The fourth stage of the Tour of Britain begins beneath the ruins of a castle whose medieval lord was one of the barons appointed to enforce Magna Carta, then travels across a part of Yorkshire where almost every change in…
Stage 3 begins beside a river that made a city and soon reaches a sea that is slowly destroying a coastline. From Hull, the Tour of Britain travels east across Holderness until the land ends at the North Sea. The…
The second stage of the Tour of Britain begins and ends in two Lincolnshire towns whose histories were transformed by journeys away from them. From Boston, religious dissenters crossed the North Sea and eventually the Atlantic, carrying with them a…
There are few better places in Britain to begin a bicycle race than the square between Lincoln Castle and Lincoln Cathedral. On one side stands a fortress ordered by William the Conqueror after the Norman invasion; on the other rises…
Some races belong to cities. Milan-Sanremo begins in one and ends in another, Paris-Roubaix carries the names of two, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège describes its journey before the riders have even started. The Bretagne Classic belongs instead to a small Breton town…
There are stages in which the geography seems to have been designed with little sympathy for cyclists. Stage 9 of the 2026 Vuelta a España is one of them. From the Mediterranean at Villajoyosa, the road turns almost immediately towards…
There is always more than one journey hidden inside a cycling stage. The first is the one we watch: riders attacking and chasing, gaps opening and closing, gradients rising on the screen and the number of kilometres to the finish…
