Nicole Cooke – Britain’s Greatest Cyclist

A surprising lack of coverage of the fact that Nicole Cooke has just successfully defended her Grande Boucle Feminine title (that’s the Womens Tour de France). Seven time British champion (yes, seven!), Nicole has been the world ranked number one female cyclist since July 2006. How the public failed to vote her the sports personality of the year is a mystery to me, but I guess the fact that she was nominated is something of a step forward.

On a somewhat related note the British road race championship has been cancelled due to the recent flooding in Yorkshire.

The Great Divide Race

Some intrepid souls are currently taking part in the Great Divide Race, a 2500 mile off-road race from Canada to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains. The route follows the Adventure Cycling Association route and will be completed in something between 16 to 25 days. Follow the progress of the race here or find loads of great background info here. If you’re inspired to do the route yourself you might like to get the book first.

Celebrity Gossip (on a bike)

Owen Wilson visits strip club on a mountain bike. The magazine speculates that he may need a tandem. I want to know when they will start doing bikes with tinted windows.

Cycling in the News

A slow week for cycling in the news. Quite a bit of coverage of the IOC president stating that despite drug scandals cycling deserves to remain in the Olympics. A London bike shop organised a fashion show and roped in some top designers in an attempt to move cycling fashion away from fluorescent lycra.

In Oxford cctv is being used to help combat cycle crime, whilst in Lancashire some poor chap was mugged for his bike.

Plenty of coverage of Bike Week including the chance for folks in Edinburgh to challenge Chris Hoy (nicely linking in with previous post).

Flickr Cycling

If you’re not familiar with Flickr (where have you been?) it’s a site for doing all kinds of cool stuff with photos. It has loads of biking pics. Some of my favourite cycling related groups/pools on Flickr include Taking Pictures While Cycling, Bike Nation, I Want To Ride My Bicycle, and the imaginatively named Mountain Bike!

Harking back to previous posts there are also Flickr pools for the London to Brighton ride and the World Naked Bike Ride. Let’s hope they have permission from all those people to put their pictures on the internet (go on, have a look – you know you want to…).

Bike Week

This week (16 – 24 June) is Bike Week, the UK’s nationwide ‘celebration of cycling’. There are thousands of event taking place all across the country including Bike 2 Work breakfasts, commuter challenges, children’s and family fun rides (including a plenty of picnics), free ‘Dr Bike’ safety checks, and even the Edinburgh Bike Week Film Festival. If you’d like to get involved you can search the Bike Week website for events near you. Most are free and suitable for all regardless of age or cycling experience.

(If an event prompts you to take up cycling in some form then Cycleguard are offering twelve months of bike insurance for the price of 11 during bike week.)

London to Brighton Bike Ride

This Sunday (17 June) is the annual London to Brighton Bike Ride, a charity ride in aid of the British Heart Foundation and possibly Britain’s biggest organised bike ride (I’m guessing this bit). It’s certainly amongst the most well known and since it started in 1980 about 700,000 people have completed the 50 something mile course raising over £35 million.

The ride is popular and hence has been fully subscribed for a while. If you fancy trying something similar the BHF are a great supporter of cycling and organise many similar events every year.

If, on the other hand, you can’t imagine cycling all the way from London to Brighton you may want to try it in a veteran car, a mini, or just sit back and enjoy the entire journey by train in just over two minutes.

World Kilo Record

A bit late with this but a while ago Chris Hoy narrowly failed in his attempt to break the world one kilometer (Kilo) record in La Paz, Bolivia. He missed the record by 0.005 of a second clocking only the second time ever recorded under a minute. The record attempt was made at the highest velodrome in the world at La Paz, Bolivia. Chris apparently arrived shortly before making the attempt without taking time to acclimatise. I guess the advantage of riding at altitude outweighs the disadvantage of performing in the thin climate. As a consolation he did break the 500 meter world record and still holds the fastest recorded time at sea level.

This will be the last time Chris Hoy competes at the Kilo event as it has been controversially dropped from the 2008 Olympics by the UCI to make way for BMX.

Track cycling is one of the success stories of British sport recently, and on something of a high right now having won seven titles at the last world championships. Here’s hoping it continues through to the Olympics in 2008 & 20012 and also translates into some future champion road racers.