I’m offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone to come round and paint the outside of my house for free (ladder provided) 👊

How do you make massive profits organising sporting events? Con people into working for you for free.

Was going to ask you @bikesnbukes.eurosky.social: where do you stand on Strange New Worlds? Have finally got into it in the last week or so, nearly through season one. Love all the lacquered surfaces, but it's also such a fun show, lighter than Discovery's first seasons but with some of that magic.

Is Sean Ingle over here? I'd love to ask him to put a number on "the death of too many cyclists from EPO in the 90s and noughties".

People seem to be seeing the upside to the failure of the Enhanced Games - World Records went unchallenged + the only one broken could be credited to equipment, not drugs - but the downside is that doping apologists (of whom we have too many in cycling media) can now claim the drugs don't work.

Team Facts 1 - 0 Team AI Bullsitt

If you've read a couple or three Tour history books - from the dreadful ones by the likes of Wheatcroft to the good ones like Thompson's - you'll know that L'Auto hated - really hated - women. Couldn't stand 'em. Which is at odds with the marketing of the paper.

"On Friday, Laramy was presented with a World Influencers and Bloggers award (WIBA) in recognition of influencers and content creators at the Cannes festival for his work on the channel." But was he?

And 79 years ago today Paris-London reached its grand finale with Brit George Fleming crowned as the winner. Bill immediately started work on Paris -London 1948 but it was pulled at the last minute. A shameless plug to read the full story in my article in Cycling Weekly 🤪

AI history? Thanks, but no thanks.

Not sure there is such a thing as a one-day stage race but in my search for the earliest women's stage race I found this, in 1926: "the women ... competed in a two-leg race (individual over 13.5 km and handicap over 5.4 km) ... a tiebreaker was required ... a hill climb." Reported in Paris-Soir.

I'd say there's more ominous tempting fate issues with hiring from that family lineage but then again we're all ok with all that again. I would enjoy yet another round of silly "how on earth could we possibly have suspected?!?" from Brailsford though, that's always good comedy.

So, just to be clear, it's cool to quote Lord of the Rings now cause some guy in a dress is doing it?

Colour me superstitious if you want (Good Morning Mr Magpie!) but given SkyNet's history with breaking cyclists (Froome, Bernal, Thomas's hip, repeatedly) I do think hiring the son of Joseba Beloki is tempting fate a bit. Spectacular wipe-outs is an inheritable trait. #IHaveABadFeelingABoutThis

On this day 79 years ago it was Stage 2 Paris-London 1947. The race was created by my great uncle Bill as pre-Olympic preparation for the 1948 London Games. Screenshot from the 1947 race programme. Full story in this week’s @cyclingweekly.com !

Victoria Pendleton has a book to plug? I wondered why she kept popping up everywhere recently. Her autobiography, Between the Lines (ghosted by Donald McRae) was very good. But ... well I'm not judging the new one by its cover. More the sport-as-self-help genre. Which, well, doesn't do a lot for me.

Victoria Pendleton has a book to plug? I wondered why she kept popping up everywhere recently. Her autobiography, Between the Lines (ghosted by Donald McRae) was very good. But ... well I'm not judging the new one by its cover. More the sport-as-self-help genre. Which, well, doesn't do a lot for me.

"Miss! Miss! Miss! I know the answer to question 4, Miss! It's Darya Domracheva + Ole Einar Bjørndalen, Miss! Can I have a gold star, Miss? No? What do you mean no, Miss? It's Laura Trott + Jason Kenny? Bit it's also Darya Domracheva + Ole Einar Bjørndalen!" #ThingsILearnedReviewingCyclingBooks

If you read only two books about the Giro d'Italia, make sure one of them is this one.

MOTHER OF GOD

I may be biased but Paris-London was a triumph - it deserves a place in sporting history. Here’s Bill’s original report of the 1947 race which brings each stage to life. The neat and well-equipped French team rolling up to the start line and the chaos of day 1 is a classic underdog story

Think about this a moment: a three-stage race from Paris to London, in 1947. And, unless you've read Matt Rendell's 'Olympic Gangster', chances are you've never heard of it. Partly because this was an NCU race and the BLRC are supposed to have been the heroes of the 1940s and 1950s.

📅 🚴 Sur les routes du Tour de France avec Gallica ! Rencontre le mardi 2 juin 2026 à @labnf.bsky.social Découvrez, de 1903 aux années 1950, à travers quelques étapes de la course, ce que la mise en récit du Tour dit de la France. Entrée gratuite, réservation conseillée : www.bnf.fr/fr/agenda/su...

And the lights go green. Amazon picks up Natalie Portman's Tour de France flick, Pumping Black.

