tour de france cycling gloves

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100% Brisker MTB Gloves

Kalas Ride On Z1 Long Gloves

Santini Gravel/MTB Cycling Gloves

Official Tour De France Cycling Gloves - Black

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The Official Tour de France Cycling Gloves feature a half finger design with gel inlays and non-slip material on the palms for protection and grip. The outside material is made of stretchy elastic Lycra to provide a full range of movement and breathability.

Additional features include a sweat band, loops for take-off assistance and elastic around the wristband for a secure fit. - A.D.

Key Features:

• Half finger glove with gel inlay and non-slip material on the palms
• Loops for take-off assistance
• Outside partly made of elastic Lycra
• Suitable for grip shift
• Elastic wristband
• Tour de France

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Customer Reviews

Top customer reviews.

Where reviews refer to foods or cosmetic products, results may vary from person to person. Customer reviews are independent and do not represent the views of The Hut Group.

TOF fingerless Glove

Mighty fine glove. Excellent materials; terry cloth type material on thumb area, a little spandex material blended in the body of the glove, ensuring good fit and little soft rubber type dots on the palm that buffers road buzz quite nicely. The fastener give a generous band of elasticized velcro which works effortlessly. This glove also give a new looking appearance for a long time because its essentially all black with the exception of accents & the logo. The only detail preventing "5" stars is that the webbing at the base between the fingers is a tad too deep. Despite that imperfection, it is still one of my favorite gloves.

Was this helpful?

The gloves are ok, they do the job for the price. More padding would have been great.

Bike gloves

Gloves arrived really quickly, a good fit and really comfortable to ride with during the summer. Very happy

Too thick and uncomfortable

Too thick, the gloves make me feel uncomfortable when I ride in the hot weather.

10% Off Order Total $100+ net // Free U.S. Shipping on Order Total $100+ net

Official 2024 Tour de France Nice Stage 21 Gloves by Santini

Regular price $35.95 $32.95 Sale

Paris Olympics, Nice finish. The sun dappled water, the beautiful vistas from the surrounding hills, the traffic snarls on the Promenade des Anglais. What's not to love about the south of France? The Tour's first finish outside of Paris since 1905, due to a conflict with the opening of the 2024 Olympics, this promises to be a gorgeous finish to a challenging Tour. 

Summer cycling gloves. Lightweight and highly breathable with anti-shock padding on the palm providing incredible comfort. The design of the glove is dedicated to the beautiful city of Nice. The perfect complement to the Nice cycling kit.

Matching Jersey, Bib Short, Baselayer, Socks and Cap also available in our store!

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Tour de France gloves - Trionfo 2023

Regular price €24,95 €24,95 €29,95 |   Save €5,00 ( 16 %) /

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Black Friday cycling clothing Cycling clothing Cycling clothing for man Cycling gloves for man Events clothing Official Tour de France cycling socks, gloves, hats, water bottles, Helmets Sale Santini sale Santini: Cycling clothing and bike accessories Short cycling gloves for man

Technical information

• Breathable fabric.
• Lycra back comfortable to wear.
• Lightweight and breathable gloves.
• Anti-shock palm.
• They offer exceptional comfort.
• Without Velcro.
• Color: Blue.

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Wear Cycling Gloves

Unless, of course, it matters to you.

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. How we test gear.

I do wear them, for the most part. But I learned to ride in the 1970s and started racing in the ’80s. I lived enough of the wind-in-your-hair era to truly miss it. Even now, when my wife isn’t watching, I’ll leave my helmet behind for shopping trips on my townie . It shouldn’t be a surprise that I avoided gloves for most of my years as a cyclist.

There were situations for which I needed them: winters in the Rocky Mountains, several muggy years in Japan, most mountain bike rides. Otherwise, I rode barehanded. Good bars and thick tape were enough for me. But for the past seven years, since the first time I wore a pair of Giro’s pro-style Zero CS gloves , I can’t remember the last time I rode gloveless.

There’s nothing particularly special about the Zeros. That’s exactly why I like them: They don’t have any excess material to foul up the connection between my hands and the bars. What they do have is a very thin, perforated, synthetic-leather palm that can hold up to thousands of miles and several trips through the washing machine. The sensation is almost as good as riding barehanded, and I get improved grip and a microfiber patch for wiping away sweat and wayward snot rockets.

The more important thing the Zeros provide is an annual ritual. Some people mark the start of serious cycling season with Milan-San Remo or a training camp in Tucson. I do it with a new pair of gloves. I wait for the weather to turn and for my winter training to start showing up in my power data. Then, I buy a pair of Zeros. That’s my marker.

In the world of cycling, where everything can be polarizing— socks outside of leg warmers, glasses under helmet straps, the old AG2R kit (which was objectively awful, BTW)—gloves get a big shrug. Even the Velominati, cycling’s self-appointed style enforcers, who have a rule for everything (most of which should be enthusiastically ignored), say gloves are optional.

→ No matter what you need to improve in your riding life, find it with Bicycling All Access!

Historically, when the choice of bar covering was leather or none, gloves no doubt provided a welcome extra layer. Still, there’s not an era for which you can’t find images of both gloved and gloveless riders. Major Taylor ? No gloves. Fausto Coppi? Usually gloves. Tom Boonen? Blasting across the French cobbles with nothing between him and his brake hoods.

It is absolutely a choice—one that cyclists, shockingly, seem happy to let you make on your own. If you feel like you need gloves, fine. If you want to leave your paws naked to the world, hey, you do you. I posted a question on Twitter asking cyclists about their glove habits. (Don’t do this unless you want to have strangers talk to you about “degloving.” Also, please don’t do an image search for “degloving.”)

I, barely more than a cycling nobody, received more than 80 replies. At every level, from weekend club rider to pro, there are plenty of cyclists who ride gloveless (almost always for comfort or “feel”), plenty who won’t ride without gloves (almost always for grip or crash protection), and those who are 100 percent kinda sorta maybe sometimes.

