Category: Cycling

Gary Imlach prepares for one final race as La Grande Boucle moves behind a paywall after 40 years on ITV and Channel 4

When the last rider rolls across the Tour de France finish line in Paris on 27 July it will mark more than the end of the world’s most prestigious bike race. Once Gary Imlach and team have wrapped up, it will conclude four decades of free-to-air Tour coverage for British TV viewers.

While the sport, and the technology used to broadcast it, have transformed since the 1980s, the excellence of the ITV programme (previously on Channel 4) has been constant.

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The Tour de France stage winner talks in detail for the first time about transitioning when her cycling career ended, growing up in the Gorbals and alienation in the peloton

Pippa York used to be Robert Millar, a stage winner and king of the mountains in the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia. Millar was also a podium finisher, in both the Vuelta a España and the Giro, a British national champion, and Tour of Britain winner. But Millar had also wanted to be a girl since the age of five, a secret that remained buried throughout childhood in Glasgow, the subsequent racing career, and beyond, into mid-life.

In her new book, The Escape, written in collaboration with David Walsh, the 66-year-old unflinchingly documents the long and painful process towards transition and the isolation, fear and loneliness that went with it.

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• New Zealander claims overall victory at the last

• Lorena Wiebes takes the stage win for SD Worx-Protime

The teenage prodigy Cat Ferguson came within a hair’s breadth of executing a memorable overall win in her debut Tour of Britain, but was outsprinted by her rival Ally Wollaston at the climax of the final stage in Glasgow.

The pair came into the final sprint tied on time, after Wollaston had erased the 19-year-old Ferguson’s overall lead. Bonus seconds for third place in the final sprint, behind the stage winner, Lorena Wiebes, was enough for the New Zealander to snatch the overall win.

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• Young British rider takes penultimate stage and GC lead

• Former leader Kim Le Court among those to abandon

The 19-year-old Cat Ferguson prevailed in foul conditions at the finish to claim victory on a crash-packed stage three of the Women’s Tour of Britain and with it the general classification lead. It was her first UCI Women’s World Tour stage victory.

Ferguson (Movistar) from Skipton, North Yorkshire, surged clear across the cobbles in Kelso to lead home a British one-two in front of Josie Nelson (Picnic-PostNL). New Zealand’s Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) finished third, with the Dutch rider Karlijn Swinkels (UAE Team ADQ) in fourth.

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Former Crystal Palace captain aims to complete the entire course for seventh time to raise funds for Cure Leukaemia

When Geoff Thomas was forced to abandon his seventh attempt to complete Tour 21 at the age of 58 after an unforgiving day on the cobblestones, the former Crystal Palace captain thought his days in the saddle were over. “My bike sort of disintegrated underneath me,” remembers Thomas. “That’s when the issues with my knees started so I’d not really been on the bike since then.”

But, two years on and having celebrated his 60th birthday earlier this year, he will join the group of amateur riders in tackling the entire Tour de France route a week before the pros, a ride of nearly 3,500km to raise money for Cure Leukaemia.

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• Kristen Faulkner takes green jersey from Kim Le Court

• Cat Ferguson fourth in GC as Canadian rider wins stage

Mara Roldan pulled off a successful late breakaway on the steep approach to Saltburn-by-the-Sea, winning the second stage of the Tour of Britain Women by 12 seconds.

The 21-year-old, who hails from Canada’s Yukon territory, made a push for victory with 14km to go and held on to win ahead of Riejanne Markus (Lidl-Trek). British teenager Cat Ferguson (Movistar) finished fifth for the second stage in a row, just behind third-placed Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) and Roldan’s Picnic-Post NL teammate, Megan Jastrab.

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• Kim Le Court takes first stage win and overall lead

• Cat Ferguson is first British finisher back in fifth

There was personal celebration but professional frustration for Lizzie Deignan on the opening day of her final Tour of Britain when her Lidl-Trek team failed to stop the Mauritian national champion, Kim Le Court, taking the first stage win and overall race lead in Redcar.

