Theo de Rooij

Zeg je VIRO Criterium Cup Twente, dan zeg je blauwe leiderstrui 👕. Al jarenlang is @bioracer partner van het klassement en verzorgen zij de leiderstruien. Dat is dit jaar ook weer zo en daar zijn we erg blij mee. Dankjulliewel! 👏 📸: @sportfotonl #VCCT2026 #VIROCCT

@CyclingLegends1 Jan Heil was also a famous soigneur. And a great comedian

Yesterday we told you how Tom Simpson won Milan-San Remo in 1964, today Barry Hoban explains what happened after all the press questions were answered and the riders made their way home. “The first thing to realise is flying was expensive in those days, so there weren’t the internal routes there are today. We did short journeys in our cars, and long ones by train. If there were lots of riders travelling together the train companies would reserve whole coaches for the teams. “That always happened on the trip north from Milan-San Remo. Moving riders around was difficult, and I remember Briek Schotte saying that Paris-Nice was invented to get northern riders south, so they were ready for Milan San-Remo. “Anyway, the French railway, SNCF always put extra carriages on their overnight trains from San Remo to Paris for the riders who lived in and around the Lyon area, Paris, northern France, and in Belgium and Holland. Riders from Normandy, Brittany and the east too, they’d get connections from Paris. “There was a Dutchman, Jan Heil who worked on the international Waggons-Lits, and Jan always made sure he was on our train north. He was a real cycling fan, a character. We’d get on the train, and Jan would direct us to our cabins. “Okay; right, Mercier this is where you are. Flandria you’re in the next coach.” What a laugh it was. “We would sleep on the train and arrive in Paris next morning at the Gare de Lyon. Then all the riders going further north got their bikes out of the luggage car. We’d roll up our right trouser legs, put our suitcases and bags on our handlebars, and pedal up the Boulevard de Magenta, through Paris, to the Gare du Nord. Once there we’d split up and get the train home.” You can read more graphic accounts of cycling in the 1960s and ‘70s, and what it was like competing against Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault in Vas-y Barry, my life in cycling - cyclinglegends.co.uk/products/vas-y… 📸 Cycling Legends Collection

@vanranstmarc Goed (of slecht?) nieuws voor de wappies!

Vaccinatie met het gordelroosvaccin of het griepvaccin lijken de kans op dementie met 20-50 procent te verminderen. demorgen.be/meningen/gevac…

@CyclingLegends1 @ChrisSidwells Very kind and modest gentleman

The face of a man who’s just gone head-to-head with Fausto Coppi when Coppi was at his best and lost, although everyone lost when Coppi was best. His name is Jan Nolten, he’s from the Netherlands and is one of the untold stories of cycling. Notlten was born in 1930 in Geleen in the hilly province of Limburg. He was the first prominent Dutch climber, the spirit father of riders like Joop Zoetemelk, Gert-Jan Theunisse and Steven Rooks. Nolton won mountain stages in the 1952 Tour du Suisse and 1953 Deutschland Tour, a mountain time trial stage in the 1956 Giro d’Italia, and was the first Dutchman to win a mountain stage in the Tour de France. That was in 1952, the year Coppi won his second Tour and entered a new realm of excellence. Coppi didn’t really engage with the race until stage 10, then something clicked, he became inspired. He won the first ever mountain top stage finish, it was at Alpe d’Huez, and took the yellow jersey. Next day, between Bourg d’Oisans and Sestrieres, Coppi won the Tour. He attacked from the start and was alone by the Croix de Fer. He flew over the Galibier then up to the ski resort finish, winning the stage from the Spaniard Bernardo Ruiz by over 7 minutes. The Tour was over for everybody, except for Jan Nolten. He hit back next day, climbed over the southern Alps ahead of Coppi, and won alone in Monaco, taking 7 minutes back from the race leader. Coppi was shocked and told those close to him that Nolten was the only rider he feared. When the Dutchman set off on another long-range raid on stage 21, another historic one that finished on top of the Puy de Dome for the first time, Coppi chased, and only caught the flying Dutchman 1 kilometre from the summit. A serious car accident brought Nolten’s career to an early end. A talented man born at the wrong time, a time when Holland wasn’t the great cycling nation it became. No Dutch team could support a mountain specialist, but Jan Nolten opened the eyes of others, inspired a generation, and in 1968 a Dutchman, Jan Janssen won the Tour de France. 📸 Dutch National Archive

Mijn reguliere bijdrage aan de Opiniepagina van Tubantia vandaag. Concurrentie in de sport maakt je beter en haalt het beste in je boven #Tubantia #DafneSchippers #FemkeKok #JuttaLeerdam #Trump

@saddleblaze Plus off course the famous Amstel Bier amateur team

@saddleblaze Skol and Breda beer teams in the 60-ties

Are there any other beer sponsors of professional cycling races beyond Amstel? Also, what beers are synonymous with cycling? There's Kwaremont in Belgium as well as Malteni, which I don't think exists anymore. The Coors Classic also ran in the 80s and the Buckler team in the 90s.