Denver magazine editor Geoff Van Dyke eschews gloves for anything except descending, “just in case I hit the pavement,” while David Thompson, a cyclist from Nanaimo, British Columbia, wears gloves only for climbing . “I find the extra grip that gloves offer to be useful,” he wrote. “Usually pull them off for the descent.”

Even if you change your mind on where you stand, you’ll be in good company. American road and track star Chloé Dygert Owen avoided gloves until a crash made her reconsider. “I am definitely not a fan of wearing gloves,” says Owen, who won the junior road race at the 2015 World Championships sans gloves and continued the look after she turned pro the following year.

That changed after a massive spill at the 2018 Tour of California. “That was my first race wearing them. [Judging by] the damage, I can’t imagine what would’ve happened if I hadn’t had them. Since then I’ve worn gloves at every single road race.”

My reasons for wearing gloves are less pragmatic. At first glance, they don’t change much for me—a bit less feel here, a bit more grip there, new tan lines. But the ritual act of buying them is important to me.

I wear gloves because, for some weird reason, that’s now how I tell myself that I’m in the thick of my cycling season. I used to have a race calendar and coaching plans for that. Now I have a desk job and preschool drop-offs. So buying those gloves is my new way of establishing an annual rhythm. The first time I slip them on, I know it’s time to ride hard. And while buying new gloves each season may be my own personal ritual, when I look at the number of responses I got to my query, it seems that the act of putting on gloves at the start of each ride signals a shift for others as well.

Yes, it seems silly. Here’s the thing about rituals, though: They work. If you think performing a certain act will settle your nerves or help you focus, it probably will. As the study of rituals has moved out of anthropology and into psychology and neuroscience, we’ve come to understand that they affect performance in measurable ways.

This is true for superstitions, as well. In broad terms, you control a ritual, while a superstition is belief in something that controls you. For example, if someone gives you a golf ball and tells you it’s lucky, you’ll be more likely to sink a putt. Seriously. That comes from a study in Psychological Science from researchers at the University of Cologne.

Likewise, if you have a superstition or ritual—a lucky pair of socks, a certain number of dribbles before a free throw—and you are denied it, your performance will tank. Again, that’s from a published study in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology .

The authors offer a few theories for why rituals work, including that they help athletes tune out distractions and focus on the task at hand, and that “routines create psychological and physiological readiness.” That leads to measurably better performances, even if, intellectually, you know it’s all BS. It’s kind of like how you can make your body believe you’ve got more calories to burn simply by swishing a carbohydrate drink in your mouth and then spitting it out. Your brain is stupid like that.

Is this all way too much to think about for something as minor as gloves? If we’re talking just about gloves, then yes. They are so unimportant, in the grand scheme, that even the hyper-judgmental world of cycling doesn’t have a rule about them. But as an example of something that can help you perform at an objectively higher level by making you feel subjectively better, they’re pretty freaking great.

And, really, aside from behavior that endangers others, there isn’t a wrong way to ride a bike (except in the old AG2R kit).

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Tour de France Youth Gloves (Yellow, Small)

Purchase options and add-ons, about this item.

• Product Type: Outdoor Recreation Product
• Country of Origin: China
• Product Possess High Durability
• Made Of High Quality Materials

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Product Description

Enjoy a more comfortable bike ride with the Tour de France Youth Gloves. They feature a half-finger style that helps absorb sweat and ventilate the hand. Made out of a combination of Lycra and leather materials for lasting performance, these Tour de France gloves are easy to put on and feel comfortable even after extended period of use. They deliver a superior grip so cyclists can gain better control and maneuverability. These youth bike gloves come in two attractive colors. The outside is black with a white piping pattern at the wrist as well as the fingers, while the inside features a pattern of orange bikes printed over a yellow background. The logo is stylishly displayed on the Velcro closure that secures it tightly around the wrist.

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2024 Tour De France Polka Dot KOM Gloves

Product Description

Lightweight and breathable cycling gloves with anti-shock palm

• Hand sewn by Santini of Italy
• Areo lycra for max speed
• Generously padded palm
• Complete yours Tour De France set

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All the gear? Check out the gearing choices of the pros at the Tour de France

First Published Jul 5, 2023

Gearing choice in the Tour used to be easy, a standard chainset was the only way to go and cassette choices were limited at best. However, these days, with 12-speed options from Shimano, SRAM and Campagnolo all represented in the peloton, there's more choice than ever. We've had a nosey at the pros' bikes to see what they're using this year.

> ​Suffering on the hills? Find out how to get lower gears to make climbing easier

The peloton's gearing choices differ from many consumer bikes simply because the riders race at very high speeds and therefore need bigger gears to keep a comfortable cadence. Whereas most bikes you can buy come specced with 50/34t compact or 52/36t chainset, (or 48/35t and 46/33t on SRAM 12-speed groupsets paired with 10-tooth start cassettes) you'll typically find the peloton powering along on chainsets with larger chainrings.

Check out this article for a primer on the basics of gears and all the lingo

The most common chainset size in the pro peloton on normal stages is 54/40t. That's a standard Shimano Dura-Ace option, and most teams racing in the Tour de France use this groupset. This is the chainset from Dylan Groenewegen's Giant Propel (above), for example.

There are plenty of other choices, though. We spotted Edvald Boasson Hagen of Team TotalEnergies using this 55/42t chainset (above) which comes from the days when Shimano Dura-Ace was an 11-speed system.

Enric Mas, who had to withdraw from this year's Tour after sustaining an injury during the first stage, was using a 52/39t SRAM chainset (above).

Intermarché - Circus - Wanty's Georg Zimmermann uses this 55/42T Rotor setup on his Cube Litening Aero.

