King of the Ride

Fresh off hosting the 2nd annual Growler bike race and the 16th annual Levi's Gran Fondo, Levi sits down with Ted to talk about the state of cycling here in North America. The Growler has the crown of the highest purse of any one day race in the world... let that soak in for a second. Bigger than winning Paris-Roubaix or a Tour de France stage. $156,000 is up for grabs and the race draws road race...

Ted sits down with a return guest, Jan Heine of Rene Herse Cycles and Bicycle Quarterly, to discuss how to be fast in the modern age of cycling. "Get low and pedal faster", right? Well... there's a lot of truth to that, but there's a lot more nuance to it. Tire widths, frontal exposure, riding with aero this and that, this dynamic duo talks through lots of the hot button issues on the tip of grave...

Quoc Pham has the work ethic of a World Tour pro cyclist, the design savvy to walk a Parisian runway, and an upbringing that’s extremely unique in the cycling world as a refugee from Vietnam. He launched his eponymous shoe company, Quoc, back in 2009 which has seen many iterations from a dapper commuter, to a fashionable boot, then with the release of the Grand Tourer he ventured into the backpack...

Chase Wark and I set out on a pretty wild adventure on Sunday March 26, separately but for the same purpose. Purposes, rather. We were both seeking an FKT on the Mega Midsouth and in a much bigger picture, we were seeking to raise funds for the United Way of Payne County.  This podcast is in conjunction with The Stable Cyclist and covers a lot from a very busy weekend in Oklahoma. Please enjoy. I...

Maghalie is a supremely successful professional cyclist with a lengthy list of palmares including nearly 50 UCI wins, World Cup podiums, and loads of national titles. She's in the midst of being a cyclocross racer with her heart and soul in the sport that is thriving in Belgium and is trying to find its legs elsewhere. You can find Maghalie and her Dirty Talks podcast here: https://open.spotify.co...

Hello and welcome back to King of the Ride! Today is a bit of cross-pollination. I am drawing from a recent Gravel Kings podcast, where Laura, Stu, and I sit down to dissect Race Around Rwanda in a two part recap. But here we've distilled it down into one episode. So, please do yourself a favor and hit SUBSCRIBE on Gravel Kings. We're three hosts with radically different cycling backgrounds talkin...

One of my favorite things to do in this podcast is to talk with the How I Built This style, namely to chat with the movers, shakers, and entrepreneurs to hear how they started their business. Amid being a professional athlete and then coach, Dirk started TrainingPeaks, which at this point has to be among the most popular pieces of training software on the planet. Every single Tour de France team,...

You likely know Cam Wurf from his exploits on a bike. He set record after record in the Ironman World Championships on the bike leg, then stepped back into the UCI World Tour after a six-year hiatus and has been working his way into headlines since. He's an Ironman winning athlete, generally found somewhere on the podium when the race is a wrap, but he's also known for wild exploits like running a...

They don't get more genuine than Chase Wark. Maybe that's those northern midwest roots, now living in the hallowed Driftless region of Minnesota (...home to the US national gravel championships, as we'll discuss today). No stranger to big results, to gravel beef controversy, to aero gains, and diving deep in search of the spirit of gravel, Chase brings a lot to the table as you'll learn today. Fol...

Finding a single word or short phrase that encompasses all that Christian does is easier said than done. Furthermore, I'm not sure in which order to put those three words, Cyclist, Ultrarunner, Entrepreneur, because over his life he juggles all three. Christian is a long time professional cyclist turned race winning ultra trail runner. He's also started a number of successful businesses in beautif...

Bond Almand just rode a record setting pace from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina. Over 75 absolutely wild days, Bond rode into ferocious headwinds, among throngs of cities, highways, oil fields, high mountains, great plains and desert, and so much more to make it to Ushuaia, Argentina.  More than 13,500+ miles later, he made it. Keep his website nearby: www.bondalmand.c...

Melisa Rollins is our esteemed guest today. She’s been in the game for a handful of years, but she’s quickly turning heads, especially here in 2024. Earning the most acclaim was a smashing victory at Leadville, the hallowed 100 mile mountain bike race scraping across some of Colorado’s highest peaks. She just won Iceman Cometh. She was second in the life time Grand Prix. She’s won Chequamegon, she...

