Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast

If you’re on top of your Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast listening, you’ll recall that Guillaume Boivin was on this past summer . He was in the midst of his first Tour de France, while also looking forward to his first Olympic appearance. He was on track for a very good season. And then, things got really good. In mid-September, he won his second elite national road race championship. Later that...

At the beginning of September, the two young riders won rainbow jerseys at the junior track world championships in Cairo. Carson Mattern won gold in the scratch race and Dylan Bibic won the points race. They took home some other hardware, too. Mattern and Bibic got bronze in the madison and Bibic was in second place in the omnium. If you’ve been keeping an eye on junior and under-17 racing, you’ll...

You know Jenn Jackson. She races cross country at the World Cup level, she digs cyclocross, she’s a bike mechanic, she sometimes bakes cookies and hands them out at events. And she’s all around into bikes. Canadian Cycling Magazine editor Matthew Pioro spoke with Jackson not long after she returned from her second trip to Europe this year where she had raced the cross country world championships a...

Lately, on this podcast, the focus has been on athletes, on their successes, challenges and just what makes them tick. But this episode is a bit different. The discussion gets into just what makes bikes tick. A few days ago, bike component maker Shimano launched its updated version of both the Dura-Ace and Ultegra road groupsets. It’s a big deal. These are the brand’s top and second-from-the-top c...

Tristen Chernove is back at the Paralympics for a second time. He’ll be competing in all the cycling disciplines that he can—the road race, the time trial, and on the track, the pursuit and the kilo. In this episode he’ll preview a bit of what lies ahead at the Games. In 2009, Chernove was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome. It’s a degenerative disease that affects the nervous system. The...

“Peter, how am I going to win this race tomorrow?” It’s a question that Carter Woods occasionally asks his Norco Factory teammate, Peter Disera . It may seem a bit cheeky, but it leads to a discussion of race tactics and strategy. As Woods mentions in this interview, you can’t win World Cup races with sheer pedal power. Earlier this year, Woods nailed the race tactics on two notable occasions. Fro...

Tristen Chernove is heading back to the Paralympics for a second time: he’s off to Tokyo later in August. He’ll be competing in all the cycling disciplines that he can—the road race, the time trial, and on the track, the pursuit and the kilo. In this episode he’ll preview a bit of what lies ahead at the Games. In 2009, Chernove was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome. It’s a degenerative d...

Guillaume Boivin is toughing it out now in the final stages of the Tour de France. He's faced crashes, heat, mountain climbs and a lack of vegetables. Listen to find out exactly what's going on with his diet. Boivin also discusses the Olympics. Near the beginning of July, he was named as the third rider, after Michael Woods and Hugo Houle, who will be at the road race in Tokyo . While still in the...

Adam de Vos can throw a punch. Most cyclists, it seems, can’t. Every few years though, there’s a dust-up in the peloton. It’s always a bit shocking, while the riders’ technique is usually cringeworthy . “That’s what I’m training for: that one time that it goes down in a race,” deadpans de Vos in his interview. “No. I’m just kidding,” he adds quickly. The rider from Victoria has been a pro since 20...

National road race champion Karol-Ann Canuel has held the maple-leaf jersey since 2019  – thanks to the pandemic. In this episode, she speaks about why it’s somewhat just that she still has the jersey that she’s so proud to wear. Canuel has been competing since she was 11. She came up through the influential Club cycliste d’Amos. She was fifth at the junior world championship road race in 2006. Sh...

Five years ago, on June 3, 2016, Jocelyn Lovell died. During his heyday in the 1970s, he was a supreme bike handler and race tactician. His skills got him more than 35 national titles in various events on the road and the track. He won gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and Pan Am Games and silver in the kilo at the track world championships in Munich in 1978. Lovell was smart, funny, feisty an...

How much coffee does Gunnar Holmgren travel with for a two-month stint of racing cross country in Europe? A lot. In this episode of the Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast, the under-23 rider from Orillia, Ont., who’s with the Quebec-based Pivot Cycles-OTE , not only discusses coffee, but World Cup mountain biking, ambitious cooking exploits, ambitious cyclocross projects and figure skating. Yes. Fi...

