of a two-stepped descent, but that amounts to 1,9km @ 2,8% with a max of 6%, so it really shouldn’t be too much of an issue. This ends when we cross underneath the Autobahn, and then the final kilometre is uphill at 1-2%, up toward the football stadium once more.

The road is three lanes wide and almost ramrod straight for the last 3km, with only some slight curves, so this is why I think this race will be one for sprinters; if the finish was in Würselen it would perhaps be more like the 2012 Valkenburg Worlds, but with the long final straight drag to the line, I feel this will favour an organised group, so a chasing bunch would stand a strong chance and if there is a small group and a péloton breathing down its neck, the run-in will favour the latter. But, the fact of the matter is that if sprinters are dropped on the 500m of the Bardenberg, they don’t really get a proper respite afterward so would have to help work themselves to get back on which may impact their eventual sprint at the line. My thinking is that the Berensberg will not be decisive outright, relying primarily on tactical moves as it shouldn’t challenge most, whereas Bardenberg is hard enough for a decisive gap to be opened by attacking, but short enough that the run-in will not be favourable to a short-distance attack here unless there is a lack of cooperation behind; but there is enough for baroudeurs and puncheurs to feel they have a chance and make the race hard enough that the group that settles it is small and those sprinters that survive will have earned their chance to contest it in a sprint.

Run-in

Looking for comparable in the past of World Championships, a few that stuck out to me were Reims-Gueux in 1958; that had a harder first climb, but the second climb was 700m at 7,3% ending in false flat so pretty similar to this - though that had a longer run-in. Bern 1961 is similar, but the final climb is closer to the line as well. The Lasarte-Oria circuit in 1965 is also pretty similar in characteristics. I’d say it’s slightly tougher than Heerlen 1967, maybe Prague 1981? Oslo 1993 is similar in characteristics but the climbs are much longer. From the altimetry profile San Sebastián 1997 is not too far off with its short but super steep ramp, but we know how misleading “flat” roads in the Basque Country are, plus the run-in was much more technical and the detailed profile shows a lot more up and down. The Plouay circuit of 2000, almost identical to the then-current short circuit of the GP Ouest-France, is perhaps the most perfect comparison of all as unlike the Valkenburg circuits there is a good run from the final climb to the line here in Aachen; that circuit had the Côte du Lezot (1km @ 5,1%) at the start of the circuit, and Ty Marrec (600m @ 10%) 4km from the line. My course is slightly easier than this, but perhaps this is our best comparison, with some editions being won solo, and others being reduced bunch gallops won by the likes of Elia Viviani, Alexander Kristoff and Grega Bole. Salzburg 2006 is another potential comparable, which was won by Paolo Bettini, exactly the kind of rider I think we would expect to see come to the fore on this course.

I also prepared a separate proposal if it was decided that the course was too easy or the organisers did not want to just go all out on the circuits. This course starts and finishes in Aachen but heads out to the Eifel mountains before returning via the city centre and then with eight and three quarter laps of the circuit, this looks like the following:

I think this would probably not change the racing too much other than getting rid of a few domestiques and the most rotten climbers among the sprinters before they even get to the final circuit.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

World Championships RR: Sheffield, UK

So we’re going to the complete opposite end of the spectrum here; my Aachen route was a Worlds designed for sprinters who could last out, whereas this one… in all honesty I did umm and ahh about whether to go forward with this one because I think it’s actually potentially a bit excessive after looking at historic Worlds routes as I think this would legitimately be one of the hardest of all time. But it’s also a route I’ve had in the works for years so I thought, you know what, let’s actually post it and put it to bed.

The idea for this stage goes all the way back to when the Tour de France start in Yorkshire was announced over a decade ago, when Sheffield was announced as a prospective stage host for a hilly early-stage race. Ideas proliferated and although the eventual stage was pretty good, it actually used areas I had not expected; I had been anticipating - especially after the involvement of Holme Moss - that they would be approaching the city from the west, like in the Tour of Britain stages of the mid-2000s, and so the climbs we would be expecting would be on that side, as opposed to Oughtibridge to the north and Jenkin Road to the east. The city then featured in the Tour de Yorkshire with some interesting stage designs but again using climbs to the north, and then after a few experiments I came up with my finalised design when trying to come up with prospective alternatives for a Yorkshire World Championships to the Harrogate option.

Sheffield is, with a population of a little over half a million, the largest settlement in South Yorkshire, and is in a battle with a number of other cities as to what the fourth largest city in England is, with a number of similarly-sized settlements drawing boundaries as they see fit to claim their desired numbers. Seen as the gateway to the scenic Peak District, it is one of the southernmost cities to be claimed as being in “the north” of England, due to being in the historical county of Yorkshire. It is heavily associated with the steel industry in Great Britain, which is its primary known exploit and why one of its two soccer teams, Sheffield United, is known as the Blades, and why its ‘partner cities’ and ‘twin cities’ include other steel industry stalwarts as Donetsk and Pittsburgh. A decline in industry in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the construction of a large shopping mall easily accessed from the M1 motorway in the early 1990s, have decentralised the city which left a lot of the centre quite run-down, and helped foster a counter-cultural scene which left the city at the heart of the expanding synth-pop boom in the 1980s, with bands such as the Human League, Heaven 17, Cabaret Voltaire and ABC being locals. While rock has retaken the lead in the city, slice of life depictions of working class families and their day-to-day struggles have been the stock-in-trade of two of the city’s most famous musical exports since, the sardonic Britpop mavericks Pulp and the raucous Arctic Monkeys. Extensive renovation and regeneration projects have been undertaken since the 1990s in order to reinvigorate the city. With its two universities both being located in the city centre rather than outlying campuses, and with major chainstores relocating into the mall, the city centre has retained a chic nature and the city’s association with its student population led it to host the Universiade in 1991. The older and more prestigious of the two is the University of Sheffield, a classic “red brick university” which is known to cycling fans for being the one that was supposedly publishing a report on Sérgio Henao’s biopassport values.

The city is a logical host for a championships such as this because it has a long association with sport, not just through those University Games, but also through a variety of other sports from disparate origins. The city is the home of snooker, hosting the World Championships annually in the Crucible Theatre in the city centre; the Ponds Forge international swimming and diving complex hosted the European Aquatics Championships in 1993; the Don Valley Stadium, constructed for the Universiade, hosted the annual Brit Bowl, the national championships of American Football, for several years until its demolition and replacement with the Olympic Legacy Complex; the city hosted the largest artificial ski complex in Europe until it was destroyed by arsonists in 2013; and the city’s ice hockey team, named the Sheffield Steelers for the city’s industrial heritage, is one of the most successful in the national league’s history. Sporting sons and daughters of Sheffield include many of the great and good in British sporting history, from World Cup-winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks, Olympic and three-time World Champion heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, Trevor Francis, the first footballer to command a transfer fee in excess of £1 million (how quaint those times seem now), International Boxing Hall of Famer “Prince” Naseem Hamed; former England football captain Harry Maguire along with international teammates Kyle Walker and Jamie Vardy; former England cricket captains Michael Vaughan and Joe Root (two of the nation’s all time leading batsmen); three-time downhill MTB World Cup winner Steve Peat; taken-too-young Indycar stalwart Justin Wilson; and unfortunately, undoing almost all that goodwill, the most shingle-inducingly aggravating man on GCN, Adam Blythe.

But the city’s most famous sporting legacy is rather more depressing even than having to deal with Adam Blythe’s inane ramblings about his mates on Ineos - the city’s Hillsborough stadium, home to the other major soccer team in the city, Sheffield Wednesday, was a formerly state of the art venue which was often selected as a neutral venue for major cup fixtures in English football, and rose in notoriety in 1989 when its location made it a logical neutral venue for an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest; with a problem of overcrowding in the standing-only terraces, a gate was opened by the police to ease the crowding, but with the reverse effect of creating a human crush as supporters tried to enter the caged sections. 94 died on the day, with two more in the coming weeks and months, and then a 97th victim in 2021, dying after suffering irreversible brain damage on that fateful day. Its ramifications are still seen today; the police attempted to apportion blame away from their own actions by feeding false stories about hooliganism and fan behaviour, and a scathing and baseless article in The Sun was seen as so insulting that the newspaper - Britain’s best selling tabloid - is still informally banned from the city of Liverpool to this day, with newsagents stocking the hated publication being subject to abuse and boycott, a fact immortalised by protest singer-songwriter Billy Bragg years later in Scousers Never Buy The Sun.

Like Rome, Sheffield was built on seven hills, and it also lies at the confluence of five rivers. This has carved valleys and meant that the city has spread along these valleys and up these hillsides creating a geographically diverse city that offers myriad possibilities for selective cycling races. One problem, however, which is uncommon in the UK, is that the regeneration projects included the construction of a tram system, relatively unusual in British metropoles, which limited the access to the city centre for me in setting my routes. The other thing that stuck out to me in my research was the county lines; I had initially wanted to beef up the early part of the course using an approach from the west similar to those in the old Tour of Britain stages, but this was revised when the 2019 Yorkshire Worlds were announced; I figured that the city’s bid would probably need a Yorkshire connection, and the Peak District is shared across multiple counties; the climbs and approaches I had in mind were actually in Derbyshire. Nevertheless, the multiple routes in to the city and stages used in previous races gave me plenty of food for thought.

2004 Tour of Britain stage

2005 Tour of Britain, more or less the same stage with beefed up run-in

2006 Tour of Britain, same run-in as the year before but easier stage until that point

2014 Tour de France, one of the best opening weekend stages in living memory

2017 Tour de Yorkshire, toning down the larger climbs but replacing them with an absolute Ardennes-style beast of a run-in

So with all of these options available to me, obviously I took the easy route.

I binned all of the above and used literally none of the climbs or obstacles used by any of the above.

Here is my circuit - it’s 19,9km in length. In theory that means, what, 13 laps for a World Championships? I don’t think that’s going to be particularly viable though, because this circuit is absolutely brutal and comparing to previous Worlds courses I think 13 laps of this is going to be absurd, not least because there are four distinct climbs on the circuit. 13 x 4 = 52 ascents… not even Amstel Gold has that, and those ascents include a lot which are easier than the ones we have here. As a result I think this is one where we probably actually go with a flat run-in like we’ve seen at many recent Worlds before joining the circuit… and crucially that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I’m thinking of having the women head from Leeds through Castleford, Pontefract, Doncaster and Rotherham to Sheffield giving about 80km of flat run-in, then four laps of the circuit for ~160km duration; the U23s do an extra lap for ~180km; and the elite men go from York to Leeds before joining the previous route, adding around 40km to the length; this gives us around 120km before 7 laps of the circuit for ~260km… before you think I’ve gone soft, that’s still 28 (twenty-eight) climbs. This is still going to be a bloodbath of a day in the saddle.

I’ve placed the finish line on Upper Hanover Street, an uphill drag that leads up northwards towards the University of Sheffield’s main city campus. This is a gradual uphill only averaging 2-3% but is on a wide dual carriageway enabling us to keep much of the logistics sorted without disrupting public transport, as the finish line has to be a little before the university buildings due to the tramlines entering here. However, as they come from West Street and then go to a section where the trams have their own tracks between the carriageways, we do not need to cross the tram tracks at any point.

Finishing straight, heading away from the camera on the left hand side

After crossing the centre of the University route, there is a large roundabout which links routes out to the hilly suburbs on the west of the city, largely student-dominated in their milieu, with the city centre. After this there is a wide and very straight downhill of around 900m at 5%, before we hang a left to head towards the Ponderosa Playground. A technical sequence of corners on a flat section takes us to the base of the first of four notable climbs on the circuit. The overall stats of this first climb - the longest of the four - are hard to check, because it takes in a few different roads and is not one of the more standard, well-known ascents around the city, largely because it crosses a couple of roads that mean it isn’t really possible for hobby cyclists to test themselves on. I drew it up in Cronoescalada and arrived at stats of 1,3km @ 8,6%, but it’s also very inconsistent; the main attraction here is Blake Street, 200m at 17%, which is renowned as one of the strongest contenders for the steepest street in the city; it is the steepest climb within the city centre at least, and in terms of sustained steepness for that length it is regarded as the third steepest urban street in Britain. It was also immortalised in the 1990s comedy film The Full Monty.

Blake Street

We continue to ascend through Duncombe Street and Matlock Road, the latter of which, once upon a time but sadly no longer (for cycling) was cobbled. Finally we join Heavygate Road and then this is the high point of this first ascent. We could continue to climb at low gradients on a wide open road into Crookes, another student-dominated district of the city, but that wouldn’t add much to the circuit and prevent us being able to do much of what follows. Instead, therefore, we have a twisty descent through the Walkley area of town which takes us towards Hillsborough, but before we get there we hang a left onto Morley Street (have to avoid the tram tracks in Hillsborough) and down into the Rivelin valley. There’s a little over a kilometre of flat in the valley before we take a sharp left onto the steepest of our climbs, the savagery that is Stephen Hill, via Hagg Hill, a popular monster of a cycling climb. The first part, Hagg Hill, is absolutely destructive, being around 350m at an average of 15%; this gets easier on the second part, but not much until right near the end; the overall stats are 900m at 13,5% - which is a large part of why I wasn’t sure this wasn’t a bit excessive for a Worlds course if it’s going to be being climbed over and over.

This ascent peaks at 6,6km of the circuit, so 13,3km from the end of the race. It’s then a very gradual and straight, fast downhill of 2,7km at 2% back into the Rivelin Valley, before we turn back uphill for the next ascent, Lodge Lane. This is another tough one, but it seems a bit light after Stephen Hill, with some gradients even in the single figures! The overall climb is 1,1km at 9,9%, but the last 150m are false flat so it does get well up above that at times, with also the steepest section of any climb in the race, with a 25% maximum.

