bike - Road bicycle racing
Photograph by Velo Steveon Flickr.
The choice bike will depend on hills, the chances that the whole field bike will finish together in a sprint, and other factors. The months of the season depend on the hemisphere.
The classics include the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Paris-Roubaix bike Bike Week Bicycle Week and Milan-Sanremo. The rest of the team will devote itself to promoting its leader s chances, taking turns in the wind for bike him, refusing to chase with the peloton when he escapes, and so on. In professional races, team coordination is performed by radio communication between the riders and the team director, who travels following the riders in a team car and monitors the overall race situation.
The term road bike racing is usually applied to events where competing riders start simultaneously (unless riding a handicap event) with the winner being the first at the end of the course (individual and team time trials are another form of cycle racing on roads). Road racing is popular all over the world, but bike especially in Europe. The competitor with the lowest cumulative time to complete all stages is declared the overall, or general classification (GC), winner.
The stage winner is the first person to cross the finish line that day or the time trial rider (or team) with the lowest time bike on the course. While the sport has spread throughout the world, these historic races remain the most prestigious for a cyclist to win. The first competitor to cross the finish line after completing the prescribed course is declared the winner.
The size of the team varies, from three in bike an amateur event for club riders to a dozen in professional races. Drafting may not be employed in a time trial, unless it is a team time trial. A group of riders that breaks away (a break) from the peloton has more space and freedom, and can therefore be at an advantage in certain situations.
The runners-up were the Count André Castéra, who had come second to Moore at St-Cloud, and Jean Bobillier, riding a farm bike that weighed 35 kg. The influence of radios on race tactics is sometimes a topic of discussion amongst cycling enthusiasts, with some arguing that the introduction of radios in the 1990s has devalued the tactical knowledge of individual riders and has led to less exciting racing. The main specialities in road bicycle racing are: The most famous cycling race is the Tour de France, a multi-stage tour over three weeks nominally through France, traditionally ending in Paris.
Some races, known as handicaps, are designed to match riders of different abilities and/or ages; groups of slower riders start first, with the fastest riders starting last and so having to race harder and faster to catch other competitors. Nocturnal races are an attempt to bring in larger crowds. Some professional events, including the Tour Down Under, are held in the southern summer, mainly to avoid clashing with the major northern hemisphere races and allowing top professionals to compete. UCI ProTour • UCI Women s Road World Cup World Championships • Olympic Games • National championships • UCI Continental Circuits: Africa Tour • America Tour • Asia Tour • Europe Tour • Oceania Tour Grand Tour • Race stage • Classics • Criterium • Individual time trial • Team time trial Racing bicycle .
A stage race can also be a series of road races and individual time trials (some events include team time trials). Race distances vary from a few kilometres to more than 200 km.
Some of Europe s earliest road bicycle races remain among the sport s biggest events. Usually a rider or group of riders will try to break from the peloton by attacking and riding ahead to reduce the number of contenders for the win.
They provided a template for other races around the world. Individual riders can approach speeds of 110 km/h while descending winding mountain roads and may reach 60–80 km/h during the final sprint to the finish line. In more organized races, a SAG waggon ( Support And Gear ) or Broom waggon follows the race to pick up stragglers. While the principle remains of the winner being the first to cross the line, many of the riders are grouped together in teams, usually with commercial sponsors.
Stronger riders are able to drop weaker riders during such sections, reducing the number of direct competitors able to take the win. The winner wears a white jersey with coloured bands (often called rainbow bands ) around the chest. In Australia, due to the relatively mild winters and hot summers, the amateur road racing season runs from autumn to spring, through the winter months, while criterium races are held in the mornings or late afternoons during the summer.
These early races include Liège-Bastogne-Liège (established 1892), Paris-Roubaix (1896), the Tour de France (1903), the Milan-Sanremo and Giro di Lombardia (1905), the Giro d Italia (1909) and the Ronde van Vlaanderen (1913). Road bicycle racing is a popular bicycle racing sport held on roads (following the natural terrain of the area), using racing bicycles.
A new organisation, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), was set up on 15 April 1900 during the Olympic Games in Paris. The other important one-day race is the World Championships.
Working together smoothly and efficiently, a small group can maintain a higher speed than the peloton, in which the remaining riders may not be as motivated or organized to chase effectively. Stage races may also have other classifications and awards, such as individual stage winners, the points classification winner, and the King of the Mountains (or mountains classification) winner.
Courses may run from place to place or comprise one or more laps of a circuit; some courses combine both, i.e., taking the riders from a starting place and then finishing with several laps of a circuit (usually to ensure a good spectacle for spectators at the finish). A racing year is divided between lesser races, single-day classics and stage races.
Team riders decide between themselves, before and during the race, who has the best chance of winning. It was the world s first long-distance road race and also won by Moore, who took 10 hours and 25 minutes to cover 134 km.