Lucas Cruz races for the Norco Factory Downhill team. As a junior, he was national champion in 2018. In 2019, he was third overall in the junior World Cup series and just 0.01 seconds off the podium at the Mont-Sainte-Anne world championships . He joined the elite downhill ranks in 2020. At last year’s Crankworx Summer Series, he won the Kicking Horse Dual Slalom .  Cruz seems like someone who’s a...

You’re probably familiar with Svein Tuft’s legendary tales, such as the time he used a broken hockey stick to chase away a wolf that was menacing him and his dog, or how he had a hairy mountaineering descent in the rain. But what used to freak him out? Well, it’s not wolves or slippery heights. Tuft retired from professional road cycling at the end of 2019. In November 2020, the Langley B.C., nati...

Like many Canadian cross country riders, Haley Smith has been doing a lot riding on the trails around Victoria. The Ontario mountain biker and her husband, who is also her Norco Factory teammate, Andrew L’Esperance, have been on the West Coast since early January. It’s the place to train for the season ahead because international travel is not an easy option right now. Smith is heading abroad soon...

At 6 p.m. on March 12, Lucy Hempstead climbed onto her bike, which was connected to her trainer, and started pedalling. She kept pedalling for 24 hours. At 6 p.m. the following day, she set a distance record, which is currently in the process of being ratified by Guinness World Records . Hempstead is from Ottawa and is a former runner. She’s faced anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, burnout a...

In February, Ryan Atkins took on his Seven Summits challenge. For seven days, he climbed, virtually that is, the highest peaks on each of the world’s continents. The place where he actually gained all that elevation was in and around his home in Sutton, Que., a little more than 100 km east of Montreal. The way he climbed was on a fat bike one day, on a virtual riding platform another and on a grav...

In early February, Chris Froome posted a photo on social media. It reads, “Can’t tell if @paulopowerwatts is happy with my numbers.” @paulopowerwatts is Paulo Saldanha, the head of performance at  Israel Start-Up Nation. He’s been working to get the four-time Tour de France winner back to the level he was at before his serious accident in June 2019. Saldanha has also been working closely with Mich...

Benjamin Perry from St. Catharines, Ont., is entering his first season on a WorldTour team, Astana - Premier Tech , after years in continental and pro continental outfits. If you look him up on ProCyclingStats , the site might lead you to believe that Perry came up through the North American road scene. Sure, he spent 2015 and 2016 on the influential continental team Silber Pro , and then went on...

Batty is a two-time Olympian. She's won the national cross country championships at the elite level five times and claimed bronze in two world championship competitions. Last year, Batty announced her departure from Trek Factory Racing . She had been with that organization for 12 years. In this interview, editor Matthew Pioro tries to find out more about the support she'll have this year. The conv...

Did you have a goal in 2020 that fell apart? Maybe an event you wanted to do well at? Maybe it was a riding-related goal that went out the window when you had to self-isolate or start managing your kid’s online classes. While there are reasons to have a bit of optimism for 2021, planning for the year ahead is still tricky. If you set a goal race, will it actually run, for example? Given the high p...

Was the 2020 road season Michael Woods's best season to date?  That's something debated here at Canadian Cycling Magazine so it's an idea editor Matthew Pioro wanted to explore with Woods himself. Despite breaking his leg in March, Woods had some great results when racing resumed in August. There was his stage win and two days in the leader's jersey at Tirreno-Adriatico, a stage win at the Vuelta...

Recently, Ryan Anderson announced his retirement from pro cycling. He’s been at it since 2008. In that time, he might not have risen to the same heights as say his frequent teammate Svein Tuft or some of his contemporaries, such as David Veilleux or Hugo Houle . But Anderson is the last of a certain generation of pro road cyclist. He’s been on all the influential Canadian road outfits of the past...

Maghalie Rochette, the Canadian and Pan Am cyclocross champion, has been in Europe for more than a month racing. In the past two weeks, things have gotten tougher for her. Cases of Covid-19 are growing in Europe. Countries have entered lockdowns. Some races are getting cancelled. But, oddly, others are forging ahead. On the Monday following Koppenberg Cross, which Rochette had raced, she was in he...

In June, Michael Barry discussed the UCI’s plan for a compressed 2020 road season . Recently, Canadian Cycling Magazine editor Matthew Pioro wanted to look back at some of Barry’s predictions from late spring. There is something unfair about looking back at predictions. In the best of times, guesses about the future are usually wrong. During this pandemic, it’s extremely hard to find any certainty...