The Shimano neutral service bikes are fitted with 52/36T chainsets that give a broad spread of gear options for any rider who is unfortunate enough to require one.

You'll find larger chainrings during the time-trial stages when riders are consistently moving at high speeds. For example, this (above) is Luke Durbridge's TT bike with 58/46t chainrings fitted.

During last year's Tour de France, Stefan Bissegger was spotted using this 64 tooth chainring that is not available to the public.

Cassettes have varied much more over the years, largely as a consequence of the steady increase in gears, from the old days of 5-speed and 6-speed to the 12-speed setups that are currently used in the pro peloton.

As the number of gears has increased, so too has the range, with larger cassettes increasingly common, partly as a response to race routes that are getting ever harder as race organisers attempt to find even more cruelly savage mountains to send racers up.

The increase in the number of gears also means that riders can cover those larger ranges with smaller jumps between sprocket sizes. This helps them keep a more even cadence as they move across the cassette.

When we visited the Critérium du Dauphiné recently, loads of pro bikes were fiitted with 11-30t and 11-32t cassettes. These are positively humongous compared with a few decades ago when you'd get an 11-21t cassette and, if you were lucky, 11-23t for the mountains. 

We saw quite a lot of 11-34t cassettes too, and that surprised us. David Gaudu's Lapierre Xelius SL (above), for example, was fitted with a 54/40t chainset and an 11-34t cassette. With a 40t inner chainring now more common than a 39t, it looks like more riders want a larger cassette to compensate on hillier roads.  

Campagnolo has just updated its Super Record EPS groupset and now the cassettes come with a 10t smallest sprocket. The standard options are 10-25t, 10-27t and 10-29t.

> Campagnolo ditches iconic thumb shifter and goes wireless with new Super Record Wireless electronic groupset... and it'll cost you £4.5k

The largest sprockets on those cassettes might seem pretty small but at the same time Campagnolo has altered the size of its chainsets to compensate. They're available in 50/34t, 48/32t and 45x29t options.

That said, we saw Ben O'Connor's BMC Teammachine (above) at the Dauphine fitted with new Campagnolo Super Record EPS shifters and derailleurs, with a 54/39t chainset and a larger cassette than any of those listed above.

SRAM offers a 10-33t cassette for Red eTap AXS, and that's what we saw fitted to one of Jonas Vingegaard's bikes ahead of the Dauphiné, matched to a 52/39t chainset. 

>  Which chainset is right for you?

The use of that 10t sprocket means that SRAM chainsets don't need to be as large as Shimano's to achieve the same gear ratios (Shimano's smallest cog is 11t). However, as well as the 52/39t chainset Vingegaard was using, SRAM now offers 54/41t and 56/43t options.

What about 1x?

Pic: © Zac WiLLIAMS SWpix.com (t-a Photography Hub Ltd)

Jumbo-Visma switched from Shimano to SRAM for this season and we first saw Vingegaard experimenting with 1x at the Dauphiné.

> Jonas Vingegaard uses 1x gearing for Tour de France opening stages

A few riders have dabbled with 1x, with varying levels of success, and of course, there was the ill-fated Aqua Sport Blue team which solely used 1x drivetrains on 3T Strada bikes. The team boss at the time was quite scathing about  either the drivetrain or the bike, or perhaps both. 

There are benefits to a 1x system. There’s no duplication of gears – which is something you get with 2x groupsets – it can be lighter and more aerodynamic, and the lack of a front derailleur means there's one less component to fail.

Jumbo-Visma uses single chainring setups on its time trial bikes (above) when it doesn't need a huge spread of gears. 

However, Vingegaard and Van Aert have also used 1x for normal road stages with a Wolf Tooth LoneWolf Aero chainguide fitted to help keep the chain in place. 

It's not as if Jumbo-Visma has chosen to give 1x a go just for flat courses; the first two stages of this year's Tour were pretty hilly. It'll be interesting to see if the team sticks with the tech throughout the race and, if not, the circumstances in which it turns to 1x.

SRAM insists that Jumbo-Visma's use of 1x isn't a marketing exercise, by the way. It's down to the team and the individual riders which of SRAM's components they decide to use.

One issue with 1x is that you can still get some fairly sizeable jumps between the gears. A possible solution to this is the Classified system which basically moves the function of the front mech into the rear hub.

Classified's tech could also bring aero benefits and it has been used by a few teams. Uno X has tried it out in competition, for example, and Lotto-Dstny's Victor Campenaerts rode this year's Omloop Het Nieuwsblad with a Classified system on his bike.

The system raises some questions about wheel changes but could it be something we see in the Tour de France in the future?

> Check out Classified's innovative Powershift drivetrain

What about the rest of us?

Today’s pro road racers are provided with equipment vastly superior to 10-20 years ago, but it’s the range of gears that has been the most interesting trend as the groupsets have evolved. As the number of sprockets has increased, the gear range has increased. Are riders getting soft, are courses getting harder, or is the higher number of gears making it possible?

The three big groupset manufacturers are still focused on the needs of the pro racers and delivering groupsets to meet their needs, and then selling them to the public, but there just aren’t many normal people that need a 54-11 gear. The requirements of the pros are very different to people like you and me. 

This is slowly changing though. Outside of the pro peloton, we're starting to see a shift in focus from the equipent manufacturers to meet the growing diversity of modern cyclists that are less influenced by pro racers and more by their riding, whether long-distance road rides or adventure and gravel bikepacking.

Largely thanks to adventure riding, we're now seeing much wider range groupsets with more realistically usable gear ratios for the many people that don't go racing every Sunday, but want gears to help them out on challenging terrain and let them conquer every hill.

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Jamie has been riding bikes since a tender age but really caught the bug for racing and reviewing whilst  studying towards a master's in Mechanical engineering  at Swansea University. Having graduated, he decided he really quite liked working with bikes and is now a full-time addition to the road.cc team. When not writing about tech news or working on the Youtube channel, you can still find him racing local crits trying to cling on to his cat 2 licence...and missing every break going...