It opened in 1893 and held its first world championship in Chicago, USA, the same year. The first world championship was in 1893 and cycling has been part of the Olympic Games since the modern sequence started in Athens in 1896. Road racing in its modern form originated in the late 19th century.
Just as there used to be track and field events such as the standing high jump or throwing the javelin with both hands, cyclists, too, used to compete for medals in events which today have been forgotten; for example in Athens in 1896, they attempted a 12-hour race, and in London, in 1908, one of the events was a sprint for 603.49 metres (660 yards). Professional racing is governed by the Union Cycliste Internationale. Among the best-known ultra marathons is the Race Across America (RAAM), a coast to coast non-stop, single-stage race in which riders cover approximately 3,000 miles in about a week.
The only woman to finish within 24 hours was the self-styled Miss America, in reality an unknown English woman who, like several in the field, had preferred not to compete under her real name. The growth of organised cycle racing led to the development of national administrative bodies, in Britain in 1878, France 1881, the Netherlands 1883, Germany 1884 and Sweden 1900. Like many other sports it has undergone several changes over the years.
This could, says historian James McGurn, lead to disputes within countries and internationally. The first international body was the International Cycling Association (ICA), established by an English schoolteacher named Henry Sturmey (the founder of Sturmey-Archer). While the World Cup contained only one-day races, the ProTour includes the Grand Tours and other large stage races such as Tour Down Under, Tour de Suisse, Paris-Nice and the Critérium de Dauphiné Libéré. The former UCI Road World Cup one-day races – which include all five Classic cycle races or Monuments – are also part of the ProTour: Milan-Sanremo (Italy), Ronde van Vlaanderen (Belgium), Paris-Roubaix (France), Liège-Bastogne-Liège (Belgium) and Amstel Gold Race (Netherlands) in the spring, and Clásica de San Sebastián (Spain), HEW Cyclassics (Germany), Züri-Metzgete (Switzerland), Paris-Tours (France) and Giro di Lombardia (Italy) in the autumn season. The success of the races in the Parc de St-Cloud inspired the Compagnie Parisienne and the magazine Le Vélocipède Illustré to run a race from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to the cathedral in Rouen on 7 November 1869.
The sport was popular in the western European countries of France, Spain, Belgium, and Italy. The race is sanctioned by the Ultra Marathon Cycling Association (UMCA). Though the objective of a race is quite simple – to be the first rider to cross the finish line – a number of tactics are employed.
A good example of this is the Shropshire Star Newport Nocturne. Stage races consist of several races, or stages, ridden consecutively. The overall winner of a stage race is the rider who takes the lowest aggregate time to complete all stages (accordingly, a rider does not have to win all or any of the individual stages to win overall). These races are very long single stage events, usually lasting several days.
Similar long, multi-stage tours are held in Italy (the Giro D Italia) and Spain (the Vuelta a España). If the break does not succeed and the body of cyclists comes back together, a sprinter will often win by overpowering competitors in the final stretch.
The UCI, based in Switzerland, has run the sport ever since. In its home in Europe and in the United States, cycle racing on the road is a summer sport, although the season can start in early spring and end in autumn. Successful riders must develop excellent bike handling skills in order to ride at high speeds in close quarters with other riders.
Riding in the main field, or peloton, can save as much as 40% of the energy employed in forward motion when compared to riding in the wind. Tactics are based on the aerodynamic benefit of drafting, whereby a rider can significantly reduce the required pedal effort by closely following in the slipstream of the rider in front.
On professional and semi-professional teams, names are typically synonymous with the primary sponsors. Some teams designate a leader, whom the rest of the team is charged with keeping out of the wind and in good position until a critical section of the race.
Unlike other classics, the World Championships is held on a different course each year and ridden by national rather than sponsored teams. The most competitive and devoted countries are Belgium, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, although the sport is popular also in Australia, Denmark, Russia, and the United States. Road bicycle racing began as an organized sport in 1868.
Teamwork between riders, both pre-arranged and ad-hoc, is important in many aspects: in preventing or helping a successful break, and sometimes in delivering a sprinter to the front of the field. To make the course more selective, races often feature difficult sections such as tough climbs, fast descents, and sometimes technical surfaces (such as the cobbled pavé used in the Paris-Roubaix race). These three races make up the Grand Tours . The historian Wlodzimierz Golebiewski says: Cycling has become a major event on the Olympic programme .
Britain was not initially a member, but joined in 1903. Races over short circuits, often in town or city centres, are known as criteriums.
This can be used as a strength or a weakness by competitors; riders can cooperate and draft each other to ride at high speed (a paceline or echelon), or one rider can sit on a competitor s wheel, forcing him to do a greater share of the work in maintaining the pace and to potentially tire earlier.