Deignan’s valedictory race on ­British roads began with a fast 85.6km opening stage, from Dalby Forest to the beachfront in Redcar, and took in some of her longstanding ­training roads within an hour or so of her home in Otley, West Yorkshire.

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• Tour of Britain will mark end of era for the 36-year-old

• Cat Ferguson, 19, will make her debut in four-day race

An emotional Lizzie Deignan will end her years racing on home roads with a farewell appearance in the four-day Tour of Britain, which begins in Dalby Forest. “I’m really pleased that the race starts in Yorkshire and finishes in Glasgow, because I’ve got amazing memories of my career there,” she said. “I’m really excited about it.”

Deignan retires at the end of this season and described herself as “incredibly emotional” about ­coming to the end of a career that included an Olympic silver medal at London 2012 and a Commonwealth Games gold medal in Glasgow in 2014, as well as victory in the first women’s Paris-Roubaix and the world road race title in 2015.

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Del Toro and Carapaz became distracted by each other, allowing the Lancastrian to claim a second Grand Tour

The Mexican standoff is a much-loved cinematic device, but the stalemate beloved of western movie script writers has rarely, if ever, decided one of cycling’s Grand Tours. The 2025 Giro d’Italia was the exception, appositely as the biggest loser was an actual Mexican, Isaac del Toro, with the unassuming Lancastrian Simon Yates the two-wheeled equivalent of the bandit who skips off with the loot, while two other bandits – in this case Richard Carapaz and Del Toro – stare each other down waiting for the other man to blink.

Yates’s second career Grand Tour win, forged on the Colle delle Finestre on Saturday afternoon in a peerless display of courage and cunning, and sealed 24 hours later in the streets of Rome, will go down in cycling’s annals as one of the most improbable heists the sport has witnessed.

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• Lancastrian claims second Grand Tour victory

• ‘I’m in disbelief I have managed to pull it off’

Simon Yates reflected on a “sweet success” he had been targeting for much of his life after a spectacular and decisive coup in Saturday’s final mountain stage ensured he would ride to victory in the Giro d’Italia on Sunday.

At 32, the Lancastrian had not been tipped to add to his sole Grand Tour victory, the 2018 Tour of Spain, but in the mammoth stage over the Colle Delle Finestre, he confounded those expectations to win the sport’s second most prestigious race, after the Tour de France.

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• Visma-Lease a Bike rider secures second Grand Tour title

• Yates lost 2018 Giro after cracking on Colle delle Finestre

Simon Yates arrived in Rome, was blessed by Pope Leo XIV and then completed a miraculous overall victory in the 2025 Giro d’Italia, seven years after his race lead had traumatically dissolved with victory in his grasp.

The Lancastrian rider’s remarkable turnaround in Saturday’s final mountain stage, in which Yates leapfrogged 21-year-old Giro debutant and race leader, Isaac del Toro and podium rival, Richard Carapaz, to take a near four-minute overall lead, was one of the most stunning in Grand Tour racing.

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Simon Yates safely finished the final day and his Visma–Lease A Bike teammate Olav Kooij claimed stage victory

“I never truly believed until the very last moment there,” Yates told the reporter and former pro rider, Adam Blythe. “I’m speechless, really.

“It’s still sinking in … I couldn’t hold back the tears. It’s something I’ve worked towards … yeah. I’ve had a lot of setbacks, but I finally managed to pull it off.”

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• Frenchman breaks clear to claim victory on brutal ride

• Simon Yates still in third spot in general classification

Nicolas Prodhomme claimed the first Grand Tour stage win of his career when he rode solo to victory on stage 19 of the Giro d’Italia on Friday, while Mexico’s pink jersey holder, Isaac del Toro, came second to extend his overall lead.

On their penultimate day in the mountains, the riders faced a brutal 166km ride from Biella to Champoluc with five classified climbs and a total elevation gain of nearly 5,000m. Prodhomme, from the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale team, broke free on the fourth climb to take the lead and eventually the victory to become the first Frenchman to win a Giro stage this year.

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