Velo Podcast

This week on the Cyclingnews podcast we listen to David Brailsford as he breaks his silence to the press in Colombia about Chris Froome's on-going salbutamol case, and we discuss Froome's controversial up-coming season debut at the Ruta del Sol.

We also take a look at the action from the Dubai Tour, where so far Dylan Groenewegen, Elia Viviani and Mark Cavendish have shared the spoils. We hear from Cavendish after he claimed his first win of the season and Groenewegen after he lost the lead after being docked 20 seconds for drafting.

This year's Dubai Tour has seen some new and modified sprint trains, and we analyse the winners and losers so far, and who has impressed in the first tests between some of the sprinting elite.

We also discuss the season so far with our two esteemed guests, Ed Pickering and Sadhbh O'Shea, picking their highlights from the early season, including Daryl Impey’s Tour Down Under win, the Cyclo-cross Worlds and Trek-Segafredo's start to their campaign.

The German and his teammates on how they’ve gone about setting up a new alliance

Welcome to the Cyclingnews Podcast, brought to you in association with Prendas Ciclismo, Pinarello, and our newest partner, Floyd’s of Leadville. This week we have a special edition of the show as we go behind the scenes of Marcel Kittel’s lead-out train at Katusha-Alpecin’s Mallorca training camp.

Kittel is arguably the best pound-for-pound sprinter on the planet right now and won five stages in last year’s Tour de France before announcing that he was moving from Quick-Step Floors to Katusha-Alpecin for the 2018 campaign. At the team’s recent training camp we sat down with Kittel and several of his new lead-out men, including Marco Haller, Nils Politt, and Rick Zabel.

Kittel came to Katusha to replace the outgoing sprinter Alexander Kristoff, and attempted to bring Fabio Sabatini with him. That move failed, and the loss of Michael Morkov to Kittel’s old team, Quick-Step meant that Kittel and his Katusha squad had some rebuilding to do.

In this exclusive podcast we hear from Kittel and his lead-out about how they have trained together and bonded over the off-season, the intricate nature of lead-out trains, and how Katusha-Alpecin hope to kick-start their new sprint dawn at the Dubai Tour next week.

The Cyclingnews team has just returned from the Tour Down Under and while we take a few days off to recover from the jetlag there’s no rest for the Cyclingnews podcast. So this week we have a special edition interview with BMC Racing’s Marco Pinotti, as we sit down and ask him to pick his cycling dream team. 

The rules are simple, Pinotti must select seven to eight riders he has ridden with or managed. That means he can pick Mark Cavendish from their HTC-Highroad days, for example, but he can’t pick Marcel Kittel, Lance Armstrong or Geraint Thomas because he’s never been on the same team as those riders. 

We sat down with Marco at BMC Racing’s team camp in mid-December and trust us, this is not the team we were expecting. There was no room for the likes of Cavendish, George Hincapie, Cadel Evans, Roman Vainsteins, Pavel Tonkov, Adam Hansen or the controversial Ricardo Ricco. Although, perhaps, there’s little surprise in that one. 

So without further delay, lets head over to Marco to hear about his team. This podcast comes to you in association with Prendas Ciclismo and Pinarello. And one final pat on the back for Procycling Trumps who have once again designed some fantastic graphics for us. You can find them here, or the Cyclingnews homepage.