Lodge Lane, full ascent visible in the distance. Crests at 9,4km from the line

Some false flat takes us up to the high point of the circuit at Hallam Cricket Club, before we descend down through the Fulwood district of town toward Porter Brook, before our final climb, in the southwest part of town, the shortest of the day but the last and closest to the finish, cresting 4,5km from the line. It’s 650m at 10,7% maxing out at 17% so, you know, more slaughterhouse gradients.

From here we then take a few corners downhill, and arrive on a long straight road called Ecclesall Road which accounts for the majority of the run-in. There’s about 1600m straight on this route through a suburban shopping area before a left hand 90º bend - a sweeping one on a roundabout - at about 1500m from the line, before the slight uphill drag to the line. This is the last real corner, but the straight does curve to the right at around 400-500m to the line.

Ecclesall Road

As I say, four climbs per circuit of this nature mean that just doing a whole 260km race with 13 laps of this circuit would just be absurd; races like Liège-Bastogne-Liège have only 10-12 ascents, and even Amstel Gold which has much shorter and mostly less steep climbs has a total of 33 climbs for the men and 21 for the women on its 2023 route. Even my proposed route with a flat run-in would yield a crazy tough number of ascents; I think the 28 climbs for the men and 16 for the women, on this course, will be more than enough. This is a slice of the kind of climbing we usually associate with País Vasco, with inconsistent ramps and ascents continually averaging double digits… only placed in a northern British city with dry stone walling and the likelihood of rain. I imagine this will be an absolute bloodbath for only the toughest hilly Classic contenders, so a completely different profile from the Aachen route that preceded it.

 

[EddyMazzoleni]

Adam Hansen when he sees this route:
CONFUSED SCREAMING

 

[JeffGoldblumIII]

Excellent circuit, tempting to just do it 13 times anyway Desgrange-style and see who makes it.

I'm sure the Sheffielders will appreciate the comparison to Rome.

 

[Forever The Best]

Did Cronoescalada lose all the previous data? I think all the previous routes done are lost.
Nice route by the way.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

World Championships RR: Tunis/Carthage, Tunisia

After two European routes, it’s time to travel further afield, and here I present my first African World Championships route, with a challenging route in the MENA world that will favour a different profile rider from either the Aachen or Sheffield routes. I know that this is not the most obvious location for an African World Championship route - Rwanda hosting the first one shortly, and other obvious hosts based on the number of riders making it pro would obviously be Eritrea, South Africa or maybe Ethiopia, while other areas that could host that have a number of riders and races, even if not at the highest level, would be Morocco and Algeria. Tunisia has had a couple of brief forays into higher level cycling, the most recent being when Rafâa Chtioui was breaking through winning stages of the Tour du Maroc and the Tour de l’Avenir before turning pro with Acqua e Sapone, scoring strong results at places like the Quatre Jours de Dunkerque and the Ronde van België. Sadly this was as high as he would go, drifting a little aimlessly through Team Europcar and falling back to the Continental level, where he would sign for Sky Dive Dubai, winning the Jelajah Malaysia and the Tropicale Amissa Bongo before drifting away from the sport. The Tour de Tunisie ran in the 50s and early 60s and then from the late 70s onwards, being popular with Eastern Bloc amateurs initially, though the most famous winner of the race would undoubtedly be Gösta Pettersson, Sweden’s only GT winner. It ran most recently as a pro race in 2017, while the secondary national tour, the Tour de la Pharmacie Centrale de Tunisie, ran until 2008, with a one-off revival in 2018 which was plagued with issues as poor weather made stage 2 in the western mountains of the nation treacherous and only 15 riders completed it. The results were annulled and riders allowed to continue, until stage 3 was cancelled when the weather failed to improve and the course was declared unsafe. At that point, the results of stage 2 were reinstated and treated as the GC, with the stage 4 route being turned into a one-day race which every rider who had started the original race was allowed to participate in. With the train wreck that this race had been, no attempts to revive it at the pro level have been seen since. There was also the Tour des Aeroports, which ran from 1997 to 2010. As you can see, through the 90s and 00s there was quite a bit of interest but this has died down considerably since.

Which is a shame, really, as Tunisia’s location makes it pretty convenient for at least Italian teams to come across to, and there’s the history with France as well, and the decent teams of Morocco and Algeria who could make up a decent field there. Perhaps a good way to spur some interest would be for the country to host a major event like this? However, because the sport is not as ingrained in the nation’s psyche as in a lot of European countries, it makes the most sense to take the sport to the people, hence locating it in Tunis, the country’s main population centre, and taking in a couple of their most well known tourist sites. Although because of this, rather than just make this a circuit race, I thought that the Worlds in Tunisia would be a slightly different affair, with a bit of a combination of the 2012 Olympic Road Race format and the 2021 Leuven World Championships styled route, with an out-and-back to one circuit, then a return before laps of a second circuit at the finish.

I decided to place the start of the race in Radès, a southern suburb of Tunis, at the large sports complex that was constructed as part of the city’s infrastructure for the hosting of the 2001 Mediterranean Games. As a lower level competition, the cycling events at the Games were contested largely by amateurs and espies as well as Continental level pros; the ITT was won by veteran track rider Sergí Escobar ahead of the Italian duo of Juri Alvisi and Maurizio Biondo. The Road Race saw a bit more notable name value; the Italians did a one-two this time with Denis Bertolini and Alberto Loddo, both of whom would turn pro in the mid-2000s and bounce around teams like Diquigiovanni (Androni) and Acqua e Sapone, and some veterans of the Continental level like Radoslav Rogina and Jaume Rovira appear in the upper pages of the results… but the bronze medal went to a 21-year-old Spanish espoir called Alejandro Valverde. Sadly I can’t find details of the parcours that day.

The centrepiece of the complex is the Stade Olympique Hammadi Agrebi, which can hold 60.000 spectators and has hosted the Tunisian national soccer team as well as two of the country’s largest club teams, and was also one of the main venues for the 2004 African Cup of Nations. It has also hosted the finals of the CAF Champions’ League on several occasions, thanks to the prominence of Esperance de Tunis in that competition. It also hosted the 2010 Trophée des Champions between Olympique Marseille and Paris-Saint-Germain, as French football tried to expand its overseas reach. The complex also includes the Salle Omnisport, which hosts indoor sports and was constructed for the 2005 World Handball Championships, but is primarily used for basketball; there is also a swimming pool and a secondary athletics stadium which is used for smaller events or where there is a scheduling clash against the more lucrative soccer games.

Cité Olympique de Radès

I think for this one the women will go straight to the second circuit as otherwise the flat transitional section will account for too much of the race. The men on the other hand will head east around Sidi Jehmi Bay, past Sulayman, to arrive on the Cap Bon peninsula (Ras at-Taib in local parlance), and take two laps of a ~30km circuit that loops around the Forêt de Qorbous and the eponymous town, a spa resort and health retreat on the eastern edge of the bay that sit beneath a steep promontory that enables us to incorporate some hills into the route. There are two hills on this circuit and neither are especially challenging - around 3km at 5% for the first and around 2,8km at 5,5% for the second - but they do put some difficulties into the early going and also add some beautiful scenery. Qorbous (sometimes spelled Korbous) is a relatively quiet town that has been undergoing some development with the intent of making it more attractive to tourists - so it would make sense for the Tunisians to want to show it off a bit.

Qorbous coast road

After the second loop, upon our return to Sidi Raïs, we retrace our steps, going full London Road Race and take the same route out that we took to the circuit - around 33-34km of pan flat - in reverse to return to Radès. This was why the women don’t have this section of the race - even if I cut a lap of the circuit, we’d still be at almost 100km already with another 25 or so to go before we get to our second circuit.

That’s because we have to traverse the country’s capital first. Officially 600.000 people call Tunis their home, but with the extended metro area this number more than quadruples, making it the third largest city in the Maghreb region (encompassing all of the MENA world west of Egypt), after Casablanca and Algiers, and meaning around 1/5th of all Tunisians live in the urban sprawl of their capital. The Medina of Tunis, the oldest part of the modern city, was constructed at the end of the 7th Century on the outskirts of the former ancient city of Carthage, and it swiftly became an important city for the Umayyad Caliphate due to the city’s ready access to Southern Europe as a trading port, and also became the Umayyads’ chief naval base. It survived Zirid uprisings before falling to the Almohads in the 12th Century, who then raised it to the level of a provincial capital with a domain approximately corresponding to modern Tunisia. It became the settling point of many Andalusian Muslims displaced by the Reconquista in Spain and forced out of settlements in the Rif mountains, and this rapidly grew the city’s mercantile wealth and prominence. This wealth made it an attractive city for empire-building, which explains why the Spaniards would occupy it and the Ottomans seized it in the 16th Century, making it part of their Empire until it was captured by Algeria, who installed their own puppet Bey. During the Age of Empires, the French exerted an ever-increasing amount of influence over Tunisia and a swell in its population to accommodate the new European population. The oldest city walls were taken down and following the establishment of the French protectorate, the city rapidly expanded with a semi-segregated system of an Arabic medina-styled old town and a more Europeanised new town, in similar fashion to other cities throughout not only North Africa but also the Balkans, with cities like Sarajevo and Skopje as well as the likes of Fes, Constantine and Tunis itself showing similar characteristics. Satellite cities were built and eventually were consumed by urban sprawl, and following the expulsion of the Axis Powers from the city it was used as a base from which the Allies could strike into southern Italy during World War II, which led to a relatively favoured status when it came to agreeing terms of independence post-war.

Modern Tunis

Medina of Tunis

We will pass a few noteworthy landmarks of Tunis such as the Avenue Habib Bourguiba Clocktower, symbol of the city, and the dramatic City of Culture Complex, a recent addition to the city which serves as a hub for the performing arts, with national cinemas, theatres, opera houses and exhibition centres within its confines. We then pass through the affluent Berges du Lac district, a lakeshore development constructed on reclaimed land south of the country’s primary airport, which is home to many nouveaux riches and corporations - as well as being one of Tunisia’s few dry neighbourhoods (like much of North Africa, alcohol is much less frowned upon in Tunisia than in other parts of the MENA world) due to conditions imposed by the Saudi investors that helped fund the project. This will then lead us to a 15,6km circuit which serves as the main theatre for action in the race, around the ancient city of Carthage.

Carthage’s ruins

Circuit detail

Carthage should, of course, need no introduction; founded by the Phoenicians in the ninth Century BC and the subject of myths and legends across Greek and Christian antiquity, it was one of the major Empires of the ancient world, ruling most of the west and central Mediterranean and exploring beyond it through advanced sea travel. At its greatest extend, the Carthaginian empire controlled the entire North African coast as far as Egypt, the Spanish coast from the Rock of Gibraltar to Catalunya and as far inland as the meseta, and all of the islands of the western Mediterranean, including the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta and most of Sicily. This power placed it at odds with both Greece Rome, and there were many wars between the Carthaginians and these forces. The second Punic War is perhaps the most famous, due to the actions of Carthaginian general Hannibal, invading through Spain and then crossing the Alps with war elephants, a fact which has only grown in the retelling, but the Pyrrhic War with Greece has also given us a famous figure of speech. These campaigns eventually culminated in the Romans triumphing over their African adversaries and the sacking of Carthage and later a new city was built in its place, which is known by historians as Roman Carthage to separate it from Ancient Carthage. The actual name Carthage is derived from a Latin rendering of the Punic words for “new city”, while the term Punic is a Latin term derived via the Greek for ‘trade port’.

The peak population of Roman Carthage was half a million, an insane number for the time, and it was the centrepiece of Roman Africa. It became an early centre for Christianity, until being sacked by the Vandals in their conquest of Roman Africa in the 5th Century. However, the Byzantines recaptured it in 533 and it became the westernmost bastion of the Byzantine Empire until the end of the 7th Century when the Arab conquest took the city and, with it being heavily damaged in the fighting, saw its population displaced to nearby Tunis, which catalysed the fall of the ancient city and the development of the modern one. For most of recent history the former ancient ruins have sat among agricultural land and have only held touristic value, but as Tunis has expanded, Carthage has now become a bustling suburb built around the tourist attention given the ancient monuments. It is now a prestigious town in its own right and the Presidential Palace of Tunisia is in the boundaries of the former ancient city.

We arrive on the circuit just after the finish, and will have essentially seven laps (six complete) of this circuit. The women will probably have an extra lap because they didn’t do the earlier circuit with the longer climbs around Qorbous. We arrive at the circuit at Byrsa Hill and the famous Acropolium (pictured above) before heading to the Cothon, the great harbour of Carthage.

Punic Ports of Carthage, historical reconstruction alongside present day appearance

We follow along the coast and this leads to a slight uphill - around a kilometre at 3% so barely perceptible - to the hill overlooking the Presidential Palace and the Baths of Antoninus, the largest Roman thermae in the African continent and third largest overall, and were excavated during World War II. They are now one of Tunisia’s premier tourist attractions. This then enables us to descend down to the coast via a twisty road to Sidi Bou Saïd beach, and then to Cap Carthage. This then sets us up for the main obstacle on the circuit, the road from the cape up to the scenic hillside Medina of Sidi Bou Saïd, which sits at the peak of the Jabal el-Menar hill. The settlement originally took its name from the hill but has subsequently been named for a prominent Sufi scholar who settled there. Famous for its scenic views and its blue and white colour scheme, the small town of 6.000 has a reputation as a home of artists and writers, with the likes of Michel Foucault, André Gide and Paul Klee among those who have lived here. But we’re more interested in how you get into the town, because it’s quite the challenging little road.

First part of the ascent - should be quite the scenery for a World Championships, no?

Second part of the ascent - note those lovely cobbles

End of the climb, central Sidi Bou Saïd

Descending back out of the town

The profile map I made suggests this to be a kilometre at 8% but it isn’t quite so tough; mapping it more precisely we get 1,1km at 6,8%. This is broken into 500m at 4,3% on tarmac, before the road turns to cobbles on a left-hand corner (the tarmac road is a dead end which leads to a helipad further round the cape) and then a short sting of false flat before a final 350m at 11,3% on cobbles, with two hairpins low down and then the road through the centre of town shown above. Not a monstrous challenge, but enough to give more than enough of a platform to attack from. It comes at 6,6km from the finish the last time, so this is a more than worthy springboard on at least the last three laps, with around 37-38km remaining, 22-23km, and 6-7km left with each passage.

