We’re shining the spotlight on Stage 4 of this year’s Tour de France as it packs a punch with 3600 metres of climbing over 139.6 km, from Pinerolo to Valloir. Using VeloViewer software we are able to breakdown the course and the challenge the riders will face.
A new contender for the steepest paved road in the UK (or perhaps even in the world if we’re talking Tarmac road) has reared its head after Bamford Clough recently received a pristine layer of smooth Tarmac up its (unofficial) 36.5 % slopes. A few contenders for the world’s steepest street/road have popped up over recent years looking to topple New Zealand’s Baldwin Street (34.8 %) in Dunedin so will Bamford Clough be a possible contender?
The Maratona dles Dolomites has been on my bucket list since I first heard of it a number of years ago and I’m remarkably excited that 2019 will be the year that I get to do it (hopefully the first of many). Many of those reading this will know of someone who has ridden the Maratona and have heard stories of the joys and challenges of the route. You can also go back to 21st May 2016, when stage 14 of the Giro d’Italia tackled the majority of the route with an extra 77km tagged on the start for good measure.
Unsurprisingly, with the 2018 World Champs being in the heart of the Austrian Alps, the routes for the road races include a whole heap of climbing. 4700m of climbing over 260km for the men and 2500m over 155km for the women.
The three most famous European gran fondos on most people’s to-do lists are l’Etape du Tour, La Marmotte and the Maratona dles Dolomites. If this was Gran Fondo Top Trumps each of them would win the hand on at least one aspect. The Etape wins the “Classic” category, knowing that you are riding the same course (almost) as the Tour de France a short time after; the Marmotte wins on raw “Elevation Gain” (5000m!); the Maratona wins on sheer beauty. Which is the “hardest” probably comes down to the weather on the day and how you ride it but lets take a closer look at the routes and stats:
We’ve all seen profiles of many climbs over the years and when looked at individually, taking note of the elevation gain and distance, you can get a good idea of the severity of the climb, especially when they are coloured by the gradient. If you show two of these profiles next to each other then because the elevation and distance scales are usually very different it is very hard to get a feel for how one compares to the other. Last year I tweeted out images of a few climbs sharing the same scales but had to do lots of manually resizing to get them to be correct. Now we have a built in way to compare any segment/climb with any other.
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The women’s race that accompanies the men’s Tour de France has previously been a circuit race around the classic Champs-Élysées loop in Paris. For 2017 the one-day race has moved to the Alps to tackle a section of the men’s 18th stage (the full length of which doubles up as the 2017 Etape du Tour – full details of route here). Here is the full breakdown of the women’s route:
A very lumpy Tour of Britain this year with plenty of double-digit gradients to be tackled and the British public will be pleased to see another classic Lake District climb on the route. Even the short Bristol time trial is far from flat. There are too many climbs to list them all but here are the top bits of road where I think we’ll see the main action.
Kinomap, the home of fully geolocated videos (videos tied into GPS data), are now automatically matching up the 1,000’s of videos uploaded to their site with Strava segments and VeloViewer has entered into a cross-Channel collaboration to connect those with your own data. You will now be able to filter your Segments List and the segments on your Activity and Route Details pages to discover those with Kinomap videos and of course watch the videos embedded in the VeloViewer Segment Details page. So whether you are wanting to relive the views from past rides or check out the roads of your next holiday then this new integration is here to help.
The Rio Olympics’ road cycling events are set to be a real opportunity for the climbers with gradients approaching 20% on both the road race and time trial courses. I suppose the sprinters have got the World Road Race Championships in Doha to look forward to this year! (Update: now also includes triathlon bike loop)