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25 comments.

No one other than a professional racing cyclist or an amateur of the very highest level needs an 11 tooth or even a 12 tooth sprocket, unless their big chainring is a 44 rather than a 50 or 52.

People tell themselves that they do because they want to pedal really fast down hill. But it's likely that their pedalling at the low wattages of ordinary cyclists merely increases their drag from the air, downhill; so they go slower than they would if they stopped pedalling, tucked in their knees to the frame and crouched in an elbows-in aero position.

As to the idea that a double or triple chainring giving duplicated gear ratios is somehow a disadvantage .... this too is an unthinking analysis.

The point of a double or triple chainring is to provide, from the same cassette, two or three gear ranges that are close enough to enable the rider to find the ideal cadence, whether for generally slowish ascents, mid-speed undulations or flats agin' the wind, or fast riding when the road is smooth & flat with the wind behind. It isn't to provide more gears but rather to provide better gear ranges for different terrains/speed ranges.

But our culture encourages sales of high end racey bike parts by seeming to promise the buyer of high-geared stuff that they too can be just as fast as them riders in the TdF by having a Dura-Ace 53/39 chainset and an 11-25 cassette. This is just a-one o' them daft "dreams" they install in the heads of folk far too blase about having their wallets emptied whilst paying no attention to the reality of their actual cycling abilities.

The annoying part for those wanting more realistic gears is that it's often very hard to find them. Because road bike frames tend to come with front braze-on fitting to suit chainrings from 48 - 56, rather than 44 - 50, you'r stuck with a 48 or (more probably) the 50 that the bike comes with. But can you buy a 14-34 cassette? Not really - you have to buy an 11- 34 cassette plus three Shimano cogs of 14, 15and 16 (to replace the 11, 13 & 15). This becomes expensive - and difficult to do as only SJS cycles seems to sell spare Shimano sprockets in Blighty, these days. 

My own preferred and favourite gear range is a 50/39/30 chainset with a 15 - 36 cassette of 10 cogs. It goes as fast as I can go pedalling (without a significant downhill) in 50/15 (30 mph, briefly) but also allows a twiddle in a very low gear. Each chainring provides relatively close-ratio gears from the cassette, since there's only usable cogs and no wasted 11, 12, 13 or 14 that would never get used.

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I'm a very ordinary (and I mean very very very ordinary) 54-year-old cyclist and I use my 50/12 as my standard flat no wind gear to ride at around 23mph, on the bike that has a 52/11 I can certainly get a higher speed downhill than just tucking in until the speed starts to approach 50mph. Pardon me saying so but you seem to be rather solipsistic in your belief that what suits you is what should suit anybody and that anyone who disagrees is just a mug falling for marketing hype. We are all different, you know.

Rendel Harris wrote: I'm a very ordinary (and I mean very very very ordinary) 54-year-old cyclist and I use my 50/12 as my standard flat no wind gear to ride at around 23mph, on the bike that has a 52/11 I can certainly get a higher speed downhill than just tucking in until the speed starts to approach 50mph. Pardon me saying so but you seem to be rather solipsistic in your belief that what suits you is what should suit anybody and that anyone who disagrees is just a mug falling for marketing hype. We are all different, you know.

At 23 mph in 50/12 you'll be revving at mid-60s rpm. That's a hard way to pedal unless you're a body builder. 

At 120rpm in 50/11, you'd only be doing 44mph, so you must have very whizzable legs to get to 50mph whilst pedaling!

Perhaps you need to practice tucking in a bit if you can't increase speed quite dramatically by getting more aero? To increase downhill speed above around 30mph just by pedalling harder, you'd have to be inputting a rather large number of watts - certainly more than those of "a very very ordinary" cyclist.

You can call hard facts about gearing, aero positions and so forth "solipsistic" but facts are uncaring of our mere opinions, seeing as how they're quite hard to avoid or change.

Cugel wrote: At 23 mph in 50/12 you'll be revving at mid-60s rpm. That's a hard way to pedal unless you're a body builder.

As a result of a lot of leg weight work as a rugby player I do have rather large pins - think Chris Hoy rather than Froome, though without an ounce of the talent of either - and I find 65-70 a comfortable cadence at that speed. Which just goes to prove what I said, we're all different and it's nonsense to issue blanket statements like "No one other than a professional racing cyclist or an amateur of the very highest level needs an 11 tooth or even a 12 tooth sprocket."

Cugel wrote: At 120rpm in 50/11, you'd only be doing 44mph, so you must have very whizzable legs to get to 50mph whilst pedaling!

If you look again I said that was on the bike with 52/11 and I get close to 130rpm before spinning out on a downhill, which I don't think is terribly unusual or "whizzable".

Cugel wrote: facts are uncaring of our mere opinions

That is very true, but most of what you wrote was opinion based on what you think is an ideal way to ride.

Rendel Harris wrote: Cugel wrote: At 23 mph in 50/12 you'll be revving at mid-60s rpm. That's a hard way to pedal unless you're a body builder.

Fact-based based on my experience, that of many others and that forced on anyone who employs various gear ratios and positions on a bike, I think you'll find.

But a mental experiment is also available. Consider the gearing of professional cyclists able to output 400 watts continuously then work out what gearing might, scaled, be appropriate for everyday cyclists with power output capbilities more between 100 and 200 watts.

Will the latter somehow be able to emulate the 400 watters just by having the same gear ratios? Some think so, going by their claims. This is not so much "just a different opinion" as "magical thinking".

Rendel Harris wrote: Cugel wrote: facts are uncaring of our mere opinions

Let's face it, the reason why most go about with cassettes starting with 11 teeth (soon to be 10 or even 9!) is that its very, very difficult to buy anything else. And nearly every road, gravel, touring or audax bike sold as such comes with such a cassette.