Although this is the main and only categorisation-worthy obstacle on the lap, it isn’t just a straight run-in; there is a right hander at the base of the road to the old town, and then there is an easier, tarmac ascent on Avenue Sidi Bennour, which is rather small to map on Cronoescalada but looks to ascend around 30m in 500m, so around 6%. 500m at 6% on a mostly pretty straight road is pretty inconsequential, but it follows almost directly on from the cobbles of the initial climb so is a chance to make or break a group selected on the larger climb.

La Marsa, our descent visible on the hillside

We then descend into La Marsa, an affluent coastal city of 100.000 which is renowned for its beaches and its Hafsid Dynasty era (13th-16th Century) palace. From here it’s a very simple run-in; we take a couple of corners to head back southwards, and then we have a near 2km long straight (with a roundabout in the middle but it is wide and will barely require negotiating) at uphill false flat - around 2% - before two 45º right handers onto the final straight. The first of these is at about 1200m to go and the second at 900m or so; these are wide and safe to negotiate with a péloton although I hope there is not a full péloton by the end. There is a slight left hander at around 200m out as the road curves and then we finish on the Boulevard de l’Environnement just above the remains of Roman Carthage, with the theatre below us on our left as we cross the line, and Parc Montazah on our right.

Aerial view showing Boulevard de l’Environnement. The péloton will be approaching from top centre heading down and right, around the double kink to their right onto the boulevard, then heading down and left with the finish area around the large parking spaces shown near the bottom of the purple line highlighting the road

Roman theatre of Carthage. Maybe if we’re lucky we can get the presentations in here, akin to the Ciudad Romana de Clunia stages in Burgos

I think this race will suit classics types, obviously, with 7 times up a cobbled climb like that, but not so tough with it only being the seven and them being 15k apart, as the likes of RVV. The route is pretty tough though, and another factor is likely to be heat; the average daily high in Tunis in September is 30ºC, but the record is over 40º which is admittedly unlikely but would really bring the pain. After my last route being one that is very much about constant punchy climbing, and the one before that being one that sprinters can win, this one I believe is more designed for the rouleurs - at least in terms of the terrain. Obviously the climate is very, very different from that expected in the Northern Classics so it will be interesting to see how those Flandrian-style hardmen cope with seeing their favoured terrain style, but with a climate more akin to the Andalucian Vuelta stages.

And it should certainly improve the field for the Vuelta as riders preparing for the Worlds look to acclimatise as well.

 

[Skijumper Roglic fan]

https://www.procyclingstats.com/rac...vincia-de-san-juan/2023/stage-3/info/profiles :

If you scroll down, here, you‘ll find „El Cerillo“, and its climb profile.

I‘ve been asking myself now for nine months, and finally dare to ask you all:

Does anyone know of a KOM of the past, in a race (WT/.Pro/.1/.2), that was easier than El Cerillo (shorter, less steep)?

By the way, mighty „El Cerillo“ was almost twice part of a race, this 2023 season. In Tour of San Luis, see above - and in Giro del Sol, few weeks before:

Stage profiles Giro del Sol 2023 Stage 1

Stage profile, mountains profiles, final five kilometre profile, race map, steepness percentage profiles for Giro del Sol 2023.

www.procyclingstats.com

There, they maybe climbed it from the other side: twice as hard! Double length, same average gradient.

San Luis: 0.5kms@0.2%, and
Giro del Sol: 1.0kms@0.2%…

Maybe MAL was so strong at this year’s Tour of Colombia because he was freshly back from altitude training on Cerillo. Steep, long, and high (596mtrs above sea level); perfect altitude training!…

 

[Samu Cuenca]

https://www.procyclingstats.com/rac...vincia-de-san-juan/2023/stage-3/info/profiles :

If you scroll down, here, you‘ll find „El Cerillo“, and its climb profile.

I‘ve been asking myself now for nine months, and finally dare to ask you all:

Does anyone know of a KOM of the past, in a race (WT/.Pro/.1/.2), that was easier than El Cerillo (shorter, less steep)?

By the way, mighty „El Cerillo“ was almost twice part of a race, this 2023 season. In Tour of San Luis, see above - and in Giro del Sol, few weeks before:

Stage profiles Giro del Sol 2023 Stage 1

Stage profile, mountains profiles, final five kilometre profile, race map, steepness percentage profiles for Giro del Sol 2023.

www.procyclingstats.com

There, they maybe climbed it from the other side: twice as hard! Double length, same average gradient.

San Luis: 0.5kms@0.2%, and
Giro del Sol: 1.0kms@0.2%…

Maybe MAL was so strong at this year’s Tour of Colombia because he was freshly back from altitude training on Cerillo. Steep, long, and high (596mtrs above sea level); perfect altitude training!…

The women's Tour of Chongming Island has had some pretty flat QOMs, they have even had some where the top was below sea level.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

World Championships RR: Amersfoort, Netherlands

Now, time for a real sprinter’s Worlds. It’s an interesting thing, trying to do course design in the Netherlands. It’s both an area which has been heavily explored by cycle races due to the nation’s tradition and history within the sport, and also which offers very limited terrain opportunities for creating selectivity. As a result, those areas which do provide selectivity are both well-known to real life races and well-known to traceurs, and the calendar is saturated with races in those areas where the Dutch countryside does offer roads that can create challenges, such as the Veluwezoom near Arnhem, the hills surrounding Nijmegen, and of course the Limburg hills. Dutch hills become household names more from their frequency than their challenge, with names like the VAM-berg being well known simply because of being the only hill usable for racing that far north in the country.

As a result, though, it’s a challenge to come up with something that isn’t well-trodden terrain in the Netherlands and yet still offers something for the spectacle. This offering probably doesn’t go a whole deal of a way towards producing something that will be like, all fireworks and high selectivity, but sometimes you gotta work with what you got.

The Netherlands has hosted the World Championships on occasions before. Of those, Valkenburg has been responsible for the majority, with the Cauberg featuring ordinarily. Shout out to the Lasterketa Burua guys for their awesome Circuiti Mondiali page that keeps tabs of all these routes. 1938, 1948, 1979, 1998 and 2012 all featured on Valkenburg circuits (the first two on a short, 10km circuit with only the Cauberg, the remainder on a longer circuit featuring the Bemelerberg as well) while 1959 (incorporating parts of the old version of the Zandvoort motor racing circuit) and 1967 (in Heerlen with Bergseweg as the only obstacle) are the alternative sites used for the Worlds in the Netherlands. The Zandvoort circuit is one of the flattest ever used, with the main competition for this being Copenhagen in 1931, 1937, 1949, 1956 and 2011, Leipzig in 1934, Zolder in 1969 and 2002 (especially the former!) and Doha in 2016. My hope was that while we wouldn’t find something that would be a real challenge, we could at least move more in to the realm of Worlds along the lines of Reims-Gueux (the much easier 1947 version rather than the more challenging, later and superior 1958 one), Moorslede 1950, Luxembourg 1952, Waregem 1957, or Leicester 1970, to at least add a little intrigue. So I set to work.

While there’s nothing big enough to pique the interest of databases like Altimetrias, Cyclingcols, Catena or Salite, Climbfinder have a huge database of even the most nothingburger of climbs in the Netherlands; there are some pretty major climbs missing in some countries, but others have every pimple in the road mapped. The Dutch lands are well covered and so it was a matter of hunting out places that had at least some slopes and then looking for places that could be viable Worlds hosts. The Holterberg and the few climbs a little to the north of the Nederrijn were the ones that gave me a bit of hope that something could be done around here, but of course then the problem was not treading on the toes of the Veenendaal-Veenendaal Classic which uses that area. Climbfinder had logged a few climbs in nearby Amersfoort, however, and these could be combined in such a way that it gave me some hope that while the race would still be a sprinters’ race, the height gain overall would be sufficient to at least create attrition across 260km duration and create some opportunities for baroudeurs.

As a city, Amersfoort with its population of around 160.000 is large enough to be a reasonably achievable host, at least in a country as supportive of cycling as the Netherlands. It also features a fairly extensive sporting history while also being fairly untapped for cycling; it wasn’t even a common feature in the old Ronde van Nederland. It has however appeared in the race which is now the Renewi Tour, back when Eneco were the sponsor; it hosted the race-ending ITT in 2009 (won by Edvald Boasson Hagen but perhaps more famous for Bradley Wiggins leading by a long way at the intermediate checkpoint and then climbing off with no explanation) and the prologue in 2011 (won by Taylor Phinney) but a serious lack of road stages there that meant it was somewhat new territory to work with for cycling.

In other sports, of course, it has quite a lot more involvement; it hosted the equestrian part of the modern pentathlon in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and the Dutch Open tennis from 2002 to 2008. It is the hometown of Alistair Overeem, a kickboxer and mixed martial artist who starred in PRIDE and K-1 and is known for a radically shape-shifting physique and failing a test for a ridiculously over-the-limit amount of synthetic testosterone in 2012. In recent years, however, the city has another sporting child to promote, for this is the city of the athletics club AV Altis, home club of Amersfoort’s daughter and the Netherlands’ current favourite sporting belle, recently-crowned world champion hurdler Femke Bol, a star turn on the track who is the second fastest 400m hurdler of all time - unfortunately competing at the same time as the outright fastest, although said fastest, Sydney McLaughlin, runs a very limited schedule outside the US which has enabled Bol, who dominates everybody else in the discipline routinely, to quickly become one of the star attractions of the world calendar.

Plus, as I like to joke at Cees’ expense, given she specialises in the hurdles (although she also sets records and wins regional championships on the flat), she’s the only sporting Bol that can win in races with obstacles in them, so I’m sure he’ll want to prove me wrong here although I doubt he’d be the Dutch team’s first choice sprinter with the likes of Jakobsen, Kooij and Groenewegen all at their disposal.

She has some way to go to beat the most prominent Amersfoorter for recognition though, this being the painter Piet Mondrian, whose birthplace is now a museum in the city and who started out painting impressionist and naturalist-style works but whose later bold, abstract, lines-and-colour-blocks works made him a household name; his works in this style became highly influential and oft-imitated; they are instantly recognisable and oft-referenced the world over, perhaps for our benefit most notably by the La Vie Claire cycling team and the Look bicycle brand.

Piet Mondrian in his studio

Amersfoort is also very easily accessed from a number of major cities, as it has three train stations on a multitude of networks connecting it to almost every city in the Netherlands; it is renowned as the country’s greenest city, so this may be a good way to promote that (although the number of pollutant follow cars and camera motos might dampen such enthusiasm somewhat). This was my attempt at making an interesting circuit out of the limited terrain offered me by the city, however.

Yea, it’s not much. The climbing isn’t hard in the slightest, but we’ve seen from some courses that even if there aren’t any sustained climbs, then at least a bit of attrition can be created by constant rolling terrain with limited actual flat, even if a lot of it is false flat. My suggestion for this would be, just like the Aachen route which had a similar distance on the circuit, 11 laps of the circuit for the women, 13 for the U23s and 18 for the men. And the hope is that the sum total of those uphills will start to play a role as the race wears on, albeit races like Copenhagen 2011 show that it isn’t so easy. Although that race did put the feed zone in the middle of the biggest uphill section, so go figure.

Anyway, we have the start/finish at Stationsplein, outside Amersfoort Centraal station. This is more or less a de facto choice, more about being able to have a wide enough and long enough safe sprinting straight leading in.

The first part of the circuit is just to take a few technical corners around the block to allow for the finish to be on one side of a dual carriageway and the other side be used for logistics, but for us to return partway up the finishing straight to use the other side of the road as well. Stationsstraat gives way to Stadsring before a right hander on to Utrechtseweg and the first of a few different approaches to the one hill in Amersfoort proper, known informally simply as Amersfoortse Berg. It’s only a mere 44m above sea level at its summit, so “Berg” is a pretty generous description, but perhaps ironically the part of town around here is called “Bergkwartier” and the park in the Bergkwartier is called “klein Zwitserland”. No, really. We aren’t climbing all the way each time because we’re going up and down various sides of this one hill in order to make things as interesting as we can. Think of this as kind of like a Dutch parent telling their child who has inexplicably got fascinated by 1980s cycling history “we have Monticello at home”.

Here we fall into a bit of the pit of Climbfinder’s auto-generated profiles, seeing as while they give us a good hint of what to expect, the fact that some of these profiles top out at higher than the official surveyed summit of the climb mean they have to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt, but the first ascent amounts to the first 1,1km of this profile. Yes, we’ve certainly seen deadlier climbs. 1,1km at 2,5% with a steepest 100m averaging 5%, I think even the oft-derided likes of Ivan Quaranta, Andrea Guardini and Danilo Napolitano could get over that, while Kenny van Hummel would probably be winning GPMs here. We then “descend” Abraham Kuyperlaan, which Climbfinder records as 1km at 2% with nothing worse than 3% and some nice greenery either side of the road, plus only one curve which means that only the roundabout about 1/3 the way down will provide any kind of meagre threat to anybody’s concentration levels - the loss of which late in the race is probably the only way anybody’s going to suffer on this one.

Heading back along the flat base before a left on to Daam Fockemalaan - named for the early 19th Century author, not his namesake, the late 19th Century cyclist - and then another left which enables us to take a slightly more challenging ascent, going through Beerenbroucklaan, Prins-Willem-Alexanderlaan and finally Belgenlaan, which passes the Belgenmonument, the largest monument in the Netherlands, and named as it was constructed by Belgian soldiers in the aftermath of World War I to commemorate their internment in the area.

This behemoth of a “climb” is 600m at 3,8% but the crucial part is that the last 175m of ascent average 7% and there’s 100m of that at 8% - enough that there might be some who can use it to work from, especially given there are a couple of 90º corners immediately following that section. We will actually complete the entirety of this climb as shown in Climbfinder, but I only bothered to reference the main body up to the 8% stretch.