Luke immediately proved his worth stepping into the World Tour, coming third in his first ever race with Soudol Quick-Step having helped deliver his teammate to the victory. He finished 7th at Kuurne Brussels Kuurne, won a stage of Czech Tour, and has a boatload of results coming up through the ranks prior to this year, including back to back to back US criterium national titles. As if it doesn't...

In particular, "Brussels Gravel" is on topic today. There has been lots of chatter about the course itself. The less than enthusiastically dubbed bike path world championships. In this conversation, Laura and Ted break down their perspectives on the course itself and what Belgium has to offer; the astounding level of World Tour competition (looking at you Lotto Kopecky and Mathieu van der Poel!);...

Jessie Diggins' name is synonymous with success for US cross country skiing. She broke the drought for all of American skiers as she and Kikkan Randall (episode 36) won the first gold medal for the United States in 2018. Jessie is a four time Olympic medalist, a six time world champion medalist, an author, and activist working with The Emily Project and Protect Our Winters (POW) as a winter athlet...

Smack in the middle of finding success (and the yellow jersey!) at the Green Mountain Stage Race, I wanted to sit down and talk with Sam Boardman about all things contemporary professional cycling. From his days at UCLA through the wild times at Wildlife Generation and Legion, right up through the present in his impressive European debut with Project Echelon, Sam has stories to tell! And if you ca...

Welcome one of the world's very best at cyclocross (and pretty handy on all types of bikes), Joris Nieuwenhuis! Joris is a multi-time national champion of cyclocross for the Netherlands, he earned a silver medal at the 2023/24 UCI cyclocross world championships, he's raced the Tour de France twice, has won on the World Cup stage, and plenty of others.  We met up in Sweden as we were taking part in...

Adam Roberge is on a tear. By my count, he's won the past three consecutive races, four out of the past five, plus plenty more to his tally this year alone. Today we'll talk about all the things you might imagine, the two of us racing together and landing in identical spots on consecutive weekends, how he got into cycling, what's happening with the general state of cycling in Canada, and his natio...

It’s July so it’s Tour de France time! I’m thrilled to have our guest on the podcast, Sam Bewley. A Tour de France rider himself, a Tour commentator and sports director, we're here to shed light on what's happening now two weeks into a very exciting Tour. Sam is a New Zealander living in Europe, courtesy of the bicycle. He won a world championship medalist on the track, then  graduated to the Worl...

Daniel Oss is the man. This long time World Tour professional raced on some of the biggest teams alongside some of the biggest names in the sport. From Liquigas to BMC to Bora-Hansgrohe to TotalEnergies, he was easy to pick out from the bunch with his rock-star long hair. He was also nearly always at the front and often pulling Peter Sagan along to victory. He's now a gravel privateer as well as a...

Roger Brown has a fan club. He's a four time Unbound rider, has accumulated more than 800 miles across the Kansas plains (which marks a considerable portion of his lifetime mileage). He's a father of four, a co-owner of mine at UnTapped , and he back for another edition of Unbound and another podcast!  If you enjoy this show, check out his previous three episodes number 113, 91, and 75. Also, chec...

Your 2024 Unbound 200 men's champion, ladies and gentlemen! Lots to talk about in this episode as Lachlan and Ted chat for nearly 90 minutes on all things bikes. From Lachlan's entry into the sport, his tough time in the World Tour, Lachlan and Ted's shared time in gravel and its enigmatic future, and of course ample race analysis from Unbound. Follow Lachlan's wild exploits at @lachlanmorton And...

There are certain people to watch for the win on any UCI road race start line and Matej Mohoric is certainly among them. He's won the road world championships as a junior and then u-23 rider, he's won three stages of the Tour de France, plus one stages each in the Giro and Vuelta. He tallied a monument, dramatically winning Milan-San Remo, dramatically in the first known case of a race win on a dr...

Many people who end up among the infrastructure of cycling begin as cyclists themselves. If they make it to the professional ranks, they often segue to professional cycling as mechanics, team directors, team managers, or soigneurs. It's rare that the timetable is reverse and they go from a professional soigneur to a professional cyclist, but that's exactly the scenario which "Gee" has experienced....

Christopher Blevins is on a tear. Winning the opening round of the UCI cross-country mountain bike race in Brazil here in 2024, he finished with the silver medal the next week in round two. Wearing the stars and stripes as the reigning US national champion, Chris has the Olympics high on his mind this summer going into Paris. From his early days on the BMX bike to showing stellar results on both t...