You can buy a 14-28 cassette from Mr Shimano. But no 14 - 34 cassette - you have to make your own franken-cassette from a 14-28 plus an 11-34; or buy individual alternative cogs. This is costly.

In short, the reason most have 11- summick cassettes is because of marketing, driven by the fashions of professional racing (also determined by marketing). "Reasons" given by ordinary cyclists to justify their 11 toofers seem, to me, to be "rationalisations after the fact" (of being caught by a fashion-net).

It reminds me of the highly successful marketing trick concerning cycling helmets - no decent proof they achieve anything but a lot of profits for manufacturers (not to mention the polluting landfill) and increased "accidents" due to risk compensation thinking .... but millions buy, wear and defend them.

I knew it wouldn't be long before we got back on to those dark forces of the global commerce conspiracy and their evil plan to reprogram the worker drones with their "marketing".

This is simply drivel and your determination to say that anyone who disagrees with your opinion as to the correct gear ratio is falling for a marketing ploy is risible. What is the marketing advantage to Shimano of selling 11 toothed smallest ring cassettes? Do you think they are making a few bob on the micrograms of metal saved? 

If you want a 14-34 11sp cassette, buy a Miche Primato and stop telling everybody else that they are wrong and falling for a sucker punch by The Man just because they prefer a different gear ratio to you.

I commute with 11-34 and 50/34 and usually average about 75rpm. My speed averages out about 25kph (according to Garmin) I moved to that setup because it was the cheapest option that I knew would fit on my bike. It is commuting, so I do the same route every day and don't move out of the 50. I am able to drop to the 11 when the headwind isn't too strong, but usually I don't get down there. My cadence tops out about 105 on some of the uphill sections. I am in exercise clothing, arrive sweaty and very much treat it as my daily exercise routine. I am not a pro.

I commute on 52/36 chainrings with an 11-28t cassette and I'm usually in the 52/11 on the flat if the road is clear. And I'm just a 48-year old hobby cyclist.

CumbrianDynamo wrote: I commute on 52/36 chainrings with an 11-28t cassette and I'm usually in the 52/11 on the flat if the road is clear. And I'm just a 48-year old hobby cyclist.

What speed are you doing and, as a result, what's your cadence, in that gear?

When I were a lad, 382 years ago, even professionals like that Merckx, had 52 X 13 as their top gear. They still managed to race at speeds not that much slower than today's professionals. 

When I raced, often in races on the flat that averaged 27mph+, I managed to do so on a 52X14 or even 15 top gear. This didn't win me any sprints but it got me to the finish only a few seconds behind those who did sprint to victory.

Of course, I don't mind if you want to go about in 52 X 11 at 55rpm cadence but when it means I can't buy the cassette I want because all the fellows with "all the gear" only want to have the same gears as the bloke wot won Le Tour, it gets a bit tedious.

About 45km/h, cadence about 80. Is that acceptable to you?

CumbrianDynamo wrote: About 45km/h, cadence about 80. Is that acceptable to you?

Your flat road commuting pace equates to about 21m30s minutes for a 10 mile TT. That's pretty fast (particularly as I don't suppose you commute on tri-bars, TT wheels, etc.) 

As I'm commuting it's not a speed I sustain for particularly long distance thanks to the hazards you might expect on a city rush hour journey, but I need the 11 when I have enough clear and flat bus lane to be able to get to around 30mph. Wouldn't know about riding TT as I've never done one, but on a good commuting day on my sub-8kg carbon bike it'll take me about 30 mins to travel about 9 miles in London traffic with a couple of hundred metres of ascent. 

www.bikecalc.com/gear_speed may be of interest here.

80rpm in 52/11 is almost 50kph.

Recent hour record breaking bikes had around the equivalent of a 52x11 gear, pedalled at about 100rpm. I guess MAMILs are more likely to be in the 80-90rpm range - much less over any distance doesn't seem very efficient.

Dnnnnnn wrote: www.bikecalc.com/gear_speed may be of interest here.

Cugel wrote:   My own preferred and favourite gear range is a 50/39/30 chainset with a 15 - 36 cassette of 10 cogs. It goes as fast as I can go pedalling (without a significant downhill) in 50/15 (30 mph, briefly) but also allows a twiddle in a very low gear. Each chainring provides relatively close-ratio gears from the cassette, since there's only usable cogs and no wasted 11, 12, 13 or 14 that would never get used.

In my opinion, nce the gear ratio goes much below 1:1 then you can't pedal any mr beause the front wheel keeps lifting off the ground.

wycombewheeler wrote: Cugel wrote:   My own preferred and favourite gear range is a 50/39/30 chainset with a 15 - 36 cassette of 10 cogs. It goes as fast as I can go pedalling (without a significant downhill) in 50/15 (30 mph, briefly) but also allows a twiddle in a very low gear. Each chainring provides relatively close-ratio gears from the cassette, since there's only usable cogs and no wasted 11, 12, 13 or 14 that would never get used.

Is that a bald opinion (one with no experience-hair), a potted opinion from a cycling website or one based on your own experience?

My own experience is that gears below 1:1 are very good at enabling a pedal up those very long and steep ascents to be found in many locations across Blighterdom. This also seems to be the experience of tens of thousands of touring cyclists, over the years, including me on my many cross-Pennine trips with rear panniers but no front 'uns.

I've not yet seen a tourist or any other slow-twiddler o' the hills go tit-over-arse from the bike whilst twiddling up the steeps (and I've frequented many such steeps) despite their 24 ring and 34 cog.

Cugel wrote: No one other than a professional racing cyclist or an amateur of the very highest level needs an 11 tooth or even a 12 tooth sprocket, unless their big chainring is a 44 rather than a 50 or 52.