At the summit here we rejoin Utrechtseweg and head onto the large roundabout that is Stichtse Rotonde, one of the largest such road stretches in the country. Bizarrely it consists of a central, almost perfectly circular roundabout, and an outer elliptical ring which only links to some of the roads inside it, and for others serves as an elevated roundabout akin to a motorway junction, as the central roundabout serves as the end of the Rondweg Zuid, the southern part of the incomplete ring road.

This incomplete nature and odd foibles of the junction enables us to utilise this to our advantage; we can go around part of the inner roundabout to head down the Rondweg, before hooking an almost 180º right hander to climb up on Laan 1914 which runs parallel to it. This is just false flat, but the last 200m up to the outer roundabout section see the gradient climb up to 6%; we can then continue along the outer roundabout heading directly over the Rondweg Zuid that we descended a couple of minutes ago, and then descend the other side, adjacent to the Rondweg to its north, which is the side Climbfinder lists as the Klein Zwitserland side you can see here. After this, we have the only side of the climb that I really think has much chance of seeing any real action; I think there might be some tentative attacks on that last part of the Belgenlaan side but the main moves will be made on Hugo de Grootlaan, which is 700m at 4,7%.

This partially brick-paved ascent has its last 300m at 6% and max stretches of 7%, but it’s more sustained actual uphill than the other climbs on the circuit which I hope gives us a chance of seeing some riders take risks to get away on it, especially as it’s only 3,4km from the finishing line the last time around. It’s the last chance to foil the sprinters if the pack is still together unless somebody does one of those Fabian Cancellara 1km darts. And you know with a Worlds that simply due to attrition from distance there’s going to be some hesitance about chasing those that try to escape late on; the days of 12 man teams like in Zolder for Cipollini are done, while in Doha Tom Leezer even somehow managed to nearly win, except for Belgium expending far more resources than were reasonable on trying to kid themselves Tom Boonen could still outsprint Sagan and Cavendish at that point in his career. I know that the echelons in the desert made that one a bit of an anomaly compared to, say, København, but nevertheless.

However, this seemingly paltry obstacle is not too dissimilar to what we saw in Montlhéry 1933 (Côte Lapize being 1km @ 5,3% and 3,3km from home), with that climb being a little more difficult but the circuit being otherwise flatter; Luxembourg 1952, with the climb being further from the finish than here too; nor those routes like Moorslede, Reims-Gueux and Leicester that I mentioned earlier. The last port of call is to descend the 450m at 4% of Vondellaan, head down to the Stadsring, and then retrace our steps around to the station for the finish. The last corner is at 900m from the line and is a 90º left-hander with plenty of run-off. After that there’s a left-right kink, the former of which is the tighter at around 30º, before a final slight right-hand curve (only around 10-15º) at 350m from home. All of these curves are on a nice two-lane-wide section of dual carriageway (we went the other way at the start of the circuit) before an open sprint finish. Can you get out of sight and out of mind if there’s a bit of indecision about the chase and foil the sprinters here?

Probably not, but hey, at least I tried.

In the Netherlands, this classifies as a somewhat hilly city

 

[Devil's Elbow]

Here we fall into a bit of the pit of Climbfinder’s auto-generated profiles, seeing as while they give us a good hint of what to expect, the fact that some of these profiles top out at higher than the official surveyed summit of the climb mean they have to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt

However, there are also non-automatically generated profiles out there. In order:

(First 900m only)

IMO this circuit would work really well with a point-to-point first 50-100 kilometres through exposed terrain.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

However, there are also non-automatically generated profiles out there. In order:

(First 900m only)

IMO this circuit would work really well with a point-to-point first 50-100 kilometres through exposed terrain.

Much appreciated! It's been quite a while since I've gone in depth on a Dutch route and didn't realise Heuvelsfietsen included this section, I've only ever used it for the Veluwezoom and Limburg, but these are much better and more trustworthy.

 

[Netserk]

Ah, hills of a difficulty I recognise from my commute.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

World Championships RR: Béjar, Spain

Oh yes! Time for me to be somewhat lazy because I kind of already gave the game away on this one by mentioning it in a Vuelta design I did. I originally envisaged this as a World Championships, European Championships or hell, even Spanish National Championships circuit, but ended up needing a Béjar finish or somewhere nearby for the route I had in mind for the Vuelta and didn’t want the stage to be too decisive (or give away some other ideas I had in mind for the area) so I ended up spoiling it, so this won’t be totally new to old hands in the thread, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective. Probably fortunately for me because it saves a lot of writing.

Béjar is a pretty small place to host the Worlds - population of 13.000 - but whereas in non-traditional countries larger cities and urban centres might be preferred, we have seen some fairly small sites in classic cycling countries host these championships; take for example Mendrisio (population 15.000), Valkenburg (population 16.500), or Plouay (population 5.800), so Béjar is big enough given it has a solid history in the sport, thanks primarily to the Banda de La Covatilla, a prominent group of voices in Spanish cycling who trained around the Béjar area and helped introduce the La Covatilla ski station to pro cycling, led by Miguel Ángel Martín Perdiguero and accompanied by the likes of Santos González, Aitor González and Rubén Lobato. But the city’s history in cycling was covered by me previously in a Vuelta route, so I quote myself thus:

The city of Béjar has hosted the Vuelta a few times over the years, but it has come more to prominence since the 90s, and that's to do with two famous riders from town. I mentioned the first a couple of times in my last Vuelta because I was going for quite a late 80s-early 90s vibe with that route - it is the underrated pure climber Laudelino "Lale" Cubino González. Professional from the mid 80s to the mid 90s, Lale is one of the few non-sprinters of the comparatively modern epoch to have won stages of all Grand Tours, with his inevitable speciality being mountaintop finishes. Sites of his victories include Cerler-Ampriu, where he was the first rider to win, Luz Ardiden (in both the Tour AND the Vuelta), Monte Naranco and Monte Sirino. He is also one of the comparatively small number of Europeans to have taken multiple stages of the Vuelta a Colombia, winning a stage in 1991 and another five years later. However, like so many featherweight Spanish climbers over the years, Cubino was fragile and prone to losing unnecessary time at unexpected places and crashing out of major races; he only managed to podium one Grand Tour, that being the 1993 Vuelta, but he managed two more top 10s, as well as a strong performance in the World Championships in Agrigento in 1994 and a national championship win. He also won countless stages of short Spanish stage races, and a few stages of mountainous races elsewhere, most notably the Dauphiné.

Although most of his career had been with BH and Amaya Seguros, in Lale's final year as a pro he was riding for the Kelme team, and when he retired at the end of 1996, one of the young riders the team brought through as a replacement in 1997 was a fresh-faced young rider from the same hometown as Cubino and who regarded the escalador as an idol, only this kid was set to completely eclipse Lale's performances. His name was Roberto Heras, and Kelme very quickly realised they had something special with him. Taking him to the Vuelta in his neo-pro year, he repaid them with a victory on the Alto del Morredero (no mean feat) and finished 5th in the final overall classification. A year later he repeated the feat, winning a stage (to Segovia this time) and finishing 5th, although he was over five minutes closer to Olano than he had been to Zülle the previous year. In 1999, he managed his first GT podium, taking 3rd place although he failed to win a stage this time; he made up for it by taking out the victory in the Aprica stage of the Giro, and in 2000 he finally stepped onto the top step of the podium in Madrid, taking two stages en route. Roberto took the leader's jersey from Ángel Casero on Lagos de Covadonga when the latter lost time, and then won the Alto de Abantos MTF in the leader's jersey to underscore his triumph.

Heras' successes led to him becoming perhaps the most famous of those riders that Johan Bruyneel brought in to ride as lieutenants for Lance Armstrong, building the US Postal super-team that took the template built for Miguel Indurain by Banesto, and turned it into a fine-tuned race-strangling machine; Heras was on several occasions the second strongest rider on any given day in the mountains, but turning himself over for Armstrong meant that his Tour de France GC results never reflected his talent - indeed his best Tour GC performance was 5th place, which he scored while still at Kelme. However, Bruyneel did repay him with full support in his Vuelta tilts; however he was unable at first to repay them with the same success Paolo Savoldelli was managing in the Giro; in 2001 he was 4th (since promoted to the podium by the erasure of Levi Leipheimer), and the following year we had what seemed like it would surely be his most memorable ever ride, triumphing atop the monstrous Alto de l'Angliru in hideous weather conditions to take the lead of the race; however we were in prime turbo diesel era, and the Vuelta route was also very turbo diesel friendly at that point, and Heras' dreams were dashed on the final day by THE AITORMINATOR©. The following year, despite an even more diesel-tastic route, Heras was keen not to repeat his mistake. Instead he chipped away repeatedly at the lead that had been built up by Isidro Nozal before annihilating the shock leader in the penultimate day's MTT to the Alto de Abantos. The following year, having moved to Liberty Seguros and freed himself from Lance (plus taken on Nozal as a domestique to create a formidable squad) he tried to repeat the 2002 tactic, taking the jersey on a mighty mountaintop in the middle of week 2 (this time Cálar Alto), but despite an absurd late race transformation that led to a top-20 pick in the Fantasy Doping Draft, Santiago Pérez didn't have the same calibre as THE AITORMINATOR© in the final chrono and was unable to overhaul Heras' lead.

And then 2005 happened. We all know the basics of the story; Roberto won the Vuelta thanks to the single greatest stage in the Vuelta's modern history, almost killing himself descending La Colladiella, leaving domestiques standing by the side of the road to wait for him to arrive, and proving himself unbeatable in the most awful of weather to hit the Vuelta since that Angliru win in 2002 - the only problem with that win was he did it in the ugly-as-all-hell "fish jersey", the blue points jersey with yellow fish designs that the Vuelta used at the time. Well, that and he cheated to do it, which led to the epic move being rendered moot, the Vuelta being taken away and given to Denis Menchov, only to then be given back in the courts in 2011; to this day it is unclear who won the 2005 Vuelta.

What we do know, however, is that Roberto Heras never rode a top level bike race again. It's pretty widely accepted that Heras is one of the most blacklisted of the blacklisted, a true persona non grata at top level road cycling. He has kept himself busy in XCO MTB and in Gran Fondos, but while many of the blacklisted riders found themselves bumped down a couple of levels and re-emerged with Rock Racing, Miche or the Portuguese teams, or have had to fund their own projects or find their own sponsors, like Michael Rasmussen, Heras has been gone, full stop, for over a decade now. However, the fact remains that he's either the equal most successful Vuelta rider of all time (alongside Tony Rominger and Alberto Contador), or the single most successful Vuelta rider of all time, and that deserves some recognition.

The circuit I have drawn here is 20,3km in length, and starts and finishes in the city centre’s Plaza Mayor. Finish on the right hand side of this image. This does take inspiration from the extensive research that the PRC guys did on the city… but also I went in a different direction from them, including one of the climbs they investigated, but also incorporating a climb they didn’t look at - but the real Vuelta a España has involved - and also approaching the city from a different angle to them, meaning that my run-in was different and separate to anything they investigated in their thread.

This was what I wrote about the circuit when I included a single lap of it in a Vuelta stage.

This was the plan that PRC came up with for a finish in Béjar:

I have agreed with their optional finish at Plaza Mayor, but I am approaching it from the opposite side (the west) thanks to looping around north of the city on the way down from La Hoya, which then enables me to add this extra circuit. We then follow the red route up towards Castañár before descending back down again, so we do ascend past the Basilica and the Plaza de Toros which is the oldest surviving one in the world; this entails 2,1km @ 6,6% but going uncategorised and cresting a little inside 20km from home. This then allows us to descend into Candelário, which has appeared recently a couple of times in stages to La Covatilla and has wowed us all with its narrow, cobbled, painful ramps serving as a minor, but noteworthy, addition to the race.

I really liked adding a 600m at 8,6% cobbled repecho to the race, especially bearing in mind that for me it is not serving as an appetiser for an HC mountaintop finish, but rather as the final ‘true’ ascent, ending 13km from home. Realistically there’s a bit of uphill before the repecho and Cronoescalada records the full climb as being 2,0km @ 6,5%, but that final cobbled stretch will be where the key moves are made.

After this there is another short - around 1,5km at 4% - uphill to the Alto Los Pollos, the official high point of the road, before a twisty downhill through Navacarros takes us back to the descent route we previously took. Once more this loops around to the north of Béjar, crossing the Cuerpo de Hombre river at the Textile Museum and turning westward following the Ronda Viriato before a short uphill, urban cobbled route takes us up Rua Pedro Roca and Calle Rodríguez Vidal to the finish at Plaza Mayor.

Left hand side of this picture

I think this finale would make an ideal World Championships course, as the two climbs are differing in style although similar in overall stats, and both are in the first half of the circuit. The final repecho is a kilometre long but the only difference-making bit is about 300m and not that steep, so you won’t see people leaving it to that final uphill. It ought to be a good finale and a warmup for the World Championships par excellence, too. And it would be nice to see the race make something of Béjar that isn’t just a stage start the day after a La Covatilla MTF, no?

For a World Championships, I wanted to have this one start in Salamanca and be like a much harder version of the Wollonggong Worlds with a more serious climb in the first 100km and then multiple laps of the circuit. I also used this approach in my Aosta circuit which I posted back in 2016, but sadly the profile is lost to Imgur’s rebuild. This was the plan:

The first 90km of the course are rolling, heading southeastward toward Piedrahita and then turning westward. This then leads us over the same run-in I used in the Vuelta stage where I previewed this circuit. That means the longest climb of the race being the Puerto del Tremedal - 11km at 5,4% - and then basically 6km at 3,4% of Puerto de la Hoya, before we get into the circuit, which we can then take six laps of.

Detail of the circuit

Having a course which has significant climbing - but part of that being cobbled and none of it being super steep - should hopefully make for an intriguing mix of riders being involved. I mean it’s hard to imagine a World Championships course where the likes of Wout van Aert, Remco Evenepoel and Tadej Pogačar aren’t among the major competitors, but it’s going to open up some interesting decisions for other nations.

