Popularity Contests

As we career towards the weekend I wanted something apart from the Tour Down Under to talk about so I set off to trawl the internet for you.

Everything is very much gearing up for the new season all over the place, including ITV.com’s new look Tour de France website, as they look forward to the Yorkshire start this year. Have a look, as Ned Boulting says,

Here it is. http://t.co/G1C8RZaPb8

— Ned Boulting (@nedboulting) January 22, 2014

Geraint Thomas is also looking forward as he starts his season in Australia.

In mountain bike news, the only professional British based cross country team has made a big name signing for this year and actually also turns up in some surprisingly accurate local news reporting about mountain biking, which is a shock.

There was also good news for anyone wanting to buy their own gravity-biased bike park as one is very much on sale (and hopefully there will be a buyer in order to keep the facility open). It’s a good time for trail centres as mountain biking grows and people are too lazy to look for their own natural routes (I’m not moaning, it keeps them less busy for me), and downhill centres are definitely popular as shown by the new Bike Park Wales centre.

That growth in popularity is perhaps best highlighted by this story of a top-value range of bikes brought in to Go Outdoors and selling out faster than anyone expected off the back of a good review. For every newbie on the trails with an overblown high spec bike there’s far more getting involved on bikes worth under £500 and that’s a good thing.

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