Rather simplistic to state that. Try living in the alps and you will rapidly find the average cyclist with a 50/34T and 11/34 setup is now the most common. As a 50 is needed, so is the 11 to compensate for the lack of a bigger ring.

philsinclair wrote: Cugel wrote: No one other than a professional racing cyclist or an amateur of the very highest level needs an 11 tooth or even a 12 tooth sprocket, unless their big chainring is a 44 rather than a 50 or 52.

The reason all those Alpine cyclists have 50/34 and 11/34 is that it's rather difficult to buy anything else with lower gears, in a road bike.

The touring cyclists I know, though - those who understand the need for lower gears up steep/long hills because of their loads - tend to buy from places like Spa, where chainsets of 44-34-24 are sold in significant numbers. A 44 ring with the ubiquitous 11 tooth sprocket is at least a usable gear at an efficient cadence.

What missing bigger ring does the 11 tooth with a 50 ring compensate for?

As a 50 year old 77kg 3.8w/kg rider, as far as I'm concerned my 11 & 12 tooth sprockets are effectively spacers that help with my chain line. I run 11-28 and 11-30 11 speed cassettes (with 50/34 or 36 front) but would happily give up the 11 tooth for tighter mid-gear ratios. 

On my gravel bike I've got 46/30 at the front and 11-34t at the rear. I find this suits me very well cycling on the road. I can comfortably ride at any speed from walking pace up to 35 mph.

My cadence is usually around 90 though, if it was lower then I'd want a higher top gear.

Reminder that unless you are putting out 5.5 watts per kg you shouldn't be making gearing decisions based on what the pros are riding. 

To be fair, the article says that.

Indeed it does, hard to overstate though. You see so many ordinary people who wholeheartedly believe that they need gearing to pedal at 40mph and sacrifice an enjoyable ride to get it. 

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‘This is Team UAE, not Team Pogi’ - Behind the scenes of Tadej Pogačar's Giro-Tour double bid

A look inside the relationship between the Slovenian and his team

The evening after the 2024 Volta a Catalunya had ended, a slight figure in a UAE Team Emirates tracksuit could be seen wandering alone through the departure lounge of Barcelona airport’s Terminal 1, his only possible concession to anonymity some massive earphones and an equally large baseball cap to cover his telltale quiff.

Having had hordes of fans chanting his name just a few hours earlier after his devastating ride to victory in Barcelona – and, indeed, the entire cycling world at his feet – here, then, was a rather different image of Tadej Pogačar . With Volta already consigned to the past, his plane ride to an altitude camp in southern Spain, his next stop before the Giro d’Italia, was already his next objective. There was no VIP treatment, mind. No fast-track through the boarding queues, no seat option other than economy class on the low-budget flight, and certainly no cheesy PA announcement by the pilot along the lines of “A special welcome to the number one bike rider in the world.’

For the next couple of hours, Pogačar went completely unnoticed by those around him. Then when the plane touched down, he just grabbed his bag from the overhead lockers, turned for the door, and was gone. Just like anybody would.

You could argue that in terms of logistics, it’s purely common sense that dictates that if Pogačar has to get from A to B and the most practical way is to travel solo on a low-budget airline then so be it. Then again, the days when Lance Armstrong would jet around from race to race in a private plane are still not so far off in cycling history. No matter, that lack of kid-gloves-treatment for his flight to an altitude camp was in keeping with how Pogačar and UAE have made their relationship function over the years.

Pogačar may well be all but in a league of his own as a rider and UAE may well have some of the deepest pockets in the WorldTour, but rather than make an excessive fuss about him – or indeed create a specially designed ‘team Tadej’ to ensure his every need is attended to – the staff that work with him do so as just one part of their normal roles within the squad. And that, too, is intentional.

“This is UAE Team, not Pogi Team,” team manager Joxean Fernandez Matxin tells Cyclingnews . “In the sense that he’s the number one in the world, we’d be the first to say it and to value him and to protect him and we’re very proud of him.

“But be it riders or staff, we try to ensure that everybody matters and that no given soigneur, say, is more important than another soigneur. We cover and work for each other, and to stick with the example of the soigneurs for a moment, it works both ways.

“For example, Tadej wouldn’t even be asked if he minded getting a massage from one of them in particular. And he’d be equally fine with that. So in that sense, there is no ‘Tadej Team.’ There’s just UAE Team Emirates.”

Yet at the same time, Matxin agrees that UAE Team Emirates are engaged in a never-ending quest to be as well-prepared as possible, an overarching strategy that will once again come into play this May at the Giro d’Italia. And how that quest is structured, be it the broad brushstrokes of planning a season or the smallest question about which flight to get to a training camp, inevitably involves input from their star GC rider.

Everything has to have a starting point, too, and Matxin harks back to the winter of 2018-19, and a crunch meeting shortly after he had taken over as general manager.

“That year we had the usual get-together to work out the rider programmes for the season,” he says. “At the time we had some very good up-and-coming riders like the Oliveira brothers, [Rui and Nuno] and Cristian Muñoz, but I can remember pointing out to the sports directors that we had also signed some champions of the calibre of Tadej, and Jasper Philipsen, too. What I said was basically that we couldn’t just treat them as young riders. We had to treat them like champions from the word go and change their race programmes accordingly.

“So we brought Tadej into some new races on the programme like the Volta a Algarve and California, which he won, and then put him in Itzulia Basque Country – which he didn’t win, but he was working for Dan Martin, and he might have won it if he hadn’t been doing that.”

2019 also marked the moment when Pogačar and the team simultaneously stepped up several notches in terms of his Grand Tour preparation, Matxin explains, bringing forward his three-week debut to that year’s Vuelta a España. And after a couple of weeks in the Vuelta, he was going so well on GC that the initial idea of having him waiting until his third season to fight for a Grand Tour was quietly binned as well. He would place third in Madrid.