Should the Brits focus on Tom Pidcock for this one, or does the consistent amounts of climbing - and the fact the race is in Spain - mean that the Yates brothers are a stronger bet? Or even Ethan Hayter, who has been great on this type of finish in the past in races like Algarve and the Ruta del Sol, but can he cope with the accumulated climbing? For the hosts, is Oier Lazkano able to make it to the end? If it’s a small group would Álex Aranburu or Pello Bilbao be the best bet? Or does the climbing make it one for Ayuso or even Mikel Landa? Is it a Julien Alaphilippe race, or could the likes of Valentin Madouas make it for France? Neilson Powless or Matteo Jorgenson for the US? How about some riders who should be contenders but will probably be foraging alone for the business end of the race like Ben Healy or Alexey Lutsenko?

I think that despite the cobbles in Candelário this should be more suited to the puncheur types and medium mountain guys, but we shall see.

 

[Netserk]

@Red Rick

Yo Dawg, I heard you like short mountain stages that finish on a steep gravel extension of a climb, so I designed a stage that finishes on a steep gravel extension of a climb that could feature after another stage that finishes on a steep gravel extension of a climb. (After exploring a few options, I thought I might as well publish this one)

 

[Red Rick]

@Red Rick

Yo Dawg, I heard you like short mountain stages that finish on a steep gravel extension of a climb, so I designed a stage that finishes on a steep gravel extension of a climb that could feature after another stage that finishes on a steep gravel extension of a climb. (After exploring a few options, I thought I might as well publish this one)

I shall reluctantly condone this one by the will of the people

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Oh, how I yearn for the halcyon days when 140km was considered short for a mountain stage.

 

[Red Rick]

@Red Rick

Yo Dawg, I heard you like short mountain stages that finish on a steep gravel extension of a climb, so I designed a stage that finishes on a steep gravel extension of a climb that could feature after another stage that finishes on a steep gravel extension of a climb. (After exploring a few options, I thought I might as well publish this one)

Actually I had never thought about climbing Stelvio from Prato and descending via Umbrail before.

 

[Netserk]

I also made a similar stage with the finish in San Valentino Alla Muta. It'd work perfectly with any finish location in that valley e.g. Slingia or Pramajur. I see that @railxmig has previously done the same, though with the finish all the way up at Resia.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

World Championships RR: Calgary, Canada

My first trip to North America for one of these Worlds courses sees me looking at something that sort of fits in with the wintersport theme that I’ve gone back to the well on frequently, but doesn’t continue with the Nordic Series because we may be in a Winter Olympic city, but the Nordic events were held over at Canmore, not within Calgary itself, whereas I’ve put the World Championships in the city.

Just because I’ve put the World Championships in the city rather than the outlying venues doesn’t mean that I’ve not taken the 1988 Winter Olympics into account when designing the race. Far from it, in fact.

It’s also probably the most ‘classic’ World Championships route I’ve put in yet, with a punchy but not too difficult climb early in the circuit and a secondary obstacle, easier and not threatening in its own right, on a circuit layout. While the placement of said obstacles on the lap, and the difficulty of said obstacles may vary, this format is a very common World Championships trope, with examples such as Zürich 1946 (a 700m climb at the start of the lap and a longer but shallower climb at the end), Solingen 1954, the second Reims-Gueux route in 1958 (a very good facsimile for this course in fact); Salò di Garda 1962; Imola 1968, Gap 1972, the later Valkenburg circuit used in 1979, 1998 and 2012, Villach 1987, Utsonomiya 1990, Oslo 1993, Lisbon 2001, Hamilton 2003, Geelong 2010 and Ponferrada 2014 all demonstrating characteristics of this kind, while the “main ascent early in the circuit and then a gradual downward sauntering” approach also crops up in Varese 1951, Lugano 1953, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Sachsenring) 1960, Montello 1985, and perhaps to an extent Bergen 2017.

Home to just under 1,5 million people, Calgary is the third largest city in Canada, and is ranked the most liveable city in North America, bolstered in its reputation by the largest proportion of millionaires per capita in the country. This area has been inhabited for some 11.000 years, but the modern city’s history is much younger; the first white settler was a cartographer and fur trader who overwintered here in 1783, and 90 years after him came the first European settlers, who used the nearby bend in the Elbow River as a stopping point, and shortly afterwards a mountie station was established to regulate the fur trade and American bootlegging. As the government started to promote cattle ranching in Alberta, the convenient location at the bend in the river made Calgary a burgeoning centre for trading and as a destination point for travelling into the Albertan interior. The rapid expansion was also supported by legislation requiring houses to be built from sandstone, which in turn supported quarrying interests in the area. The association with cattle was continued by the inauguration in 1912 of the Calgary Stampede, one of the world’s most famous rodeos and horse racing festivals, now grown into a huge annual event that is well ingrained into the city’s culture.

The Stampede is referenced alongside the city in many of its sporting endeavours; the city’s CFL franchise is called the Calgary Stampeders, while from the 50s through to the end of the 80s when the Territory days ended for good, Calgary supported arguably (because Montréal and Lutte Internationale could make a case) the strongest and best known wrestling territory in Canada. Back in the days before globalisation, different regions had favoured styles of wrestling and wrestlers would often train in one and then journey from region to region to make money and gain experience. The American northeast enjoyed the OTT pageantry that we nowadays associate the sport with, the South - especially the Memphis territory - liked brawlers and blood feuds, and the west coast liked Mexican-influenced gymnastics and fast-paced action. The Canadians, however? They became associated primarily with sound, amateur wrestling-inspired bouts that were lower on showmanship and higher on technical skills, telling stories more through moves and holds.

Calgary’s main wrestling promotion was Stampede Wrestling, established by catch-as-catch-can wizard Stu Hart, and serving as an NWA affiliate north of the border. It became renowned more, however, for the Hart Family Dungeon, a wrestling school in the basement of an old army hospital and led by Hart alongside Japanese wrestler Mr. Hito. Stu Hart was notorious for using legit wrestling stretches to punish students with sadistic glee, and the wrestlers that graduated it tended to come with reputations as strong and technically gifted fighters. The most obvious graduates would be Stu’s two sons, Bret “The Hitman” Hart - a future WWF World Champion - and Owen Hart, but other graduates would include “Superstar” Billy Graham, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, Davey Boy Smith and The Dynamite Kid (a tag team of British origin known as The British Bulldogs, with Davey Boy later known simply as The British Bulldog after Dynamite Kid was forced into retirement by injuries), Chris Jericho, Edge and Christian and, if I can be serious for a minute, Lance Storm. There’s also Chris Benoit, but he has rather been airbrushed out due to his crimes. As well as the two best known sons of Stu Hart, the family’s tendrils extend further into the annals of wrestling; in total Stu and Helen Hart had 12 children. Diana, one of the youngest, married Davey Boy Smith rendering the Bulldog an in-law of Bret and Owen; her older sister Ellie married Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, thus creating the best known version of the faction “The Hart Foundation”. Their daughter Nattie, her partner Tyson Kidd, and Davey and Diana’s son Harry Smith, founded a “New Hart Foundation” team in the late 2000s and came to WWE as “The Hart Dynasty”. Dynamite Kid and Brian Pillman are also considered, though they are not directly related by blood or marriage, to be close affiliates of the Harts, and the latter was the only wrestler not connected by either of those two means to Stu Hart to compete with the Hart Foundation. In addition to this, the father of “Macho Man” Randy Savage was a well known wrestler in the 50s and 60s, and Savage’s younger brother Lanny Poffo was born in Calgary while his father was working for Stampede Wrestling.

No Kayfabe needed

Calgary has been used in pro cycling a couple of times; whereas most cycling interest in terms of racing has been in Ontario and Quebec, the highest profile stage race touring an actual Canadian province was here in Alberta, running from 2013 to 2017, and the first edition finished with a short sprint stage from Okotoks to Calgary which was won by Peter Sagan. The following year the direction of travel was reversed, so instead of running Edmonton to Calgary, they ran Calgary to Edmonton, with the former hosting a prologue and the latter the final sprint. The 2014 edition’s prologue in Calgary was won by Tom Dumoulin but after this the city faded from use with Edmonton taking centre stage. But for the most part it is for other sports that the city is known.

Nowadays oil and gas have replaced ranching as major commodity industries in the area, and it was this interest that saw the rapid expansion of the city to its present day size, as well as attracting an NHL franchise, as the Atlanta Flames were relocated to Alberta to form one of the most storied rivalries in the sport, the Battle of Alberta between the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton Oilers. Their feeder team, the Wranglers, moved into the city in 2022 after previously being based in Stockton (then known as the Heat, they adopted the Wranglers name from a defunct WHL team from the 70s and 80s), and a junior team, the Calgary Hitmen, also use the city as their home (their name inspired by their original bankroller, the aforementioned Bret “The Hitman” Hart). And perhaps more crucially, it brought the Winter Olympics in 1988.

Winsport Canada Olympic Park today. Note the service road for the bobsleigh and ski jumps in the foreground.

The Canada Olympic Park hosted the bobsleigh/luge, some of the arena sports (especially the curling, which is commonly held at the top level here to this day) and the ski jumping as well as the Nordic Combined (to avoid having to build two complexes or having the athletes transfer to Canmore between sections of competition) and the freestyle skiing (which at the time consisted of two disciplines, Aerials and - no, really - Ski Ballet) at the 1988 Games and is now sponsored by WinSport, the successor to the Calgary Olympic Development Association, serving as a centre for development of Canadian wintersport athletes, introducing some smaller alpine runs, halfpipes and a terrain park for moguls and other X Games type disciplines. However, of perhaps more interest to us will be that the park, in summer, is converted for XCO and downhill mountain bike disciplines, where it is a popular competition spot on the North American and domestic calendars.

As you might expect as a result of this, most of Calgary’s sporting sons and daughters not related by blood or marriage to the Hart family (I know, definition of ‘sport’ and all that) are wintersport athletes, such as recent ski jumping world champion Alexandria Loutitt, hockey players Bill Gadsby, Taylor Hall, Cale Makar, Jaret Anderson-Dolan, Jay Beagle, Jake Bean, Dany Heatley, Tim Hunter, Jarome Iginla, Larry Kwong, Tyler Myers, William Nylander, Jim Peplinski, Brayden Point, Jason Smith and Mike Vernon, freestyle skier Brady Leman, figure skater Jamie Salé (an Olympic champion), curlers Ben Hebert, Cori Morris, Cheryl Bernard, Amy Nixon and Julie Skinner, lugers Sam Edney and Alex Gough, speed-skater Gilmore Junio, Paralympic cross-country skier and biathlete Brian McKeever, regular biathlete Nathan Smith, and ski-crosser Aleisha Cline, but there are others such as NFL veteran Nate Burleson, former Washington Redskins quarterback Mark Rypien, who won two Superbowls - one of which as MVP - for the team, English footballer Owen Hargreaves (born in Canada to English and German parents), swimmer Curtis Myden, Olympic champion swimmer Mark Tewksbury and Olympic gold medallist gymnast Kyle Shewfelt.

No cyclists though. So let’s try and inspire some.

The circuit here is 16,9km in length so I’m looking at 9 laps for the women (152,1km), 11 for the U23 men (185,9km), and 16 for the elite men (270,4km), as a pure circuit race Worlds.

Winsport Arena and Park from the west. Finishing straight in foreground in front of Winsport Arena.

The above picture shows the start and finish of each lap. We will take the left curve and then 90º subsequent left at the car park at the start of each lap, before the sharp right and the snaking bobsleigh service road up the hill. With seven snaking corners of varying difficulties, it’s a pretty classic Worlds-style obstacle, totalling 1,7km at 6,2%, but after a short run-up leaving the arena complex, it’s 1,2km at 7,6% before flattening out again at the summit. The summit coming so soon in the circuit also means it is over 14km from the line, which sprinters will like, so long as they can handle the many laps they will be taking.

This is the main climb of the circuit; it is followed by around 4km of flat and false flat around the Cougar Ridge hilltop district, before descending through Patterson Heights and back up Coach Hill on Patina Drive SW - this is 1,1km at just over 4% so it’s an option for an attack in a small group, but it isn’t going to automatically drop anybody; it’s exactly 8km from the line at the summit, so there is the chance to break away and make a move if the group is fairly small, but you aren’t going to easily drop an organised péloton here.

Patina Drive SW, which we descend and then climb, is the perimeter road of this development

We then descend back down on the highway road. We then turn left onto Na’a Drive and head directly back to the WinSport Arena. I originally preferred to extend the circuit into Bowness to make the climbs a bit further from the finish, but after reviewing I think this route will be superior, as it enables us to create a somewhat more interesting and challenging finale that will make this less likely to be a regular sprint and enable some intrigue in the final few kilometres, whereas the original, slightly longer (18,9km) circuit featured a very straight and slightly uphill (2-3%) drag before crossing Canadian Highway 1 and then having the same final couple of corners and finishing straight as we have here.

Instead, it’s a left-hander at the freeway junction roundabout, before a tricky penultimate kilometre which takes us past the new Trinity Hills development; we pass a retail park before a left-hand sweeper at 1,9km from the finish, which takes us to a 250m at 7% climb, then a couple of light bends (one right, one left), and then a right hand sweeper which finishes the uphill section here, at 1200m to go. The overall for this climb is 700m at 5%, which is just about enough to potentially be decisive, but that 1200m remaining mean it’s not just about that uphill. That right-handed is fairly significantly sweeping, but with a very broad radius. We then cross two roundabouts - one at 1100m from home and the second at 900m. The interesting thing here is that we have gone from one freeway junction where we have exited a road which passes underneath the freeway, along a road running parallel to the freeway to an adjacent junction where the lesser road actually bridges over the freeway. There’s then those two sweeping corners you can see on the picture above, 750m and 450m from the line respectively, but not technical at all and I don’t think that other than the roundabouts no corners in the last few kilometres will be a crash risk.

