The Mandelo race series ran for 15 years in Ireland. Every Tuesday night, rain or shine, volunteers showed up and made it happen. Then last week it was cancelled. Not because of insurance, not because of money. Because the volunteers burned out and Cycling Ireland, whose entire mandate is to promote cycling in Ireland, did nothing to stop it. That's the trend Anthony and Sarah are actually talking about this week on the podcast.
Key Takeaways
The Eurosport story is part of the same problem. Terrestrial TV cycling in Ireland and the UK is gone. Discovery+ is now €6.99 a month to watch races that used to be free. That doesn't sound like much but it's one more door closing on casual fans who might have become cyclists. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin on Channel 4 was how a lot of people got into this sport. That pipeline is done. And Cycling Ireland's road race calendar has been collapsing for a decade with races like the Shay Elliott, the Bogman, the Ballina Rás and the Tour of Ulster all gone.
On the tech side, if you're arguing with a training partner about aero versus lightweight wheels, aero wins on anything close to flat above 25-30 km/h. Above that speed, aerodynamic drag is your main enemy, not rotating weight. Lightweight only makes sense if you're going purely uphill where you're fighting gravity every pedal stroke. On normalized versus average power: average is just total output divided by time. Normalized power accounts for the spikes. If you do 1,000-watt sprint efforts out of every corner in a criterium and then freewheel back to the bunch, your average might read 200 watts, but your normalized power could be 290. That gap is the physiological cost your body actually paid. Also worth noting from listener Tyler van Brooklyn, who trains BJJ: antibacterial soap strips the skin's microbiome and makes saddle sore problems worse. Natural essential oil-based soaps preserve the healthy bacteria that fight the bad stuff.
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The Peloton episode covers what happens when cycling culture gets turned into a product and the audience walks away. And if the UCI presidency frustrates you, the marginal gains episode goes into how Team Sky operated under the same governing body and played the rules their own way.