It is fun to hear a cyclist from an Isle of Man team leading after the first day of the Rás. @cycologies.com was there not a really good account of the history of the Rás early-mid 2000s? I seem to recall a Shane stokes review (or maybe he wrote it?).

Watching some Two Ronnies @oispooky.bsky.social - there was a chain of logic that took me from something I read to watching this - and this popped up.

“I flipped and called him every name under the sun, despite the fact that he was probably three or four times the size of me and threatened to put my lights out” www.independent.ie/sport/other-...

Victory for SRAM as UCI loses appeal over gear restriction trial www.cyclingnews.com/pro-cycling/...

Daire Feeley’s Rás diary Stage 1 is today ‘My new wife has another baby to look after now, a fully grown one who cries about bikes’ www.independent.ie/sport/other-...

Tonight, I went to the bow alone and spoke to what lay ahead. Not Franklin. Not Crozier. The dark itself. The particular dark that has no edge, no far side where a lamp might wait.

As this is on the same page as something I'm actually looking for ... who knew that Queenie, in her youth (she would have only been 30 here), had a thing for men stripping down to their briefs and beating each other up in her garden? It's like something out of Bridgerton.

Do not read the ALT text - means you have to read it - but it’s of it’s time and I’m a big believer of NOT sanitising history in order to understand today

If Leulliott's Tour Féminin wasn't the first ever women's stage race, wasn't even the first women's stage race of 1955, what was the first women's stage race of 1955? That appears to have been the Circuit Lyonnais Auvergne, a three-day race held at the end of July 1955. DO NOT READ THE ALT TEXT!

In that review of Breakaway Femmes I challenged the claim of one of the films 'expert' talking heads that Jean Leulliot's 1955 Tour Féminin was the first ever women's stage race, which it most definitely was not. It wasn't even the first in 1955. But what was the first stage race? I don't know.

Bernal's blethering about his numbers looking good ... it does have echoes of the nonsense he came out with in 2020 after climbing the Puy Mary like a granny whose Stannah had broken down. "I’m looking at my numbers and I’m doing some of my best numbers," he said back then. Shortly after, he DNFed.

I know I've posted this before, but ... she still haunts me, the Bride.

I have just spent far too long trying to put a date - just a year, not an actual date like what stage this is, or what climb they're on - on this set of images from the TdFF. Why? For a photo caption. There are clues in the sponsors on the jersey (Credit Lyonnais, Le Parisien, and Le Coq Sportif)

As usual, my attempts to write something quick and short are being derailed by my silly need to check facts. But here's a story from 1949 about plans for a women's Tour de France in 1950. Don't read to the end of the Alt text unless you want to feel the need to punch someone, probably a man.

In 1947 the promoters of the Tour de France appointed Bill Mills, of THE BICYCLE, to select the individuals for the 5 man British team. A British manufacturer was found to equip them. We know a team didn’t come to fruition until 1955. I wonder what happened?

Born in Islington to a French father + an English mother, Georges Passerieu was French. But he was also English, carrying a UK passport + racing on an NCU licence. His victory in Paris-Roubaix + stage wins at the Tour should, then, be part of British cycling history. Why aren't they?

This started life as a short piece congratulating Tour historians on actually getting something right. A couple days work, a few hundred words and on to the next thing. Only the research took me somewhere unexpected and once again I find myself rewriting a chapter of Great Britain's cycling history.

A cycling film set in and around the Tour de France that actually has a production date set and is not just a press release? We'll see. Pumping Black sees at 35-yr-old fading pro (Jonathan Bailey) taken under the wing of Natalie Portman, "a doctor driven by her own thirst for victory and power."

If you've got quarter of an hour to spare and are curious about the arrival of anti-doping rules in e-sports, the BBC did a piece on it ... five years ago.

"Even WADA struggles with global reach with its out-of-competition testing strategy." Does WADA - the body that sets the rules - actually struggle with its OOC testing strategy? Isn't that the ADO's headache, often outsourced to the ITA? Is it really too much to expect CN to know this?

"selected riders will be told before, during or after racing that they must stay where they are for up to three hours to be tested." Anti-doping testing only works if there's no advance warning. This? It's just window dressing. PR. But effective PR if it gets more credulous reporting like this.

‪Eleanor Sharpe's feature-length #TdFF (the '80s version) docu Breakaway Femmes - The Forgotten Women has been hiding away on @tg4.bsky.social for a while now but I'm only getting round to realising that. Well worth 90 minutes of your time, trust me. Lots of new interviews and contemporary footage.

Believe it or not, this is actually a question for the ages and you're just going to have to read the book if you want to know why. Or you could just ask Gareth, he's put a lot of effort into finding out the truth of when the baby was really deaded.

A little light reading for the next few days - @garethcartman.bsky.social's new cycling novel, We Rode All Night, set during the 1926 Tour de France. Looking forward to getting lost in this.