The climbs on this route make it comparable to, say, Bergen, or an easier version of Montréal, but for me the difficulty is more akin to Madrid or Hamilton, and the layout is perhaps more similar to Lisbon. Obviously the Montréal Worlds on the updated course have yet to happen (although the GP Montréal can be used as examples), but looking at those precedents, we can look at likely outcomes. Lisbon ended with Óscar Freire winning a sprint from a group of 45; Igor Astarloa won solo in Hamilton ahead of a small group largely comprising puncheurs, then a group of just under 40 finished 12” behind him; Tom Boonen won a sprint from a group of 27 in Madrid; while Bergen ended up with an almost identical scenario, Peter Sagan winning a sprint of just under 30. I think this will probably be similar - the tricky run-in is not enough to make it a puncheur thing (especially given the last kilometre favours the chasers), but it’s enough to offer some potential for breaking out of the bunch if it’s not organised around a sprint, for example if there are no teams with coherent leadouts prepared.

 

[nightowl]

World Championships RR: Calgary, Canada

My first trip to North America for one of these Worlds courses sees me looking at something that sort of fits in with the wintersport theme that I’ve gone back to the well on frequently, but doesn’t continue with the Nordic Series because we may be in a Winter Olympic city, but the Nordic events were held over at Canmore, not within Calgary itself, whereas I’ve put the World Championships in the city.

Just because I’ve put the World Championships in the city rather than the outlying venues doesn’t mean that I’ve not taken the 1988 Winter Olympics into account when designing the race. Far from it, in fact.

It’s also probably the most ‘classic’ World Championships route I’ve put in yet, with a punchy but not too difficult climb early in the circuit and a secondary obstacle, easier and not threatening in its own right, on a circuit layout. While the placement of said obstacles on the lap, and the difficulty of said obstacles may vary, this format is a very common World Championships trope, with examples such as Zürich 1946 (a 700m climb at the start of the lap and a longer but shallower climb at the end), Solingen 1954, the second Reims-Gueux route in 1958 (a very good facsimile for this course in fact); Salò di Garda 1962; Imola 1968, Gap 1972, the later Valkenburg circuit used in 1979, 1998 and 2012, Villach 1987, Utsonomiya 1990, Oslo 1993, Lisbon 2001, Hamilton 2003, Geelong 2010 and Ponferrada 2014 all demonstrating characteristics of this kind, while the “main ascent early in the circuit and then a gradual downward sauntering” approach also crops up in Varese 1951, Lugano 1953, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Sachsenring) 1960, Montello 1985, and perhaps to an extent Bergen 2017.

Home to just under 1,5 million people, Calgary is the third largest city in Canada, and is ranked the most liveable city in North America, bolstered in its reputation by the largest proportion of millionaires per capita in the country. This area has been inhabited for some 11.000 years, but the modern city’s history is much younger; the first white settler was a cartographer and fur trader who overwintered here in 1783, and 90 years after him came the first European settlers, who used the nearby bend in the Elbow River as a stopping point, and shortly afterwards a mountie station was established to regulate the fur trade and American bootlegging. As the government started to promote cattle ranching in Alberta, the convenient location at the bend in the river made Calgary a burgeoning centre for trading and as a destination point for travelling into the Albertan interior. The rapid expansion was also supported by legislation requiring houses to be built from sandstone, which in turn supported quarrying interests in the area. The association with cattle was continued by the inauguration in 1912 of the Calgary Stampede, one of the world’s most famous rodeos and horse racing festivals, now grown into a huge annual event that is well ingrained into the city’s culture.

The Stampede is referenced alongside the city in many of its sporting endeavours; the city’s CFL franchise is called the Calgary Stampeders, while from the 50s through to the end of the 80s when the Territory days ended for good, Calgary supported arguably (because Montréal and Lutte Internationale could make a case) the strongest and best known wrestling territory in Canada. Back in the days before globalisation, different regions had favoured styles of wrestling and wrestlers would often train in one and then journey from region to region to make money and gain experience. The American northeast enjoyed the OTT pageantry that we nowadays associate the sport with, the South - especially the Memphis territory - liked brawlers and blood feuds, and the west coast liked Mexican-influenced gymnastics and fast-paced action. The Canadians, however? They became associated primarily with sound, amateur wrestling-inspired bouts that were lower on showmanship and higher on technical skills, telling stories more through moves and holds.

Calgary’s main wrestling promotion was Stampede Wrestling, established by catch-as-catch-can wizard Stu Hart, and serving as an NWA affiliate north of the border. It became renowned more, however, for the Hart Family Dungeon, a wrestling school in the basement of an old army hospital and led by Hart alongside Japanese wrestler Mr. Hito. Stu Hart was notorious for using legit wrestling stretches to punish students with sadistic glee, and the wrestlers that graduated it tended to come with reputations as strong and technically gifted fighters. The most obvious graduates would be Stu’s two sons, Bret “The Hitman” Hart - a future WWF World Champion - and Owen Hart, but other graduates would include “Superstar” Billy Graham, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, Davey Boy Smith and The Dynamite Kid (a tag team of British origin known as The British Bulldogs, with Davey Boy later known simply as The British Bulldog after Dynamite Kid was forced into retirement by injuries), Chris Jericho, Edge and Christian and, if I can be serious for a minute, Lance Storm. There’s also Chris Benoit, but he has rather been airbrushed out due to his crimes. As well as the two best known sons of Stu Hart, the family’s tendrils extend further into the annals of wrestling; in total Stu and Helen Hart had 12 children. Diana, one of the youngest, married Davey Boy Smith rendering the Bulldog an in-law of Bret and Owen; her older sister Ellie married Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, thus creating the best known version of the faction “The Hart Foundation”. Their daughter Nattie, her partner Tyson Kidd, and Davey and Diana’s son Harry Smith, founded a “New Hart Foundation” team in the late 2000s and came to WWE as “The Hart Dynasty”. Dynamite Kid and Brian Pillman are also considered, though they are not directly related by blood or marriage, to be close affiliates of the Harts, and the latter was the only wrestler not connected by either of those two means to Stu Hart to compete with the Hart Foundation. In addition to this, the father of “Macho Man” Randy Savage was a well known wrestler in the 50s and 60s, and Savage’s younger brother Lanny Poffo was born in Calgary while his father was working for Stampede Wrestling.

No Kayfabe needed

Calgary has been used in pro cycling a couple of times; whereas most cycling interest in terms of racing has been in Ontario and Quebec, the highest profile stage race touring an actual Canadian province was here in Alberta, running from 2013 to 2017, and the first edition finished with a short sprint stage from Okotoks to Calgary which was won by Peter Sagan. The following year the direction of travel was reversed, so instead of running Edmonton to Calgary, they ran Calgary to Edmonton, with the former hosting a prologue and the latter the final sprint. The 2014 edition’s prologue in Calgary was won by Tom Dumoulin but after this the city faded from use with Edmonton taking centre stage. But for the most part it is for other sports that the city is known.

Nowadays oil and gas have replaced ranching as major commodity industries in the area, and it was this interest that saw the rapid expansion of the city to its present day size, as well as attracting an NHL franchise, as the Atlanta Flames were relocated to Alberta to form one of the most storied rivalries in the sport, the Battle of Alberta between the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton Oilers. Their feeder team, the Wranglers, moved into the city in 2022 after previously being based in Stockton (then known as the Heat, they adopted the Wranglers name from a defunct WHL team from the 70s and 80s), and a junior team, the Calgary Hitmen, also use the city as their home (their name inspired by their original bankroller, the aforementioned Bret “The Hitman” Hart). And perhaps more crucially, it brought the Winter Olympics in 1988.

Winsport Canada Olympic Park today. Note the service road for the bobsleigh and ski jumps in the foreground.

The Canada Olympic Park hosted the bobsleigh/luge, some of the arena sports (especially the curling, which is commonly held at the top level here to this day) and the ski jumping as well as the Nordic Combined (to avoid having to build two complexes or having the athletes transfer to Canmore between sections of competition) and the freestyle skiing (which at the time consisted of two disciplines, Aerials and - no, really - Ski Ballet) at the 1988 Games and is now sponsored by WinSport, the successor to the Calgary Olympic Development Association, serving as a centre for development of Canadian wintersport athletes, introducing some smaller alpine runs, halfpipes and a terrain park for moguls and other X Games type disciplines. However, of perhaps more interest to us will be that the park, in summer, is converted for XCO and downhill mountain bike disciplines, where it is a popular competition spot on the North American and domestic calendars.

As you might expect as a result of this, most of Calgary’s sporting sons and daughters not related by blood or marriage to the Hart family (I know, definition of ‘sport’ and all that) are wintersport athletes, such as recent ski jumping world champion Alexandria Loutitt, hockey players Bill Gadsby, Taylor Hall, Cale Makar, Jaret Anderson-Dolan, Jay Beagle, Jake Bean, Dany Heatley, Tim Hunter, Jarome Iginla, Larry Kwong, Tyler Myers, William Nylander, Jim Peplinski, Brayden Point, Jason Smith and Mike Vernon, freestyle skier Brady Leman, figure skater Jamie Salé (an Olympic champion), curlers Ben Hebert, Cori Morris, Cheryl Bernard, Amy Nixon and Julie Skinner, lugers Sam Edney and Alex Gough, speed-skater Gilmore Junio, Paralympic cross-country skier and biathlete Brian McKeever, regular biathlete Nathan Smith, and ski-crosser Aleisha Cline, but there are others such as NFL veteran Nate Burleson, former Washington Redskins quarterback Mark Rypien, who won two Superbowls - one of which as MVP - for the team, English footballer Owen Hargreaves (born in Canada to English and German parents), swimmer Curtis Myden, Olympic champion swimmer Mark Tewksbury and Olympic gold medallist gymnast Kyle Shewfelt.

No cyclists though. So let’s try and inspire some.

The circuit here is 16,9km in length so I’m looking at 9 laps for the women (152,1km), 11 for the U23 men (185,9km), and 16 for the elite men (270,4km), as a pure circuit race Worlds.

Winsport Arena and Park from the west. Finishing straight in foreground in front of Winsport Arena.

The above picture shows the start and finish of each lap. We will take the left curve and then 90º subsequent left at the car park at the start of each lap, before the sharp right and the snaking bobsleigh service road up the hill. With seven snaking corners of varying difficulties, it’s a pretty classic Worlds-style obstacle, totalling 1,7km at 6,2%, but after a short run-up leaving the arena complex, it’s 1,2km at 7,6% before flattening out again at the summit. The summit coming so soon in the circuit also means it is over 14km from the line, which sprinters will like, so long as they can handle the many laps they will be taking.

This is the main climb of the circuit; it is followed by around 4km of flat and false flat around the Cougar Ridge hilltop district, before descending through Patterson Heights and back up Coach Hill on Patina Drive SW - this is 1,1km at just over 4% so it’s an option for an attack in a small group, but it isn’t going to automatically drop anybody; it’s exactly 8km from the line at the summit, so there is the chance to break away and make a move if the group is fairly small, but you aren’t going to easily drop an organised péloton here.

Patina Drive SW, which we descend and then climb, is the perimeter road of this development

We then descend back down on the highway road. We then turn left onto Na’a Drive and head directly back to the WinSport Arena. I originally preferred to extend the circuit into Bowness to make the climbs a bit further from the finish, but after reviewing I think this route will be superior, as it enables us to create a somewhat more interesting and challenging finale that will make this less likely to be a regular sprint and enable some intrigue in the final few kilometres, whereas the original, slightly longer (18,9km) circuit featured a very straight and slightly uphill (2-3%) drag before crossing Canadian Highway 1 and then having the same final couple of corners and finishing straight as we have here.

Instead, it’s a left-hander at the freeway junction roundabout, before a tricky penultimate kilometre which takes us past the new Trinity Hills development; we pass a retail park before a left-hand sweeper at 1,9km from the finish, which takes us to a 250m at 7% climb, then a couple of light bends (one right, one left), and then a right hand sweeper which finishes the uphill section here, at 1200m to go. The overall for this climb is 700m at 5%, which is just about enough to potentially be decisive, but that 1200m remaining mean it’s not just about that uphill. That right-handed is fairly significantly sweeping, but with a very broad radius. We then cross two roundabouts - one at 1100m from home and the second at 900m. The interesting thing here is that we have gone from one freeway junction where we have exited a road which passes underneath the freeway, along a road running parallel to the freeway to an adjacent junction where the lesser road actually bridges over the freeway. There’s then those two sweeping corners you can see on the picture above, 750m and 450m from the line respectively, but not technical at all and I don’t think that other than the roundabouts no corners in the last few kilometres will be a crash risk.

The climbs on this route make it comparable to, say, Bergen, or an easier version of Montréal, but for me the difficulty is more akin to Madrid or Hamilton, and the layout is perhaps more similar to Lisbon. Obviously the Montréal Worlds on the updated course have yet to happen (although the GP Montréal can be used as examples), but looking at those precedents, we can look at likely outcomes. Lisbon ended with Óscar Freire winning a sprint from a group of 45; Igor Astarloa won solo in Hamilton ahead of a small group largely comprising puncheurs, then a group of just under 40 finished 12” behind him; Tom Boonen won a sprint from a group of 27 in Madrid; while Bergen ended up with an almost identical scenario, Peter Sagan winning a sprint of just under 30. I think this will probably be similar - the tricky run-in is not enough to make it a puncheur thing (especially given the last kilometre favours the chasers), but it’s enough to offer some potential for breaking out of the bunch if it’s not organised around a sprint, for example if there are no teams with coherent leadouts prepared.

As someone who lives in Calgary and has spent a fair bit of time over the years plotting out imaginary world championships courses around the city, it’s rather surreal to see this popping up here all of a sudden!

