Joshua Tarling is riding through his first Tour de France, but it's not the experience he must've imagined. Coming back from a miraculous recovery following his Tour Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes, the 22-year-old Brit was counting days and hours to be (somewhat) ready for the Grand Dpart. And while hisbrok...

Stage 10 of the Tour de France not only reinforced Tadej Pogacars dominance, it also sparked an unexpected debate about Jonas Vingegaards condition. In the latest episode of The Move, Lance Armstrong, Bradley Wiggins, George Hincapie, and Spencer Martin dissected the Danes situation after anoth...

As the Tour de France heads into breakaway territory, theoretically giving lesser-known riders a chance of glory, Britains first stage winner of this years race could come from an unlikely source of sorts.Abel Balderstone, 26, is making his Tour debut for Spanish wildcard team Caja Rural-Seguros RGA just under a year after finishing 13th overall at the Vuelta a Espaa.His name is a mix of classic Catalan and English. Abel is a common name in Catalonia; Balderstone, meanwhile, has its origins in Lancashire, the English county where his father John Mark was born and raised in the town of Lancaster, to be precise.When John was 24, he moved to northern Spain to become an English teacher, met his wife and in 2000 they gave birth to Abel, their second son.Balderstone, who has been racing with Caja Rural since 2022 and was the Spanish time trial champion in 2025, has been building a good reputation for himself in recent years, and could feature in the mountain days in the coming fortnight.I want to be a protagonist, he tells Cycling Weekly. I agree that this [second] week is more important, but UAE as a team are very strong and if they dont want a breakaway to go, it wont. We hope that they can give a little bit of margin for the breakaway.Should Balderstone achieve an unlikely victory, it will be held up as Spains first success of this edition of the race, but would also be partly claimed by the UK. In my childhood we went a lot to the UK, at least twice a year. Always at Christmas and in the summer, until I was 12 or 13 when my grandparents died, Balderstone says.His entire life, however, has been spent in Spain. I feel very Catalan, he says. My mum is very Catalan and in the house we all speak Catalan. But my dad is still very English. He has traditions and ways of acting that come from his English roots. For example he has tea every morning and another tea at merendar afternoon snack. He also cooks a lot of English dishes that we dont eat in Spain.Balderstone is speaking to CW in Spanish, the language hes most comfortable in alongside Catalan. I understand English really well, and my dad and his family speak to me in English, but I dont really use it myself, he says.I find it difficult and its a little embarrassing to be honest. But I just dont really get to use it, to practice it. When I do I have to think of the words in Catalan and then translate it into English to create the sentence so it takes time. But poco a poco little by little.What he does know is how to pronounce his surname unlike his Spanish compatriots. Its Bawl-der-stun, rather than Bal-der-ston. Its true that in Spain people dont say it correctly, he laughs.Balderstone came into the Tour as a possible GC option for Caja after his impressive performance at the Vuelta last year, but it was his teammate Alex Molenaar who was most prominent for the Spanish team in the first week until he crashed out on stage five.It was a pretty positive week with Alex getting the polka dot jersey [on two] and being in two breakaways, Balderstone says. I knew going for the GC myself would be complicated, so attacking and going in the breakaways was my intention. He was in the break on stage three to Les Angles and wants to appear again. Theres still a lot of the Tour to come so Ill keep trying, he adds. But to get in the breaks you have to fight so hard and they take much longer to form. You notice once youre here that its the hardest race that there is.In recent weeks, Spanish publication Marca has reported that Balderstone will move to UAE Team Emirates-XRG next season. The rider has a contract until the end of the 2027 season with Caja, but admitted that he would find it hard to turn down a move to the top-tier.Ive been with Caja for four years, Ive grown with them, and Im very happy here, but Ive always said that my dream is to go to the WorldTour, to learn and to grow as a person and a cyclist, he says.Im always open to speaking to WorldTour teams to see if there are options. Theres always conversation but it's up in the air.For now, the man who has roots in northern England is just focused on leaving his mark at his maiden Tour de France. To be in the race means a lot. Its something I dreamt about since I was a kid so its a dream come true to be here. It's a luxury Im lucky to be able to ride it.