Het verleden wordt (deels) nieuw leven ingeblazen!

@gre_no Le premier coureur diabétique que j'ai jamais rencontré

Un grand serviteur du cyclisme fête aujourd'hui ses 67 ans ! Félicitations Dominique Garde 👏👏 #DominiqueGarde #cycling #cyclisme #wilersport #wielrennen #ciclismo #radsport #LesRP #sporza #rtbfvelo - noelgregoirecollections.com

@faustocoppi60 Maybe... maybe not

@TheodeRooij You must sign for a non-French team in order to win? Maybe times have changed.

Scary photo in today's L'Equipe. 😰

Radio Tour de France: laat sinds 1970 en al meer dan een halve eeuw, ruim drie weken lang, niets aan de verbeelding over. Gelukkig kunnen we erover praten en vooral: dromen

🚨 JUST IN: A migratory bird just shattered world records — flying 8,425 miles (13,560 km) NON-STOP across the Pacific without landing once. The bar-tailed godwit doesn’t stop to eat, drink, or sleep during its migration across the Pacific Ocean. Its journey from Alaska to Australia takes roughly 11 days of continuous flight, covering over 13,000 kilometers through storms, headwinds, and open ocean with zero land beneath it the entire time. Before departure, it does something almost surgical to its own body. It shrinks its digestive organs down to almost nothing, converting the stomach, intestines, and liver into raw fuel. The bird essentially eats its own gut to make room for fat reserves that will power its wings for nearly two weeks straight. The brain doesn’t fully sleep either. Half of it stays active while the other half rests, alternating in shifts mid-flight at altitude over the open Pacific. The godwit is simultaneously unconscious and navigating with magnetic field sensitivity that no human instrument in the 18th century could replicate. What makes this genuinely staggering beyond the physical record is the navigational precision involved. The bird leaves Alaska and arrives in New Zealand with accuracy that would embarrass early GPS systems. It reads Earth’s magnetic field, atmospheric pressure gradients, star positions, and potentially quantum-level compass mechanisms inside its eye that literally let it see magnetic field lines overlaid on its visual field. Evolution spent millions of years building an aerospace navigation system inside a 300 gram animal. We spend billions engineering machines that do what this bird does on instinct, fat reserves, and half a sleeping brain. The longest recorded non-stop flight by a commercial aircraft is around 20 hours. This bird does 11 days. Without a runway.

@SpencerHakimian 😂

🚨BREAKING: TRUMP POSTED THIS

@grahamwatson10 All the best from us 😆

Enjoying the first days of Autumn here in New Zealand, - who needs Strade Bianche's gravel when we have our own to savour..?

We gaan ervoor!! Lekker verhalen vertellen. #nieuwewereld #theater linkedin.com/posts/mailvoor…

Read, think, imagine, interpretate, understand and use to your and everyone's advantage

@PedalVintage @grahamwatson10

Un gran fotógrafo fotografiado. Esto es equivalente a que Jack Nicholson vaya al cine:

@Roadman_Podcast The decline started decades earlier in the 80-ties, when Look and Shimano introduced innovative elements and group sets. Like click pedals, index shifting, STI levers. Campagnolo's engineers reacted too late. Innovations, like the Delta brake, were beautiful but also wretched

The death of Campag (what went wrong?) Campagnolo didn’t die overnight. It just slowly stopped being normal. For years, Campag was the dream groupset – the godfather of racing kit, the Italian jewellery you lusted after in the shop window. But while Shimano and SRAM were quietly hoovering up OEM spec on “normal” bikes and flooding the mid‑range, Campagnolo doubled down on being premium, niche, and mostly road‑only. That meant fewer complete bikes came with Campag out of the box, fewer shops pushed it, and over time most new riders simply never got exposed to it. At the top end, they also missed a few big waves – slower to embrace disc, no MTB or gravel presence to speak of, and pricing that made it hard to justify over Ultegra/Force for a lot of riders. Add in long lead times, limited mid‑tier options, and Shimano/SRAM aggressively sponsoring teams and brands, and Campag’s market share just kept shrinking until, for the first time, they disappeared from the WorldTour completely in 2024. So who’s still on Campagnolo? A small but very loyal group of enthusiasts who love the mechanical feel, durability, and the “if you know, you know” factor. Boutique builds and custom bikes where the owner is choosing with their heart, not a spreadsheet. And from 2025, Cofidis – who’ve signed a four‑year deal to bring Campag back into the WorldTour on Look bikes, which is about as core‑cycling and romantic as it gets. So is Campagnolo dead? In the mainstream, yeah – most group‑sets you see on club spins now are Shimano or SRAM. But in the corners of the sport where people still care about history, feel and aesthetics, Campag never really left. And with that Cofidis deal, they’re at least refusing to go quietly.

El hombre con las pantorrillas más gruesas del pelotón