“He had said to me that year that if he got to week two of the Vuelta and was really tired, then he’d quit,” Matxin says. “But I sat him down and said, ‘I consider you a champion and I don’t want you starting a race thinking you’ll abandon. I’d prefer you to ease back on two or three stages if you’re tired, and then keep going right the way through.

“With Philipsen our approach was different, because as a sprinter it makes no sense to continue through the high mountains if you’re tired and when you’ve done the first two flatter weeks where you can make things count. But with Tadej our strategy was completely the opposite, he did the whole Vuelta.

“Then in 2020, when the normal thing would have been to take him to the Vuelta or Giro d’Italia to fight for that, we raised the bar again and put him in the Tour de France straightaway.”

Pogačar corroborated the idea he and his team raised their game in tandem in an interview with Emirati newspaper The National last Autumn.

"When I came to the team five years ago, we were sitting in one conference room in a hotel and the bosses were saying, ‘We want to be the best team’, and at that time, I thought it was impossible," Pogačar told the newspaper.

"But they believed we could do it. We worked towards this goal and achieved it quite early. I saw such an improvement from year to year.”

In order to ensure that Team UAE did not become ‘Team Pogi’ during that process, Matxin says the team insisted on keeping all staff members working across the board and not specifically with their star rider. At the same time, that strategy would hardly function without Pogačar’s own buy-in, and his own preference for being treated no differently to the rest.

“He’s changed a bit since he came on the team, but only in the way every 20-year-old changes as the years go by. People grow up,” soigneur Joseba Elguezabal tells Cyclingnews.

“Essentially, he’s the same guy he ever was – the same person who likes his jokes, who likes his food and loves riding his bikes, who is really friendly and who has a smile for everybody. He’s number one on the bike and off it, too.

“Equally, I don’t see any difference between the way he gets treated and the way the rest of the riders do. In the training camp, for example, when we’re all in the same hotel, nobody gets a better or worse deal. The thing is, we’re all rowing in the same direction, and from rider number 1 to rider number 30 at UAE Team Emirates, they’re all treated well.”

As for who works with whom in the team and who gets to work with Pogačar, Matxin cites the example of Pogačar’s usual mechanic. “It’s often a question of logistics. For example, take the mechanic. Rather than lugging his bike around from airport to airport, it makes sense for him to look after that because he lives seven kilometres away from Tadej,” he says.

“So it’s not a question of Tadej choosing one particular mechanic for his personal preference. It’s more that this mechanic is really good for everybody on the team and he happens to live close by.”

It was a similarly organic process when it came to Andrej Hauptmann being the sports director. Along with Matxin, the Slovenian is usually behind the steering wheel in the lead team car when it comes to Pogačar’s races.

“I first met Andrej a long time ago, back when he was with [Italian squad] Vini Calderola. Another of the reasons why we asked him to come on board was because we had Tadej and Jan Polanc, both Slovenians on the team,” he explains.

This absence of special treatment has a definite advantage, too, when it comes to questions such as the changeover of team medic during the winter of 2023-24 for Pogačar during the winter. The Slovenian went from the direct guidance of Iñigo San Millan, now working both for UAE and a top football team, to being supervised by another doctor, Spaniard Javier Sola, with San Millan taking a more indirect role. What made the switch smoother was that, as Sola explains, he is handling multiple riders in UAE, not just Pogačar.

“A change happened, and this was it – there are five trainers in the team and it’s like he was just another rider, I got a call from Matxin, I got a list of riders to work with,” Sola told Cyclingnews and El Pais over the winter.

“It’s a bigger responsibility, but I always do the best I can, and we have a good group of doctors, and you get lots of support. So having that helps you stay calm.”

But that team effort doesn’t affect, of course, his appreciation of what Pogačar can do on the bike.

“He’s the best rider in the world, a force of nature, and there’s not much more to add than that,” Sola said.

“What really struck me is how quickly he gets into top condition. His [power] numbers are spectacular regardless, but when he’s trained for four weeks, then you say to yourself - Heck, he’s improving way faster than the rest.”

Part of that ability to benefit more from training than other riders, Sola says, is due to genetics. “He’s basically been touched with a magic wand, and he can assimilate everything better than other riders,” he says. “But his biggest virtue, in any case, is that he enjoys it all so much, be it training or racing.”

Elguezabal is equally eloquent when it comes to Pogačar’s exceptional muscular qualities from a soigneur’s point of view, although he struggles to define their precise nature. “It’s something I’ve come across before a little in other riders, but in his case it really stands out. Only another soigneur, though, would really get what I’m getting at,” he says, before doing his best to explain the inexplicable for anybody but a fellow practitioner.

“The muscle groups of a climber, a sprinter, a Classics rider or a stage racer all differ from each other in subtle ways. But Tadej is so exceptional that when it comes to a massage even his muscles are in a class of his own.

“It’s not just me that says that. All the soigneurs on the UAE team give massages to all the different riders when we’re at training camp, and they’ve all noticed the same thing about Tadej. It’s just spectacular.”

Elguezabal also cites Pogačar’s extraordinary powers of recovery as one of his many gifts as a racer: “I was giving him a massage after Vallter in the Volta a Catalunya, a stage where he’d attacked in the rain and gone solo to win, and in barely a minute he was back to normal. It was just staggering.”

Like everybody else Cyclingnews talks to at UAE about Pogačar’s working relationships with his squad, Gorka Prieto, the team nutritionist since 2020, emphasises that one of Pogačar’s qualities is that despite his exceptional nature as a rider, he is anything but exceptionally demanding.

“Of all the riders on the team, when it comes to nutrition, I’d say he’s the most straightforward of all,” he says. “There are some who are way fussier, the ones who insist on having white pasta all the time and you just can’t convince them otherwise. But Tadej is the complete opposite.