We look at the bike computers being used by all 23 teams, from flagship models to the devices riders choose on race day

Team Visma | Lease a Bike are preparing for further talks with Jonas Vingegaard this winter after the Danish rider confirmed that he almost walked away from cycling over winter. Vingegaard told media on Sunday that he approached the Dutch team's management last winter and asked for a change to his s...

Ever been to Nevers? If not, chances are that its come to you because Nevers is the capital city of clipless pedals.The city sits in central France on the bank of the Loire river, bank as in singular as the city is on the northern side and theres little to the south. It sounds like the town that likes to say no but the name comes from new fort in Roman times.Fast forward nearly 2,000 years and an industrialist from Nevers called Jean Beyl had a company making rubber bladders. One winter in the late 1940s he went skiing and broke his foot. Convinced the ski bindings were to blame for the injury he had his eureka moment to make a metal plate on the ski that would rotate in the event of a fall and use elastic bindings to help movement in an accident too.Beyl wasnt the first inventor of quick release ski bindings, Norways Hjalmar Hvam broke his leg skiing and came up with a similar idea, and earlier too. But he was a competition skiier and Beyl an industrialist with ready capital and labour. So Beyl perfected a quick release ski binding and soon the Look Nevada became the market leader. The English name of Look traded on post-war enthusiasm for all things American. The business flourished during a time when skiing became a mass activity and a growing market.Only Look went bankrupt in the early 1980s during a period of upheaval in the French economy. Entrepreneur Bernard Tapie bought the firm out of bankruptcy for one franc and part of the turn-around was to enter the cycling market. Ski boots and bindings had plenty in common with cycling shoes and pedals. But most cyclists used small cleats with a grove to hold the shoe on the pedals and secured this with a leather strap. Look wanted tocopy the automatique ski bindings to replace this. And just like the ski bindings before, Look didnt invent clipless pedals, it refined them.Tapies marketing abilities with the La Vie Claire team then the wonder team seen at the cutting edge of sports science helped sales soar, Look pedals won the 1985 Tour. To this day Look retains the Mondrian-inspired white, red, yellow and blue quadrilaterals branding that were first used for the team and then adopted by Look and also other companies in Tapies conglomerate. You can see it on packaging and also the factory walls in Nevers too.Embed from Getty ImagesOusted from Look as a result of the bankruptcy proceedings, Beyl went on to create Time with his son-in-law Rolland Cattin in 1987. The company was also based in Nevers and hit the ground running,Pedro Delgado won the Tour de France in 1988 with Time pedals and shoes, so did Greg Lemond in 1989 Tour, and with white shoes too, ubiquitous today but until 1989 shoes were almost always black, with a few grey or blue options.Time thrived for a while and Tom Boonen was on a Time frame with Time pedals when he won the Worlds in 2005. But the company lost ground was in financial difficulty with different owners trying to relaunch it. Confusingly Look Cycle was bought out by some of its managers while Time was taken over by ski brand Rossignol which also has the Look ski bindings business. In 2021 Time was bought by SRAM where the Time Sport brand lives on for pedals.Today there are separate Look factories in Nevers for ski bindings and cycling and while they share a name, they are not the same business. The Look Cycle pedals business has recovered too. In 2021 Look Cycle brought back all some of its activities in Asia to concentrate in production in Nevers and now about 80% of its pedals are made here. It also makes road, gravel, MTB and track frames.Well see who wins in Nevers. Cofidis with their Look bikes and pedals would be ideal for this postcard but todays preview suggests thats a tall order. If Biniam Girmay wins itll be on Time pedals and so a connection to Nevers. Jasper Philipsen and Tim Merlier use Shimano pedals but theres actually a Nevers connection as while Shimano has its proprietary SPD cleats, it also has a line of road pedals that are licenced from Look Cycle which use larger,triangular plastic cleats similar to the design used by Look for decades. And while Decathlon-CMA CGMs Olav Kooij rides a bike with SRAM components, he and his team mates are on Look pedals. Made in Nevers.The post Postcard from Nevers first appeared on The Inner Ring.