AWARDS 30TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

DEFINING EVENT OF OUR LIFETIME

In 1993, a year on from Cycling Plus’s debut, an event emerged that would define a new era of mass participation cycling: L’Etape du Tour. The idea behind ‘the stage of the tour’ was to copy a key mountain stage of the Tour de France in any given year for thousands of amateur cyclists. For the many cyclists who have since got into road cycling, it’s always been the major aspirational ride to target, a bucket list ride that sees all who compete in it for the first time come of age as a roadie. Arguably, it’s the event at the very centre of the cycling boom of middle-aged people over the past three decades, where people once considered over-the-hill in terms of endurance sport chose to throw themselves into previously unimagined physical challenges. We’ve covered it many times over the past 30 years, most recently at the blazingly hot 2015 edition in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne for issue 312. After two cancelled editions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the return in 2022 is highly anticipated, particularly given its finish on the most Etape du Tour climb ever: Alpe d’Huez. General entry is sold out, but you can secure a ride with official race partners such as Sports Tours International.

WOULDN’T GET COMMISSIONED TODAY

We thought we’d have to go further down the rabbit hole to find a suitable candidate for this, but we didn’t need to look beyond the Big Ride feature of issue 310, which appeared in the February 2016 issue. At the time we were happy with the article – ‘The Big Skive’ – in which I, for the sake of the narrative, ‘pulled a sickie’ from work