Hannah Barnes takes back-to-back stage wins at the Tour Femenino de San Luis

British rider Hannah Barnes (UnitedHealthcare) has begun the 2015 season in perfect fashion, winning the first three UCI-sanctioned races she’s competed in, all three in Argentina.

After winning the one-day Gran Prix San Luis Femenino over the weekend, Barnes has begun the six-stage Tour Femenino de San Luis in similar fashion, winning the opening two stages, both in a bunch sprint.


On stage 1 a number of attacks threatened to split up the race but it all came back to a sprint in El Durazno where the 21-year-old Briton claimed victory ahead of Elena Cecchini (Lotto Soudal Ladies) and Michela Pavin (Servetto Footon).

Stage 1: El Durazno > El Durazno - Stage Result

Sunday 11th January 2015

1. gb
BARNES Hannah
UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling Women’s Team
 02:12:08
2. it
CECCHINI Elena
Lotto Soudal Ladies
 -
3. it
PAVIN Michela
Servetto Footon
 -
Course Profile
View full results

Barnes took another sprint victory on stage 2 of the Tour just a few hours ago, with Chilean rider Paola Munoz and Arianna Fidanza (Ale Cipollini) rounding out the podium.

Stage 2: Villa Mercedes > Villa Mercedes - Stage Result

Monday 12th January 2015

1. gb
BARNES Hannah
UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling Women’s Team
 01:55:20
2. cl
MUNOZ Paola
-
3. it
FIDANZA Arianna
Alé Cipollini
-
View full results

Thanks to bonus seconds accrued on the first two stages, Barnes now leads the six-stage race by 11 seconds over Cecchini with Fedanza a further five seconds in arrears. The race continues today with a 63.4km stage starting and finishing in Merlo.

Click here to read more at VeloNews.

No change to Santos Tour Down Under routes following bushfire damage

The Santos Tour Down Under will go ahead next week as originally scheduled despite significant bushfire in regions visited by the race on stage 1 and stage 3.

Race organisers made the decision after consulting with the Country Fire Service, South Australia Police, and other agencies. Race Director, Mike Turtur said that he was pleased with the outcome, and thanked those involved in the decision-making process.

“We’re very happy the race is able to continue as planned and hope that the communities that have been affected by the recent fires will be able to enjoy the spectacle the race will bring to their towns,” said Turtur.

Text adapted from a Santos Tour Down Under press release. Click through to the Santos Tour Down Under website for detailed information about each stage.

Wiggins’ path to Paris-Roubaix and Sky swansong outlined

by Shane Stokes

Set to move to the new Wiggins team after riding Paris-Roubaix, Bradley Wiggins’ final Team Sky racing programme has been outlined and will see the Briton get things underway later this month.

According to the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper, Wiggins will begin racing in the Challenge Mallorca races, the first of which is on January 29. Wiggins is then expected to ride the Tour of Qatar, after which he will compete in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne en route to Paris-Roubaix.

“For Britain, this is simply – after the Tour – the most famous race, Wiggins’ directeur sportif Servais Knaven said of Paris-Roubaix. “He’d prefer [to win on] the cobbles rather than overall victory in the Giro.”

“Paris-Roubaix is a special race for me and I’m determined to give it another go in Team Sky colours,” Wiggins said. “It’s one of the toughest races in the calendar and my aim is to improve on my ninth-place finish last year. After that I can focus fully on preparing for the Rio Olympics in 2016.”

Click here to read more at CyclingTips.

Vincenzo Nibali reveals race schedule for 2015

Vincenzo Nibali’s road to a 2015 Tour de France title defence has been mapped out with the Sicilian skipping the Giro d’Italia in the lead-up to the French Grand Tour.

Nibali (Astana) will begin his 2015 season with the Dubai Tour in early February before tackling the Tour of Oman, Strade Bianche, Tirreno-Adriatico, Milan-San Remo, Amstel Gold Race, La Fleche Wallonne, Liege-Bastogne-Liege and the Criterium du Dauphine.

That schedule gives Nibali 30 days of racing ahead of the Tour de France, compared with 45 days in 2014.

Click here to read more at Cycling Weekly.

Unzue: Andorra is the hardest Vuelta stage I’ve ever seen

Stage 11 of the 2015 Vuelta a España is already turning heads and the race is still more than seven months away. Revealed at the Vuelta route presentation in Torremolinos over the weekend, the 138km stage has been described by Movistar boss Eusebio Unzue as “the most demanding stage I’ve ever seen in a Grand Tour.”

“Firstly there’s six classified climbs, and that adds up to 5,200 metres of climbing. That’s a lot more than in most of the major Alpine or Pyrenean stages of the Tour or Giro, which tend to come to 4,500 metres at most,” Unzue told Cyclingnews.

“But it’s the shortness, too, of the stage, 138 kilometres, which will make it really hard. There’s no time to recover between the climbs at all. There’s not a single metre of flat, it’s constantly going up and down, all day long. 65 to 70 kilometres of climbing. It’s so hard, in fact, it could well decide the Vuelta overall.”

All six climbs are within the Principality of Andorra and it is the first time the tiny landlocked microstate has hosted a full stage of a Grand Tour.

“There has never been such a hard Vuelta, and there’s never been such a hard stage as Andorra in the history of cycling,” Unzue said.

Click here to read more at Cyclingnews.

