Your Majesty, I Gravel at Your Feet

This newsletter is mostly about road racing, but it's not entirely about road racing

Photo Credit: Pauline Ballet, ASO

I always want to come out of the weekend hyping up how great the cycling was, but the 2024 road racing season is basically on its last legs. Tadej Pogačar won the Giro dell’Emilia by a hilarious one minute and 54 seconds over a pretty impressive group of puncheurs: Mike Woods, Ben Healy, Tom Pidcock, the Yateses, Matteo Jorgenson—that was a serious startlist, and sure enough Pogačar just vamoosed away. Brandon McNulty won Stage 3 of the six-stage Cro Race with a 40-kilometer solo break and hung on to win the GC against…not a great field, to be honest, in a race rated 2.1.¹

Even so, B-Mac now has nine wins on the season, including a national championship in the time trial, a grand tour time trial stage win, and two stage race GC victories. Plus a credible GC podium at Paris-Nice and fifth-place finishes at Tour of the Basque Country and the Olympic time trial. Had Sepp Kuss not broken the curve by winning the Vuelta last year, that’d be a banner season for any American man.

Elisa Longo Borghini won the Giro dell’Emilia Donne, which barely registers in a season in which she took GC at the Giro and won the Tour of Flanders, plus a host of other prominent podiums and top-five finishes. It might not be the biggest news of the week for the 32-year-old Italian, who announced a new three-year contract not with Lidl-Trek, but with UAE Team ADQ.

The UAE women’s team is one of (checks notes) about a million Women’s World Tour outfits that wears confusing blue and pink and pastel jerseys, but I think they’ve got the best kits of the bunch.² What they haven’t had is a competitive roster. This in sharp contrast to the men’s squad, which wears boring black and white but has Pogačar, McNulty, Adam Yates, Jay Vine, João Almeida, Marc Soler, Juan Ayuso, Our Man Isaac Del Toro—this team should (and does) boss every stage race it enters.

UAE Team ADQ…Silvia Persico’s fine, I guess. The whole team is moderately successful, but its best win of the season is one stage of the Giro, which is hardly competitive with SD Worx or Lidl-Trek, for that matter.

Longo Borghini had been with the American-badged, Italian-run team for six seasons. (Her previous team is the now-defunct Wiggle High5 outfit, which had my favorite name in all of sports history.) Longo Borghini was as synonymous with Lidl-Trek as any rider in the women’s peloton is with her team. So it’s fascinating to see them part ways now. She’s closer to the end of her career than the beginning, but having just had a grand tour- and monument-winning campaign, she’s clearly got some prime years left. Maybe this is UAE finally chucking the bag at the women’s team?³

I’ll have a big transfer roundup sometime later this month, after Il Lombardia, because I’ve basically neglected the team swap drama that’s been unfolding in the background. I apologize; in addition to there being actual racing, baseball has eaten me like the whale ate Jonah.

So before the proper Il Lombardia preview later this week, I want to touch on some news from around the world—literally, around a significant part of the world in one case—from road racers in non-road racing events.