 

[Libertine Seguros]

So the winter sports season starts, and immediately I’m whisked off into a merry world of imagining fanciful routes around the range of places we see coated in cold white coverings for the next four months as I get a little break from whinging about the fanboying of the sycophants in the GCN studio cheerleading people I don’t like, which I usually use to whinge about the fanboying of Eurosport International’s sycophants cheerleading people I don’t like. Plus ça change, as they say. Obviously over the years I’ve done many a Nordic Series entry, along with things like a Tour of Norway that was heavily influenced by the Nordic sports, utilising Holmenkollen, Beitostølen, Lillehammer and other such places; a Tour of Finland that was inspired by a love for the navel-gazer nation brought about in part because of my love for the Nordic sports; a Giro del Trentino that consisted solely of stages between Nordic skiing venues; and a multitude of stage hosts in countless races over the years in this thread being cribbed from wintersport. Candanchú in a Vuelta, Oberhof in Peace Races and Deutschlandtours; Hochfilzen, Obertilliach and Seefeld in an Österreichrundfahrt; Nové Město in a Peace Race; Valcartier in my Tour de Quebec, Pokljuka in Tours de Slovénie, the list goes on. The fact I love wintersport is well entrenched in this thread even for those that don’t venture off to the XC skiing threads to see me contributing (often grumpily and wordily as ever) there too.

This is a race which was somewhat inspired by wintersport likewise, but is not set entirely to wintersport venues - at least not the ones you’ll have come to expect from me - but instead more focused around, you know, cycling. The country I have chosen to design this race around sees precious little UCI racing, despite some history with the sport. But, my reason for picking this particular country as one to investigate for the Race Design Thread is heavily influenced by some cult favourites in the wintersport world. This country is Latvia.

A wide but not especially tall coastal country in northeastern Europe, Latvia is, like its fellow Baltic States, mostly flat, meaning we have some challenge in finding creative ways to make a challenging race here, which is of course part of the fun. It’s also not super northern, so it doesn’t have the most reliable snow, at least in the west closer to the sea. Further inland you do have more reliable winters and this is where the main wintersport venues are. Like many flatter cold countries, however, the country doesn’t really excel in the field of Alpine skiing, snowboarding or such sports, so relies heavily on sliding sports (which have a very strong presence in Latvia), and the endurance-rich Nordic disciplines, although with its limited population and team budgets, the team can seldom be especially competitive with the juggernauts of the Nordic sports. When they can be competitive, however, they seem to be disproportionately keenly felt in my affections.

There are probably at present three high profile Latvians in the Nordic discipline… and I am a big supporter of all three. Biathlon has Baiba Bendika, who has a few top 10s and is a popular figure who breaks in among the bigger nations frequently, and a major cult hero within the sport, Andrejs Rastorgujevs. Andrejs has managed a couple of podiums in a career of over a decade (even bearing in mind the year he spent on the shelf for whereabouts violations) but has picked up a few flower ceremonies or bombed his way to the top 10 from deep in the field, often swashbuckling from deep in the field, only to then blow it completely at the final shoot, or taking the opening leg of a relay and serving as a premier disruptor, forcing pace to get his sponsors some airtime and pressing the pace. It’s just what he does. And in the cross-country, you have exciting up-and-comer Patricija Eiduka, who has been edging ever further forward and, because she is cool, scores her results primarily on distance races. She’s actually one of the youngest of a large family who have all started out in biathlon, but she has been the most successful of the siblings and even won Latvian Sportswoman of the Year in 2020. Big daddy Inguss Eiduks, who coached them all, sadly passed away during the pandemic so he sadly isn’t there in person to see his daughter finally reward him for all his hard work. But we’re not here to talk about skiing, I know.

Stage 1: Liepaja - Talsi, 149km

So, first thing’s first, as you can see I’ve rather exaggerated the y-axis so that you can actually see some kind of topography here, since the area is rather flat, and this stage, being the one that takes place in the Kurzeme region, better known in English as Courland. The highest point in Courland is barely over 200m above sea level, so you know full well that this is not going to be a climber’s stage, but we are going to try to create some time gaps nevertheless.

The stage starts in Liepāja, the largest city in the region and the overall third-largest city in the country - although given the relatively low population of Latvia relative to many neighbouring countries, that does still leave it at just 67.000 inhabitants. It came to prominence as a valuable ice-free port on the Baltic, founded possibly on the site of an earlier poorly-attested village called Līva, by the Teutonic Knights, who called their village on the site Libau, which grew significantly after being granted city rights in the 17th Century. This was accelerated in the 19th Century after the province fell under Russian control; the fact it was an ice-free port relatively close to St. Petersburg made its position advantageous during the expansion of the railways, and this gave it strategic importance that led to its being fortified against German recapture. This lasted until 1915 when the Germans overran the Russian Empire on the Eastern Front, and from 1918 to 1940 it was a key city in independent Latvia. It was initially captured by the Bolsheviks, but the Nazis then took it, and it was a bastion of the “Courland pocket”, an isolated corner of lands held by the Nazis but cut off entirely by the Red Army for an entire year.

Once the Soviets established control, the city became a key naval base and was eventually cut off from commercial shipping entirely in 1967, and eventually became a closed city, such that permits were required for entry. After liberation in 1990, the city has pivoted back to commercial port status, and the proximity to an existing city structure has helped the former military facilities avoid the same fate as places like Paldiski in Estonia as Soviet ghost towns, with the military districts repurposed as - albeit somewhat spartan and utilitarian - suburbs. Liepāja is also Latvia’s music capital, being home to the oldest symphony orchestra in the Baltic States as well as being the hometown of Līvi, an important band in the development of rock music in Latvia. It also houses one of the strongest ice hockey teams in the country.

Early in the stage we pass through Grobina, another Teutonic settlement but on the site of an earlier battlefield when the Swedes had controlled the area, and onward we head, largely in a northeastern direction crossing the Courland region. The next landmark is Aizpute, formerly Hasenputh, a Livonian Order castle town built on the site of an old Curonian hillfort, and which hosts our first intermediate sprint. Little happens until we reach the second such sprint, in Kuldīga which, despite barely being 1/5 the size of Liepāja, is the official capital of Courland, possibly owing to its history within the Hanseatic League and its UNESCO-inscribed architecture. Located where the Venta meets the Daugava rivers, it was founded in the 13th Century and was where the independent duchies of Courland and Semigallia (i.e. Kurzeme and Zemgale today) were founded. There is also the widest waterfall in Europe here, although given the width is 275m and the height is barely 2m, it doesn’t really resemble what most people envision when they think of a waterfall. Its central library is also notable, as this was a former synagogue, surprisingly left unaffected by the Nazis, although they did use it to trap Jews in and once they had been barricaded in and summarily executed, the building was used as a grain store before being converted under the Soviets to a cinema. The city is also the hometown of Krists Neilands, arguably the most prominent Latvian in the current péloton, a winner of the Tour of Hungary, the GP de Wallonie, a number of national titles and two combativity awards in the Tour de France, as well as somewhat miraculously being able to stay with thermonuclear Raúl Alarcón and Amaro Antunes almost all the way to the line in that 2017 Volta a Portugal stage when they accidentally did a Tabriz Petrochemical Team in Europe.

Historic centre of Kuldīga

Waterfall

Around 20km after the city, however, comes the beginning of the obstacles which are designed to give us the possibility of selectivity, and if you know much about the Baltic States and cycling there, you’re probably aware of what that means: sterrato. And lots of it. Sector 1 - the main body of the challenge on this stage - begins at 39km from the line… but it lasts a grand total of 17,5km, so that’s a pretty severe and long, long stretch of gravel for the riders to deal with. Hell, maybe we’re heading into the UCI’s interpretation of “gravel racing” territory. The sections are pretty nice, though - this long section is included in the European Rally Championships’ Rally Talsi, for example.

Rally Talsi

This first sector is, if we’re honest, the most likely to cause any serious gaps by anything other than tactics. The rest of the time it will be about placement and racing decisions and brains; the sheer length of this sector however means that attrition comes into it. Plus of course the luck factor; I don’t think that the surface here will be too bad in terms of mechanicals, but the fact it’s stage 1 so there is no race leader to wait for should hopefully mean that the hammer stays down. There are around 4km of tarmac after the end of this herculean sterrato stretch before sector 2 which is 1400m in length, and then another 4,6km of tarmac before a final 1800m on the unsealed roads, meaning the final sterrato sector ends just a mere 9,2km from the line as we approach our finishing town of Talsi.

The site of an ancient hill fort and named after a Livonian word meaning “isolated place”, Talsi is home to just under 10.000 people today and until the end of the 18th Century it was dominated by Baltic Germans, although a Jewish shtetl developed during the ensuing 100 years, although it was largely spared the holocaust by a Russian pogrom at the time of WWI - though those that returned would fall foul of the Nazis later - one of whom was kept hidden by a local farmer for over three years before her eventual capture and murder. I largely selected it as a stage town, however, for being the birthplace of probably the most prominent Latvian cyclist (or at least of those that always competed for Latvia, seeing as Piotr Ugrumov vacillated between the USSR, Latvia and post-Communist Russia), Romāns Vainšteins.

Vainšteins trades the national colours for rainbow bands at Plouay in 2000

Obviously best known for his 2000 World Championships Road Race win, Romāns Vainšteins is kind of treated nowadays as something of a poster boy for the ‘out of nowhere’ winner, an example of an unheralded rank outsider who somehow won the rainbow jersey. The brevity of his career - he only had eight pro seasons and retired in his early 30s - also helps this perception. But it isn’t quite right, and in reality at the time he was far less out of nowhere than his predecessor; subsequent events have meant Óscar Freire’s 1999 win is kind of accepted as just kind of there, but at the time it occurred it was well out of left field. Vainšteins by contrast had been highly prominent in the year 2000 and the issue with him as a candidate for victory was more to do with the lack of support that the Latvian team could give him relative to other stronger nations, no different to what we would later see in respect of riders like Alexandre Vinokourov or Peter Sagan, and they did alright for themselves in high profile one-day races in national teams too.

All of his best results are crammed in a three year period from 1999 to 2001, but in the context of these, he seems far less of an anomaly as a winner of the World Championships Road Race; he was adept in a sprint and best in one after a hillier route that got rid of some of the fastest men. He’d won two stages of Tirreno-Adriatico and one of the Giro in 1999, and his Classics record was strong in this period - albeit with Paris-Bruxelles and Coppa Bernocchi the biggest wins, but he had managed to podium the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Milano-Sanremo, Paris-Roubaix, Cyclassics and Clásica San Sebastián, and score top 5s in Amstel Gold, Paris-Tours, Omloop, Gent-Wevelgem and Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne during that period. You name the one-dayer, he was a threat in more or less any route short of Lombardia. However, after leaving Dome-Farm Frites for 2003 and returning to Vini Caldirola where he’d first broken out, he rapidly declined and achieved little in his last two seasons before retiring prematurely. In that respect he’s something of a throwback to the Ostbloc Russian racers of yesteryear, burning brightly but briefly, and also overtraining, overworking and, yes, doping, as he would later hint, answering a simple “yes/no” question of whether he had doped with an evasive “that’s my own personal business”.

Our route around Talsi is an interesting one - a bit like Viljandi in Estonia, its potential is known for cycling but frustratingly its best cycling roads are parallel so including them both in a circuit is hard. No fear then - we’ll just use one, loop around and use the other, but use them each just once because it’s only stage 1. Neither obstacle is especially challenging, especially for pros, but they’re something. The official stats of the Kalna Iela climb are 320m at 5,9% - but according to the Strava profile it has 100m at 12% in the middle. The current KOM is Toms Flaksis, a former pro who spent a year with La Pomme Marseille (later Delko) back in the early 2010s. It crests just 3,8km from the line so there’s the possibility to do something with it. Oh… and it’s cobbled. This is enough for it to get the nod as our one categorised climb for the day.

Kalna Iela

It is crucial that although the cobbles continue straight on in front of us, we turn left at the top of this climb onto Laidzes Iela. This enables us to avoid the crossroads where the finish will be in only a few kilometres’ time. Instead we loop around Talsu Ezers, or Talsi Lake (eagle-eyed linguist viewers will spot the similarity of Ezers “lake” to Slavic, from which it is likely borrowed). This allows us to go up to a roundabout and keep our run-in mostly on wide and safe roads. I could have shortened this section but for safety’s sakes I took a couple of extra roundabouts out to make the turning onto the final road of the day shallower, rather than having a tight 90º right at 800m from the line; instead we have a sweeping 50º or so right with a wide radius onto Lielās Ielas. This road includes a kink to the right and then a final kink to the left only 150m or so from the line - however this last 340m is at 4,7% with the last 150m at around 8% as it gradually steepens.

Approaching final corner

Finishing straight and final corner

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 2: Jelgava - Jekabpils, 210km

The longest stage of the Tour of Latvia is the second, as we head through Semigallia (Zemgale) province and into the southeast of the country. Jelgava, south of Riga, is the largest city in Zemgale with a population of 55.000 and is a logical host therefore. The Latvian name is a regional variation on “jālgab” or “town on the river”, but for most of its history it has been known as Mitau, the name originally given to it by the crusading Livonian Knights and reflected in the Yiddish name (Mitave) and the Polish (Mitawa). It has also come under siege several times, most notably during the wars between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden. Although it changed hands during the partitions of Poland it largely survived intact, unfortunately however the same could not be said of World War I where it was badly damaged, although its defence by Home Guard battalions led to the formation of the Latvian Rifles division. It suffered more in the immediate aftermath however, as the Soviets fought Latvian freedom fighters and depleted German loyalists through 1919 before the establishment of independent Latvia and the renaming of the city to its present name. In July and August 1941 it was the scene of some of the least ceremonious massacres of the Nazi era, as the Gestapo and Latvian auxiliary police went around gunning down ‘undesirables’ indiscriminately until a specific weekend date when any survivors were taken to a rifle range, forced to dig a pit, and then massacred in waves, with estimates ranging from 1500 to 2000 murdered across the course of two days. Following Soviet occupation the city was rebuilt in typical fashion of the day, but since Latvian independence a lot of the Baltic German era architecture has been restored and given the city back a bit of its tourist interest. It has a small amount of cycling heritage, being the hometown of Dzintars Lācis, a member of the USSR Team Pursuit teams at the 1964 and 1968 Olympics, and also hosting the start of two stages of the Baltic Chain Tour, in 2017 and 2022, both finishing in Sigulda. The winners of those stages were ex-Astana, IPT and Human Powered Health pro Benjamin Perry and ex-Bora and Astana man Martin Laas respectively.