Rachel Neylan credits McGee for comeback success, searches for new team

It’s been a challenging few years for Rachel Neylan since she won a silver medal at the 2012 Road World Championships behind Marianne Vos. She’s had season-ending injuries, major surgery and has been hit by a car in training, but the 32-year-old is hoping that her second place in Saturday’s road race at the Australian National Championships could propel her towards a big season and, ultimately, Rio 2016.


Neylan paid tribute to coach Brad McGee:

“Brad [is an] extraordinary mind in cycling and working on a lot of other aspects — not just the physical performance side, but also the mental, emotional and environmental and putting all those aspects in place to be an optimally functioning, well-rounded athlete.”

McGee, meanwhile, told VeloNews that he can’t understand why Neylan hasn’t been picked up by a professional team this season.

“I’m quite new on the women’s side of the sport, but it doesn’t make much sense to me seeing a rider of her caliber on the sidelines,” McGee told VeloNews. “She’s a fantastic athlete of high pedigree and very high performance and sometimes people like that struggle with the simple mundane things that keep them from reaching their full potential.”

Neylan is reportedly in talks with some teams for 2015 but will not make a decision until after January.

Click here to read more at VeloNews.

Gracie Elvin Q&A: The vulnerability of the pre-race favourite

In the lead up to Saturday’s elite women’s race at the Australian Road Nationals, Gracie Elvin was being touted as one of the pre-race favourites. She’d won the last two editions of the race and she’d shown sparkling form at the Bay Crits a week earlier. So would she win it for a third time?

In an insightful Q&A with CyclingTips’ women’s cycling editor Jessi Braverman, Gracie opens up about the pressure put on her to perform (from herself as much as anything) and what it’s like trying to deal with that pressure.

Here’s an excerpt:

“
I’ve been riding for more than 12 years now, and I was never the best junior. I was the one that got dropped on the first climb of every race and had to ride on my own for the rest of the race. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I’ve started to find success in the sport.

I’ve come from a background of just surviving but loving cycling, and now I have to teach myself how to win. That’s what I’m struggling with at times – backing myself and believing in myself that I deserve to be there and that I can win. That’s different than just being in the race and supporting my teammates. I feel that I have it in me to be one of the best riders in the world. It’s a mental process not just a physical process.

Click here to read the full interview.

Strava introduces training plans

Activity-tracking platform Strava has teamed up with Carmichael Training Systems (CTS) to develop training plans for cyclists. The plans are available to Strava Premium members and are “designed to optimise performance on a different type of Strava segment”.

At the time of writing there are 10 workout programs available, each of them four-weeks long and each helping you build towards a specific goal. These goals vary from a 20-second sprint through to a 60+ minute climb and the plans can be customised based on your weekly training volume.

To get access to the training plans on Strava, click “Training” and then “Training Plans”.

Click here to read more at Strava.

What You Missed This Morning Photo Competition Winners 2014/15

Over the Christmas and New Year break we ran our annual What You Missed This Morning photo competition for the sixth time. We received more than 5,000 entries and from those we selected 100 of our favourites which we then sent to our panel of expert judges.

You can see the winners, what they won and the judges’ comments about the winning photos here.

On-board footage from the Revolution track series

This video from Round 3 of the Revolution track series features some great on-board vision and audio courtesy of Team Sky’s Luke Rowe.

Highlights from the Australia Road Nationals time trials

Last Thursday Miles Scotson (U23 men), Shannon Malseed (U23 women), Richie Porte (elite men) and Shara Gillow (elite women) were crowned Australia’s national time trial champions. A highlights package from the day’s action was screened on Gem and Fox Sports late that night and now you can see that highlights package in your own time, free of ads (well, apart from the advertorials anyway). We’ve embedded the video below, courtesy of the Cycling Australia YouTube channel.

Highlights from the women’s and U23 men’s road races at the Australian Road Nationals

Cycling Australia has also made available the highlights package from the U23 men’s and women’s road races at the Australian Road Nationals. Check it out below. We expect that the highlights package from the men’s road race will be coming in the next day or so.

Tiff Cromwell and Martin Barras talk the women’s road race at the Australian Road Nationals

We crossed paths with Martin Barras and Tiffany Cromwell in Buninyong on Sunday during the elite men’s road race at the Australian Road Nationals and shot the video you see below. Barras is the senior women’s road coach at Cycling Australia and serves as sport director at select events for Orica-AIS, including the Nationals. Cromwell, who has delivered fourth place for Australia at the Commonwealth Games and fifth place the World Championships last year, moved over to Velocio-SRAM (formally Specialized-lululemon) in 2014 following two seasons with Orica-AIS.

The playful banter between Barras and Cromwell has been developed over more than ten years of working with one another through the Australian Institute of Sport, Cycling Australia, the national team and professionals teams. Cromwell poked fun at Barras’ sense of fashion (or rather lack thereof) while Barras cracked jokes about Cromwell’s sprinting prowess.

When they started discussing the women’s race that took place the day previous, we turned on the camera.

Cycling with a big blue macaw in the middle of the road

This video appears courtesy of Facebook user Ronaldo Souza from Brazil. We can only imagine how cool it must have been riding alongside the bird. We would, however, like to point Mr Souza towards this video ahead of any future video-related endeavours.

The Rocacorba Recap

And finally this morning, here are a few things you might have missed at CyclingTips:

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Today’s feature image comes from Jered Gruber but it’s not clear exactly where it was taken. Our guess is somewhere in Colorado.