While I’ve been gone there was news in the form of the announcement of the Tour de France route for next year. It looks to be a broadly French affair, with a minimum of time trialling. Given the shape of the course there are already questions around whether Chris Froome will ride this one, relying as he does on steady climbing with solid time trialling to cement his racing, the same token would put Wiggins out of the running as well and it may be a route set up for one of the new guard of French riders, or a climber in the shape of Quintana or Kwiatkowski perhaps.
In other news on routes there has been ongoing concern over work on bridleways in the Peak District where trails have been unsympathetically surfaced in a way that not only ruins the feel of the track, but also utterly destroys the fun of the riding and from there threatens to remove the reason for mountain bikers to visit and spend money. This has reached something of a head this week where work has happened on the iconic trail on Rushup Edge. This is one of my favourites and makes me glad I rode it in both directions in the summer if that’s the last time it’ll be ridden as it was.
Mountain bikers are up in arms on the Singletrack World forum with good reason and have organised a peaceful picnic protest which took place yesterday. But other outdoor groups are equally upset, with the possible exception of horse riders alone, who seem to possibly be behind the pressure on Derbyshire CC to do the work.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this as it seems that Derbyshire CC have not engaged with requests for answers from Singletrack, and are not responding to a brilliant amount of pressure and comments on the DCC Facebook page.
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