Road racing may now have ceded centre stage to cyclo-cross, but there's still plenty of major stories and issues for the RadioCycling team to pick over in our latest podcast. We begin with...
One Cycling – the latest on the plan that could rock world road racing. Since lifting the lid last week on the scheme put together by Jumbo-Visma boss Richard Plugge and Soudal-QuickStep majority owner Zdeněk Bakala, we've been gauging reaction and opinion across the sport.
We hear from the race organisers likely to be affected by the mooted restructure of the calendar, from the women's teams who haven't been sounded out at all, and hear why this, the latest in a long line of racing revamps, has got an awful long way to go before the major stakeholders might climb on board.
We also speak to Alex Duff, author of Le Fric: Family Power and Money, the business of the Tour de France, who explains why Tour organisers ASO won't be jumping into bed with One Cycling any time soon.
Paris 2024 – we have the lowdown on Rue Lepic, the key climb that could decide destiny of the medals in next year's Olympic road races, which has a many-storied history. Eulogised in song by legendary French actor Yves Montand (and, yes, his crooning paean does feature), it starts next to the famous Moulin Rouge caberet and rises past the former home of artist Vincent van Gogh and the cafe where Amélie worked in the eponymous movie as it climbs the Butte de Montmartre, a Flanders-like hill that will have the cobbled Classics specialists salivating.
Split stage renaissance? Largely absent from major events since that late 1980s, the split stage will make its Grand Tour return at next year's Tour de France Femmes. We hear from Audrey Cordon-Ragot on the very particular challenge of racing twice in one day, recall the day that a defiant Bernard Hinault led a rider protest against split stages at the Tour, and assess whether the TDFF's experiment might lead to their reintroduction at the Tour de France.
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