Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast

Throughout the Tour, Hugo Houle of Astana Pro team checked in with Canadian Cycling Magazine. Listen to his insights from inside the race. He talks about echelons, spreadsheets and crashes.

Also this month, Michael Woods won a stage at Tirreno-Adriatico and held the leader’s jersey for two days.

Both riders are slated to represent Canada at the road world championships on Sunday. They’ll tell us what we might see on the circuit in Imola, Italy and of their hopes on how the road race might play out for them.

From jerseys won by young Canadians to Euro pros sipping Caesars to taking in a Montreal Canadiens game with a future world champion, the influence of the Grands Prix Cyclistes de Québec et de Montréal is significant. This episode of the Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast honours those races by looking at moments, both big and small, connected with the Grands Prix. There’s discussion of poutine, too.

This is usually a busy time of year for Catharine Pendrel. She’s usually competing in cross country World Cups or preparing for the world championships or even in full Olympics mode. Her list of wins is long, but here’s a short version: two cross country world championship titles, one in 2011, the other in 2014; winner of the World Cup overall three times, once in 2010 and 2012 and 2016; six national cross country championship titles; two national cyclocross championship titles; three appearances at the Summer Olympics; one bronze medal from Rio in 2016.

Pendrel is a very generous and active supporter of the mountain bike scene in Canada. About two years ago, she and her husband Keith Wilson started Pendrel Racing, a development team for young riders. This past summer, they’ve had an up-and-coming Canadian rider staying at their place and riding in the Kamloops, B.C. area. (Listen to find out who.)

Pendrel also discusses how she reacted after a crash in one of the biggest races of her career and who she thinks will be going strong when this year’s shortened mountain bike World Cup starts in September. She gives some insights into the selection process for mountain bikers for the 2021 Olympics. Pendrel speaks on some advice she had for a rider on her development team on how to ride in this extended off-season that athletes face. That advice could help you, too.

When Rob Britton got into bikepacking, he really went for it. In 2018, the Tour of Utah winner set off from Calgary to Port Renfrew, B.C., on a nine-day adventure. The saddle time seemed to prepare him nicely for spending the day in the breakaway at the world championship road race soon after. Since then, Britton has continued to have some long adventures on his bike, including a big trip to Japan in November 2019 and a gravel epic earlier this year.

In this episode, Britton covers all kinds of topics related to bikepacking. He talks about how he sometimes pushes himself and his friends. He’s very safety conscious, and even has some good advice about when and how to take risks. There’s discussion about gear, including his go-to equipment list. He puts a lot of thought into every gram including what goes in his flask.

After you hear this interview with Rob Britton, you’ll want to plan a big cycling adventure.

This episode is a rebroadcast of our look at the 1980 Olympic boycott. It happened 40 years ago, but contains some lessons for what athletes are facing today. On this day, BMX competition was originally scheduled to begin in Tokyo. But in March, as rising COVID-19 cases sent nations scrambling, the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Canadian Paralympic Committee announced that Canadians would not go to the 2020 Games. Two days later, the IOC said it would postpone the 2020 Olympics for a year.

Recently, as we passed the one-year-to-go-until-the-rescheduled-Olympics date, talk of cancelling the 2021 Games started up. On July 22, the president of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee Yoshiro Mori said to Japanese media that if the pandemic continued has it had been so far, the Games could not go ahead in 2021. A few days before that, the Kyodo news agency released the results of a poll that showed that only 23.9 per cent of the people surveyed throughout Japan thought the Olympics should be held. A segment as large as 36.4 per cent thought the Games should be postponed again. From the survey, 33.7 per cent said the Games should be cancelled.

With the threat of Olympic cancellation creeping in once again, let’s listen to track cyclists Gordon Singleton and Steve Bauer, and road cyclist Louis Garneau as they discuss the time, 40 years ago, that the Olympics didn’t happen for Canadian athletes.