“You’ll tell him, ‘You’ve got to eat this’ and he’ll eat it. He particularly likes some kinds of sauce that our Italian chef makes with pasta. But in any case, he’s anything but a complainer.”

This extreme flexibility when it comes to food is definitely an advantage for Pogačar in all sorts of ways, but one specific example, as Prieto explains, is that there has been some significant change in the last few years regarding carbohydrate consumption.

“Riders’ carbohydrate consumption is much higher too,” he says. “Before they would be on a maximum of 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour of exercise, now it’s 120 or 130.”

That figure is even more striking given that a few years back, San Millan was already recommending that his riders increase their carbohydrate consumption to 80 grams per hour, up from a more accepted norm of 50. Nowadays, that intake is even higher.

Quite apart from getting the carbs in, a major part of nutritionists’ work in bike teams is predicting how much riders will need to consume depending on their role in a race. “It’s not the same sitting in the middle of the bunch compared to if you’re off the front,” as Prieto puts it.

In turn, that raises the question of how a team nutritionist handles a rider like Pogačar when he has a predilection for, say, solo attacks at 80 kilometres from the finish in Strade Bianche.

“It’s not a problem, he’s very intelligent and he knows that if he goes off the front at x kilometres from the line, he’s got to eat this much,” Prieto says.

“He’s been trained, if you like, to know that if he goes at such-and-such a speed, he has to eat that much more, and if he’s sticking in the bunch, he needs to eat that much less.”

Sometimes it all goes awry, though, as happened on the Col du Granon in the 2022 Tour de France, when Pogačar effectively lost the race because of a hunger flat. But it seems that rather than get overly hung up on that stage and its consequences, to judge from Prieto’s reaction, it was better to look for solutions in the future.

“You remind him – eat, eat, eat. But at the end of the day, sometimes because of the stress of a race, they don’t follow your instructions to the letter,” he agrees.

“Trying to ensure they do is very much up to the directors, we remind them constantly over the radios in the team car to remind the riders: And then there are stickers on the bike telling them where they know where the bidons will be handed out, where the feeds will be, and that’s a way of reminding them: eat, eat, eat.

“The stress you feel in any race and certain circumstances can always cause a slip-up. But you learn from your errors and let’s just hope it [the Col du Granon] doesn’t happen again.”

While the dedication and professional interest in their riders’ success is palpable in all the UAE team staff’s comments, the cynical might say that given the knock-on benefits of a team winning races, they are bound to feel that way. However, many years ago, former longstanding top-level domestique turns sports director Charly Wegelius told Cyclingnews that working for a leader for long spells of time, even if that leader is barely able to connect on a human level with his teammates and staff, inevitably creates an emotional bond.

In the case of the affable Pogačar and his team, the bond is perhaps even greater still, which surely benefits their willingness to work as a unit. For example, when Pogačar is on the massage table, Elguezabal says he and the rider share everything from musical tastes – Pogačar is one for rap, Elguezabal more in favour of reggaeton – to impromptu language classes in Euskera and Spanish, to long discussions about their different hobbies, with the rider being a huge fan of cars and the soigneur of horses.

When the Basque recently bought an English thoroughbred, Pogačar even paid him a visit at home to see the animal in question. The name? Pogi. How could it have been anything else?

But Elguezabal has also had had more than one occasion to see how Pogačar reacts to victories, too, like the one he’ll be seeking to capture in the Giro this May.

“He’s not overly emotional. If he wins, he’s pleased, but it’s nothing excessive and if he loses, he doesn’t lose the plot, either,” he says.  But as Eguezabal recently told El País, he will always remember the day that Pogačar gave him a heartfelt hug without saying a word after one memorable triumph: “And that wasn’t in a Tour at all, maybe because he thought beforehand he could win those. It was when he won the Tour of Flanders.”

Pogačar eschewed the cobbles this year in preparation for a tilt at the Giro-Tour double, which Matxin explains is being a target this year, rather than any other, for multiple reasons.

“Firstly, it’s because the Giro this year is a bit less tough, there are 11,000 metres less of vertical climbing than last year, and that’s 11,000 metres less of tiredness, both mental and physically,” he says. “But above all, we’ve opted for the Giro-Tour double because this year there are just about five weeks between the two. Other years that total has barely reached four.

“On top of that we’ve reduced the number of race days prior to the Giro itself drastically. He’s done just four different races up to now this season, and only one of those was a stage race [Catalunya], bringing the total down to 10 days.

“The last part of the preparation for the Giro-Tour double has been an altitude camp until April 12, then Liege-Bastogne-Liege, before going back home until the Giro. After he does the Giro, he’ll have one week at home again and then go back to altitude before the Tour.”

Yet what is striking, too, is how Matxin’s emphasis when discussing going for the double is very much about how it works in the bigger picture of Pogačar and his relationship with UAE Team Emirates. Which again, is very much in line with the team’s insistence of seeing their star rider as part of a bigger operation, rather than a stand-out figure who needs to be treated differently.

“We wanted initially to try to do a Tour-Vuelta double, but the year we wanted to do it, he was tired after the Tour so that idea got scrapped,” Matxin explains. “But this year, aged 25, we decided he was strong enough to try for both Giro and Tour, and while he’s a rider who doesn’t just want to do it for its own sake, we wanted it to fit in his career in general.

“So this isn’t just happening now because he’s got a contract with us until 2027. We wanted to do it now, this year, because although he can still improve and evolve, even if it’s not a vast amount, this is the right moment to do it.”

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Alasdair Fotheringham has been reporting on cycling since 1991. He has covered every Tour de France since 1992 bar one, as well as numerous other bike races of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Olympic Games in 2008 to the now sadly defunct Subida a Urkiola hill climb in Spain. As well as working for Cyclingnews , he has also written for The Independent ,  The Guardian ,  ProCycling , The Express and Reuters .

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