This stage is pretty flat, but it is also the most sterrato that we will see in a single stage, with a total of 45,9km across 8 sectors in the course of the stage. These are mostly divided into two sections, with four early - should be in the first hour and a half of racing - and four later on which should be more decisive for the bunch. The first landmark is Iecava, known in German as Großeckau, the scene of a battle during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and then after that it’s a veritable diet of dirt roads. The first sector into Misa is 6,3km in length, starting just under 35km into the stage, and then there’s around 2km tarmac before sector 2, which is the shortest at 1200m. 3,6km tarmac follows before another 1500m, and then we have just 1500m of tarmac before almost 18 kilometres of unabridged, unabated gravel. This will sort out the men from the boys. We’re still like 140km from the line at the end of this so I am not expecting significant moves, but it should tail off some also-rans, allow breaks to form, and give riders an idea of what to expect later.

Sector 3, road from Vecumnieki to Ķegums, as far as Ligieri

This section ends shortly before we reach the banks of the Daugava, and we then follow its southern banks for around 35km before we cross the river into Aizkraukle. Originally known as Ascherade by the Baltic Germans and, until 1990, Stučka by the Soviets, it is also home of an intermediate sprint and the local ski club of the Eiduks family, where Ingus Eiduks previously coached prior to his death during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Eiduks family - from nearby Koknese, which also hosts an intermediate sprint - consists of Ingus, his widow Anita, and at least six children who have gone into winter sport; Valts Eiduks (b.1986) went to the Turin Olympics and also competed in the Junior and U23 Worlds and the Universiade in cross-country; Krists (b.1988) entered the IBU Cup as a biathlete in 2006-7 after making 6th in the Junior Worlds, and also competed at the equivalent level as a cross-country skier; Elina Eiduka (b.1989) did biathlon on the IBU Cup at the same time but retired early - a bit of a shame as she seemed decently promising looking at the results in a vacuum; Ralfs (b.1997) competed in cross-country at the European Youth Olympic Festival; Patricija (b.2000) is the most successful, having abandoned biathlon after struggling with shooting at the Junior Worlds and focused on cross-country, where she is a mainstay of the World Cup and the reigning U23 World Cup overall winner; finally, Edijs Eiduks (b.2003) has been seen at the Junior Worlds and EYOF and is angling for a World Cup debut this season.

We now follow along the north bank of the Daugava, as far as Pļaviņas, which is home to the largest hydroelectric power plant in the European Union, the construction of which was controversial and aroused almost unprecedented levels of protest in Latvia against the Soviet government. This was due to the implications of the construction, which would result in flooding historical sites and landmarks; among those to be submerged were the ruins of Koknese’s historic castle, and the scenic Staburags cliff, a rock face and waterfall which created a whirlpool and would freeze in winter, and was the subject of many local myths and legends. The main myth surrounds the rock and waterfall being the personification of a mourning girl of legend whose lover drowned on the site and she remained fixed in place in mourning until she was turned into rock, and another version appearing in the Lāčplēsis, the national epic of Latvia, written in the late 19th Century by Andrejs Pumpurs to collect folk tales and myths in epic poem form, similar to the Kalevala in Finland or the Kalevipoeg in Estonia. According to the myth, our titular hero (his name meaning “bear slayer”) observes a plot of the witch Spīdala at Aizkraukle castle, who catches him and tries to drown him by throwing him into the whirlpool, only for the goddess Staburadze (many of the characters have names personifying cities, towns and landmarks in the region, with Aizkrauklis and Koknesis two other such figures) to rescue him by pulling her down to the crystal castle she lives in beneath the waves. The Staburags have disappeared from the map thanks to the power plant, and they now reside around 6,5m below the surface of the Daugava, this famous and culturally significant site to Latvians now reduced to a curio visited by divers and small submersibles only.

Staburags prior to its submersion in 1958

After passing through Pļaviņas it’s time to leave the river behind and enter our second set of sterrato sections. The first of these commences at 49km from the line and lasts for 5,8km, heading into the village of Varieši. 1,6km of tarmac through the village ensues before we hit another 6,6km stretch. The key thing about this is that 4km into the stretch there is a T-junction we approach in a hamlet called Sprukti; we turn right, and this takes us onto a final circuit that is 30,3km in length and we are doing one-and-a-bit laps of it. The end of this section is a mere 4,3km from the finishing line in Jēkabpils, but the first time around this is just an intermediate sprint, not the actual finish of course.

A fast and straight tarmac route out of town via Zīlāni characterises the first part of the circuit, something of a respite from the gravel and dirt roads. However, at 17km from the finish we turn left and head onto an uphill road which is also gravel, and the final run for home begins. I mean, it’s barely perceptible as a climb, being only around 3,5% for 1,2km, but it’s the high point of the stage so I figured I’d give out some mountains points. As such while it may look like there’s a descent on the profile, again it’s mere false flat so the fact it’s on sterrato doesn’t seem like much of an issue; the Giro’s sterrato stages and Strade Bianche routinely risk more. This overall sector is 5,2km in length and ends at 12,3km from the line, then we ride along 5,4km of tarmac before the T-junction in Sprukti where we join the sector we did in full earlier, completing the final 2,6km of it on our way to the finish.

Strictly speaking, we aren’t finishing in Jēkabpils at all but in Krustpils on the opposite side of the river. Historically, these were two separate cities, each side of the Daugava, with Jēkabpils being in Selonia and Krustpils in Latgale, but they were linked into one municipality by the Soviets in 1962. This extends back to their founding by the Baltic Germans, with Jēkabpils being known as Jakobstadt and Krustpils as Kreutzburg. Krustpils is actually older, the area having been settled owing to its convenient location at a bend in the river since at least 1000BC, but the present inhabitation having been founded around its scenic medieval castle, which we actually pass close to, at the final left hand curve around a kilometre from the line.

The south bank of the river started to be settled in the 17th Century when Russian Old Believers displaced during the Raskol arrived in the area, and Poles and Lithuanians in the ailing days of the Commonwealth settled in the town in order to access trade with the Latgale towns. It was a major battleground during the Great Northern War, and after rebuilding a ferry was established between the two towns across the river which improved the connectivity and cooperation between the two, until finally in 1936 a bridge was inaugurated. The modern population of the city is about 30.000, 2/3 of which is in Jēkabpils with the remainder in Krustpils, although it is apparently reducing somewhat as Latvia experiences a bit of a brain drain. Around 2/3 the population are Latvians with around 1/4, so most of the remainder, being Russians who had largely moved here during the Soviet era, many to service the Jēkabpils Air Base, from which tactical military reconnaissance aircraft would be tested and flown. Now largely disused, it hit the news in 2004 when one of its buildings was found to be a hive of illicit material, mostly cigarettes, being smuggled into the EU from Russia and Belarus. Our finish should be much more scenic and serene than a rundown airfield though, passing the castle after a couple of roundabouts, and then a long straight finish into the old town.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 3: Rēzekne - Alūksne, 163km

Our third stage starts in Rēzekne, the seventh largest city in Latvia with around 26.000 inhabitants. Originally known from Germans as Rositten, and then by the Russians as Rezhitsa (from which the Yiddish name, Rezhitze, derived), it was originally a Latgalian hill fort upon which the German crusaders built a fortress of stone to mark and protect their eastern frontier. Over the eras it would change hands between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire, and during the 19th Century it became an important shtetl, a centre of the Jewish community, and over half of the population were Jews when surveyed during this period. Although this proportion declined in the early 20th Century after Latvian independence, the driving out of the Jews during the Nazi occupation still reduced the population from about 13.000 to a mere 5.000. The Soviets extensively repopulated the city with ethnic Russians, and for much of the Soviet period it was a majority-Russian city, but many repatriated back into Russia following Latvian independence; the population reached a peak of 43.000 at the end of the USSR but has shrunk considerably for this reason since. It is famous for the Latgales Māra statue, commemorating liberation from the Red Army in 1920. It was rather predictably destroyed when the Soviets marched in in 1940, reinstated under German occupation, re-removed in 1950, and then reconstructed from old photographs in the 1990s.

We’re heading along the eastern borderlands of Latvia here, so close to the Russian border. It’s mostly a flat and straightforward stage in all honesty, but it also includes probably the biggest shock to any of you in the race: I didn’t detour through Madona, home of the country’s main biathlon and cross-country skiing facilities! Don’t worry though, my beloved ski-shooting sport will make an appearance today.

In fact, for the first 120km or so very little of significance is likely to happen; it’s tarmac roads but through fairly sparsely populated areas. The most significant point of the first 3/4 of the stage is passing through Gulbene, a village which grew exponentially since the 1920s as it stood on a railway junction, and where I host an intermediate sprint, and then Stameriena, home of one of the most impressive castles in Latvia. After all, race coverage most places pines to be like the Tour de France, and the Tour de France coverage doesn’t half love to liven up a dull flat stage by showcasing France itself, an underrated star of the show, by highlighting a few vineyards and châteaux. Latvia mightn’t be the first place you think of for mighty châteaux, but it has its own charm to offer.

The main body of this stage from a GC-relevant perspective is the two laps of ~17,5km we undertake once arriving in Alūksne, our finishing town. Home to a little over 6.000 people, the town was settled since antiquity by ancestors of the Finns and Estonians, before Latgalian Balts moved in and settled the area from the 8th Century. The location on the shores of Lake Alūksne (from which the town obviously derives its name) along with the rarefied air (semi-joking - Alūksne is the highest altitude town in Latvia, at a herculean height of 217m above sea level). In 1284 the Teutonic Knights arrived, and Marienburg fortress was constructed on an island in the lake. The nearby village of Volyst expanded around the fortifications and became known as Marienburg likewise. Although historically settled by Latgalians, the town was in the Vidzeme area, and Ernst Glück, a German clergyman from the town, became a key figure in Latvian cultural history by deciding that in order to spread the word of God he needed the townsfolk to understand it, translating the Bible into Latvian and opening up Latvian-language schools in order to improve literacy of the populace.

As with many such towns and cities in the Baltic region, successive incorporations into Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have ravaged much of its historical sites, but an outdoor theatre has been set up at the ruins of the former castle, while the Neue Schloß has been reconstructed in the neogothic style after damage in WWII, with monuments to the fallen erected both during Soviet times and following independence.

But let’s be honest, you know the drill, it’s me. Alūksne has a small biathlon club - not even one which has a stadium that can host events, just a range and tracks and a small hut for preparations and changing rooms for competitors - but this small biathlon club has been at the heart of Latvian biathlon for many years. Kristaps Lībietis competed periodically on the World Cup and IBU Cup (or its predecessor the European Cup) for a decade from 2000, retiring after the Vancouver Olympics, with just one points-scoring World Cup performance to his name; Gints Rozenbergs competed in 20 World Cup events - largely sprints and relays - from 2005 to 2010; Aleksandris Sverčkovs was a reasonably successful junior who however never rose above the IBU Cup level. But, the town also gave the nation the man, the myth, the legend, Andrejs Rastorgujevs. I gave Andrejs a cursory rundown in the pre-amble so I shan’t repeat myself too much, but since his World Cup debut in 2009, Rastorgujevs has very much carried the flag for Latvia, being by far and away their most notable talent since Edgars Piksons and has a personal best of 13th on the overall World Cup, with three podiums at the highest level to his name - two 2nd places individually, in a sprint and a mass start, and a Single Mixed Relay alongside Baiba Bendika; this goes alongside 43 top 10s, 5 medals (two gold, one silver and two bronze) at the European Championships, and one IBU Cup win. He’s also a veteran of three Olympics, and Beijing would have made it four had he not fallen foul of ADAMS regulations. Even despite the suspension, however, he remains a popular figure on the circuit as an outsider and a rebel flying the flag for outsider nations to possibly the greatest success of anybody on the circuit in the last decade, at least on the men’s side. In recent years the Buliņa twins, Sandra and Sanita, have joined him as Alūksne natives on the World Cup; they are still in their formative years (being 2001 births) but at time of writing Sanita is the more successful, arriving on the World Cup two years earlier and having achieved three points finishes.

In addition to these, the same sports club has given the world former world champion orienteer Edgars Bertuks, and the town is also home to former national road race (2014) and time trial (2020) cycling champion Andris Vosekalns, who spent a few years racing rather uninspiring-looking parcours races in the Baltic States, Belarus and Poland with Rietumu Bank before finding a niche for himself in China; he has been on the books of Hengxiang Cycling Team since 2018, but those national titles remain his greatest achievements.

The final circuit consists essentially of circling around Lake Alūksne, which is a flat-to-rolling loop. But not so fast! The dirt roads are back, I’m afraid (well, I’m not, I’m not sorry for it at all) - only one sector here, but it is 9,2km in length so accounts for over half of the circuit. The far point of the circuit - at the end of the sterrato section - is Lāzberģis, a small village famous for its abandoned castle, the shell of which stands tall and proud against the lake and provides an impressive backdrop for the closing stages.

However, as I am kind, the sterrato ends 8km from the line so if the sprinters can survive it - and it is flat so some at least should - this is their chance, that thing that looks like a repecho on the profile is 1km at 3%, so really not going to make this one for the puncheurs. The final significant corner is at 1500m from the line, after that there are only a couple of curves, first to the right and then to the left, before we finish at the museum with it on our left and the city park on our right, with the lake as our backdrop. This will be a scenic finish if it’s just going to be a sprint stage, at least. And bonus seconds could be crucial in this race with its short nature and mostly flat terrain, so there’s that too.