The highlights of the year in cycling
Tuesday 30 December 2014 12:52, UK
The past 12 months in cycling have delivered an endless stream of memorable races, landmark victories, big-name crashes, unprecedented crowds and surprise results.
In chronological order, here are our Top 10 Moments of 2014...
Nothing quite gets a crowd going like a home winner and there were few better examples than Colombian rider Edwin Avila’s spine-tingling victory in the points race at February’s UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Cali, his home city. Avila took the lead of the 40km event by gaining three laps on the rest of the field but had a slender advantage of just five points over New Zealand’s Tom Scully going into the last lap and final sprint. Scully made a frantic dash for the line in the final 250m, but Avila followed and finished right behind to triumph by four points and send the crowd in the Alcides Nieto Patino Velodrome into raptures. A special moment even for the neutral.
For pure entertainment, there was not much to beat Alberto Contador's wrestling match with the ludicrously steep Muro di Guardiagrele on stage five of Tirreno-Adriatico. It measures only 610m in length but averages 22 per cent in gradient and reaches a leg-snapping maximum of 30 per cent. Few climbers look as natural on an incline as Contador – hips swaying and shoulders rolling – but this brute of a ramp reduced him to hunching, bobbing and zig-zagging his way up. Yet he still got the better of it. He had initially attacked 32km out to distance all of his main rivals, but he still had to sweep up what was left of the breakaway on the Muro di Guardiagrele to seal the stage win. Simon Geschke put up a fine resistance, but he was ultimately no match for the peerless Contador, who took the race lead that day and went on to win overall.
The Women’s Tour of Britain was set up in a bid to build on cycling’s rising popularity in the UK and bring world-class women's racing to these shores, and on the evidence of its inaugural edition in May, it is already an overwhelming success. The weather may not have played its part and the challenge of Lizzie Armitstead, the main British hope for victory, didn’t materialise, but tens of thousands of fans nevertheless lined the route of the race on each of its five days to provide an almost unprecedented level of support for women’s cycling.
Watching a pure climber soar up an Alpine climb is one of the most beautiful sights in cycling and Nairo Quintana’s ascent to the Val Martello summit finish on stage 16 of the Giro d’Italia was a definitive example. The Colombian had escaped from race leader and compatriot Rigoberto Uran in a group of seven riders on the descent off the day’s previous climb, the Passo dello Stelvio, and took a lead of 1min 50sec on to the 22.3km final ascent. It was then that the 24-year-old began his climbing masterclass, dropping his fellow escapees one by one and single-handedly more than doubling his advantage over Uran to 4min 11sec by the summit. It was a sublime and ultimately race-winning exhibition of climbing.
Chris Froome and Contador went head to head numerous times in 2014 but stage two of the Criterium du Dauphine was their stand-out clash and made for arguably the most thrilling racing of the whole season. Froome was the chief aggressor on the climb to the summit finish on the Col du Beal, creating an elite front group with a pair of attacks around 5km out and then causing more havoc with two more attacks inside the final 1km. Only Contador could follow his electric accelerations, and when the pair entered the final 200m as lone leaders, the Spaniard tried to counter-attack and outsprint Froome to the line. The Team Sky rider would not be denied, though, and dug in to take victory with Contador following on his wheel. It was a breath-taking battle.
Admittedly, this isn’t a single moment, but rather a collection of images, sounds and experiences that will live indefinitely in the memory. Standing room only in Leeds to wave the race off, Jens Voigt leading solo over a jam-packed Buttertubs Pass on stage one, tens of thousands of fans on Holme Moss on stage two and central London at a standstill to see the culmination of stage three were just some of the highlights of three days later described by Tour race director Christian Prudhomme as the “grandest Grand Depart” in the race’s history.
They were certainly not moments to celebrate, but for pure shock and drama, Froome and Contador’s exits from the Tour de France were almost unmatched in 2014. Froome was the first to depart after crashing once one stage four and then twice more in torrential rain on stage five. He hesitantly remounted after his first fall that day, but when he went down again, he merely slumped over his bike grimacing, before eventually shaking his head and climbing into the team car. Froome’s exit should have taken away the surprise of a big name crashing out, but when the same fate befell Contador five days later, it felt just as cataclysmic. The Spaniard sustained a small fracture to the tibia in his right leg in a high-speed fall on a wet descent on stage 10. After spending around four minutes slumped on the roadside getting patched up, Contador remounted his bike and initially closed the gap back to the peloton, but then he started to fall adrift again and eventually began thanking his team-mates for their efforts, before climbing off of his bike and into the team car.
Vincenzo Nibali’s performance on the cobbles of stage five of the Tour de France was arguably one of the finest in the history of the race. The general classification contenders had been expected to be shaken into near-submission by the day’s 13km of rain-soaked pave, and all of them were, except for the magnificent Nibali. With the help of outstanding team-mate Jakob Fuglsang, the Italian thrived to such an extent that not only did he put more than two and a half minutes into Contador and Alejandro Valverde, two of his main rivals, but incredibly he also dropped cobbles specialists such as Fabian Cancellara and Peter Sagan, who ended up finishing more than 40 seconds behind him. Lars Boom’s victory on the day was equally noteworthy.
Women’s cycling in Britain has enjoyed a stand-out year in 2014 and the highlight was arguably Armitstead’s gold medal and the retiring Emma Pooley’s silver in the women’s Commonwealth Games road race in Glasgow. England were expected to challenge for the podium, and Armitstead was one of the favourites for victory, but the manner in which the pair worked together to blow all of their rivals away was little short of textbook. Pooley did much of the leg work, repeatedly attacking opposing countries to wear them down before launching a much more purposeful attack 11km out. Armitstead then made her own move 8km from the finish, catching and passing Pooley as planned before riding comfortably on to gold and one of the biggest wins of her career. Pooley might have expected to be caught by the rest of the chasers, but instead she held on for second place and crossed the line in tears in her final race as a professional cyclist. The perfect team race.
Just when we started to think the days of Sir Bradley Wiggins delivering iconic, career-defining victories on the road were coming to an end, the maestro conjured up yet another win for the history books in September’s world championship time trial. It had been one of the few major honours to have eluded him, and he went into the event as underdog behind three-time defending champion Tony Martin, who had crushed Wiggins a year earlier. The 34-year-old Briton was four seconds down on his German rival at the first time check, but from thereon in he dominated and went on to triumph by 26 seconds. He was only the second Briton, after to Chris Boardman in 1994, to claim the title, and victory meant he became the reigning national, world and Olympic time trial champion.
