u/CyclingLoveDirect

Paris-Tours ran today, and I’d bet most cycling fans didn’t notice. That’s a shame, because it was a good one.

Per Strand Hagenes won for Visma-Lease a Bike. He jumped out of an 11-rider group inside the last kilometer and held it to the line by two seconds. Jasper Stuyven was second and Hagenes’s teammate Christophe Laporte took third. Having a former winner like Laporte sitting in that group probably made everyone else hesitate, and a moment’s hesitation was all Hagenes needed.

The course is better than its reputation. It starts in Chartres these days, not Paris, and the first 145 km are flat and forgettable. The last 70 km are something else: nine short climbs and ten gravel tracks through the vineyards east of Tours, about 10.5 km of dirt in all. After the last climb there’s a flat run into town, long enough for a chase to get organized. Today it delivered. Tim Merlier punctured, a big crash caught Arnaud De Lie and Dorian Godon, and Jenno Berckmoes split the field with 25 km to go. Pierre Gautherat went solo with 20 km left and was only caught in the final kilometers.

So why does nobody talk about it? Look at the date. It comes the day after Il Lombardia, where 20-year-old Paul Seixas just became the youngest winner ever, so that’s the story of the weekend. Worlds are over, half the peloton is already on vacation, and the riders who do show up have been racing since February. It’s also a ProSeries race, not WorldTour, so the big teams don’t have to send their best.

This race dates back to 1896. Give that finale a weekend of its own, or a spot on the calendar when the classics riders are fresh, and I think people would treat it like the classic it is. In mid-October, most fans catch the highlights on Monday, if at all.

In 1987, Stephen Roche had a dream season. He won the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France, and then capped it off with the World Championship road race in Villach, Austria, pictured here. Only Eddy Merckx had won that Triple Crown before him. But Roche never came close to those heights again. A recurring knee injury haunted him for much of his career, and his years after 1987 were a long, frustrating struggle to return to form. For many fans, the explanation was simple: the curse of the rainbow jersey.

Roche was far from the only champion who seemed to pay a price for the stripes. Laurent Brochard won the 1997 Worlds, only to see his Festina team thrown out of the 1998 Tour in the sport's biggest doping scandal. Oscar Camenzind followed his 1998 title with a quiet season, and he later tested positive for EPO. Alessandro Ballan's 2009 campaign was derailed by a cytomegalovirus infection months after his win in Varese. Óscar Freire spent much of his rainbow year battling back problems, and Julian Alaphilippe crashed hard at Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 2022, breaking ribs and his shoulder blade and collapsing a lung while wearing the jersey.

So is the curse real? Probably not. Most riders win the Worlds on the best day of the best season of their careers, so a quieter year afterward is often just a return to normal, with a big target on their backs added in. And plenty of champions have shrugged it off. Greg LeMond won the 1990 Tour as world champion, Peter Sagan won three straight titles, and Mathieu van der Poel took Flanders and Roubaix in the stripes in 2024. We're not predicting a slump for Demi Vollering or Brandon McNulty, but it'll be fun to watch them try to prove the curse wrong. Whatever you believe, it's hard to look at Roche's face in this photo and not wish the story had a different second act.

If you only know one thing about "Le Blaireau" (The Badger), let it be this: the man had almost no patience for anything getting between him and a race. The most famous example is "The Punch" — 1984 Paris-Nice, dockyard workers protesting mass layoffs blocked the route on a descent, and Hinault rode straight into the middle of it throwing hands while most of the peloton just tried to shove past. He didn't even win that Paris-Nice. Sean Kelly did. Hinault's only takeaway was becoming a meme decades before memes existed.

He was also the last real "patron" of the peloton — the guy who could just declare "there will be no attacks today" and everyone listened, partly out of respect and partly because they were scared of him.

Compare that to Tadej Pogačar today. Pogačar attacks constantly, even when he doesn't need to, even when he's already got the race won — it's almost the opposite temperament. Hinault ruled through control and intimidation; Pogačar just seems to enjoy racing his bike so much he can't help himself. Different era, different psychology, same result: nobody in the bunch can do anything about it.

Photo credit: Cor Vos 1980 Giro d'Italia

Cycling might be the hardest sport out there. I still don't know who first decided that riding a bike for three weeks over some of the tallest mountain passes on earth sounded like a good idea, but the best athletes in the world line up to do it every single year.

Mikel Landa is a perfect example of what that toughness looks like. Back in May 2025, at Stage 1 of the Giro d'Italia, he crashed hard just outside Tirana and fractured a vertebra — an injury that ended his season for months. He's back racing again now, still fighting, still one of the most respected climbers in the peloton.

His win today at La Vuelta is his first victory in the race since 2015!

📸 A.S.O. Toni Baixauli

Only sidelined by a blood clot in his brain in 2012, Didi has attended almost every stage at the Tour de France since 1993. As a kid watching the Tour on West German TV (he's was born in East Germany), he heard commentators refer to the red triangular flag marking the final kilometer as "the devil's red flag." After the wall fell, he became the devil.

Time trialing is the most painful discipline in cycling — no draft, no hiding, just you against the clock and your own lactic acid. Today's Stage 18 of the Vuelta a España sent the riders 32km into Jerez de la Frontera, where Stefan Küng edged Callum Thornley by just over 2 seconds for the win, while Enric Mas rode a heroic time trial to limit his losses to Roglič to only 33 seconds — keeping the red leader's jersey with a 1:37 cushion heading into the final mountain stages.

Photo by 📸 : A.S.O. Naike Erenozaga

Riders of the Vuelta a España ride through an area affected by wildfires.

Rain-soaked, teeth bared, three men throwing everything they have at a finish line. That's the 1989 World Championship road race, and it's one of the greatest images in cycling history — but today it's here to talk about the man behind the lens, not just the men in front of it.

The riders, quickly: Greg LeMond (center) had already come back from a hunting accident that nearly killed him to win the Tour de France that summer — this sprint gave him a second World title on top of it. Sean Kelly (left) was one of the most feared riders of his generation and never once wore the rainbow jersey; this bronze was about as close as he'd get. Dimitri Konyshev (right), one of the first Soviet riders to make it as a pro in the West, snuck into silver here and would go on to win stages in all three Grand Tours.

But the reason this photo exists at all is Cor Vos. For fifty years, Vos and his agency were cycling's memory — if it happened in the peloton since the 1970s, there's a decent chance his camera caught it. He wasn't a great racer himself; a brain injury from a crash ended that career early. So he picked up a camera instead, self-taught, and became the guy who showed the rest of us what it actually looked like to suffer and win at the highest level of this sport.

Vos passed away almost a year ago, suddenly, at 77. Today's photo of the day is for him.

📸: Cor Vos

Cool Action Shot Wout van Aert, Stage 15 La Vuelta Photo- 📸: A.S.O. Miguel Ena