1 Claire Rose – Podium Ambition p/b Club La Santa 0:44:12.821
2 Nikki Juniper – Team Ford Ecoboost 0:44:24.718
3 Alice Barnes – Drops Cycling Team 0:44:24.750
4 Grace Garner – Podium Ambition p/b Club La Santa 0:44:24.946
5 Annie Simpson – Drops Cycling Team 0:44:26.913
6 Hayley Jones – Team Breeze 0:44:27.955
7 Dame Sarah Storey – Podium Ambition p/b Club La Santa 0:44:47.236
8 Charlotte Broughton – Team Ford Ecoboost 0:45:49.677
9 Charlotte Alston – Team 22 0:45:49.745
10 Lydia Moylan – Team WNT 0:45:49.843
Team Results on the Night
1 Podium Ambition p/b Club La Santa 103
2 Drops Cycling Team 81
3 Team Ford Ecoboost 74
4 Team WNT 62
5 Team Breeze 59
6 Boot Out Breast Cancer Cycling Club 39
7 Sunsport Velo 27
8 Velo Schils – Interbike RT 23
9 Aprire HSS Hire 18
10 Team Jadan-Weldtite 10
11 Team Footon Velosport 6
Style, Performance and Individuality from New UK Based Online Store OMNIUM
I met Claire Pepper on a Bike Ride with Brunch organised by Queen of the Mountains and was excited to hear of her plans to launch OMNIUM a brand new, UK based, online store bringing together some previously hard-to-buy or as yet undiscovered cycling apparel from independent designers. Their focus is high performance road cycling kit and accessories, bringing together lots of smaller brands who are doing really interesting stuff and making them more accessible, especially to the UK market.
Claire’s background is photography, specialising in fashion and sportswear in e-commerce, and as a runner, cyclist and triathlete, she found women’s cycling clothing to be much more limited in terms of choice than the rest of the active wear market and decided to do something about it! With her partner Jonathan, a creative director and active racer for Dulwich Paragon, they have launched OMNIUM.
Most of the OMNIUM brands are small companies with a bit of a cult following, and until now some have been hard to get hold of in the UK. OMNIUM solves the problems of buying internationally such as customs charges and complicated returns!
The products are stylish, high performance, individual brands which will only be stocked in limited runs, keeping the offering of fresh and current items in-demand.
Starting with 7 brands and with 2 more coming soon, the selection comprises mostly of men’s and women’s jerseys, shorts, socks and caps. There are some eye-catching full kits from Minneapolis brand Twin Six and graphic-patterned base layers from Good Cycling, a brand from the Netherlands. One of the most popular items is a cap by Canadian brand Forward, which features a pair of cat-eyes on the underside of the peak.
Well worth taking a look if you would like to stand out from the crowd this summer!
OMNIUM BRANDS
Twin Six – USA – men’s & women’s jerseys with matching shorts, caps, socks, bidons
Angeles Creative – USA – men’s and women’s jerseys, high performance and distinctive
Brick Lane, in the heart of London’s East End and formerly known as Whitechapel Lane has always been a vibrant melting pot of a place and the earliest known record of its existence was on a woodcut map that was printed sometime during the 16th Century. It has been home to many communities of immigrants throughout its colourful history. Always a staging post to upward mobility. That mobility sometimes being slow, sometimes quite rapid. It has been home to French Huguenots, Ashkenazi Jews, and then Eastern European and Russian Jews in the early 20th century. It has been an epicentre of changing small scale industries centred around the clothing industry. Weaving, Leather making, Exquisite tailoring and the sweatshops of the rag trade. Home to Fagin and Jack The Ripper. It still retains its flavour of an amalgam of the new and tentative amidst wide boy small entrepreneurs. Shops momentarily flourishing displaying “vintage” clothing….aka, overpriced elegantly displayed jumble sales. The earnest Guardian reading fashionistas leaving their tatty chic boutiques to browse scratched vinyl records and other vendors tatty chic furniture. 35mm cameras that will never be used and they buy their fabulous Indian sub continent, Eastern European and Far Eastern street food lunches in cheap and plentiful non eco friendly styrofoam boxes.
The Truman Brewery’s disused premises opened above a now drained well in 1863 are themselves a tatty chic exhibition space in keeping with the area and ideal therefore to house the show “SPIN” devoted to the urban cycling revolution taking place in London, with a nod here and there to the sporting and serious leisure cycling side of things enabling the hipsters their radical touch of the esoteric work of cycling.
Spin was a show for Hipsters. No doubt whatsoever about that. There was the very deliberate wearing of 20,30,50 year old continental race team kit. I saw one guy. Beard long enough to plait and use as a climbing rope in his Gan team kit, hanging on Chris Boardman’s every word and nodding sagely as he munched on his tofu burger before clattering away in an ancient pair of wooden soled track shoes, converted to take the cleats of a set of middle ‘80s Look Classic pedals. Yes, it really was that sort of occasion. The exhibition was a truly enjoyable reflection of Brick lane’s very nature on to the world of cycling. There was a plentiful amount of beautifully crafted clothing, hand built bespoke bicycles (in steel of course) and the feeling that rather like the place 100 yards down Brick Lane that has now ceased attempting to trade in contemporary Vietnamese Folding food, many of them, for all of their skill and genuine innovation would struggle to stay in business much beyond two years or so. That is a great pity, because in the reviews that will follow shortly, I am going to take you on a wander through the best of SPIN and introduce you to some of the start up businesses that are attempting to take root.
If you’d not seen Rollapaluzza before, you might have been forgiven for turning away before you entered the place. They’d set up their usually thriving space and were attracting their usually lengthy queues accompanied by music so loud and a commentary so unintelligible that you have to walk away or give in. We walked away and that was the point at which we recognised the advantage of this very solid old building, step into the next room and the sound that filled the entrance hall was all but eliminated by the purposeful 19th century walls. A moment to reflect on some art work, depicting some of the greats of our sport….up to the 1990s (yes that was the first indicator) Bartolli, Coppi, Simpson, Merckx, Rijs, Anquetil, LeMond, Hinault, Boardman, Obree, Yndurain, Abdujaporov, and my hero (shut up… its my article) the finest climber of all time Marco(Il Pirate) Pantani. None of them were particularly flattering, but at Brick Lane prices I wasn’t going to be hanging one in my shed anyway.
The whole feel of the show was not so much a display of products to do with the world of cycling, but products that were designed to fit lifestyle choices of which cycling is but a part. Cycling fits very nicely into the choices made by the eco friendly….correction, obsessively eco friendly and thats not necessarily a bad thing, but there is a pedantic quirkiness about almost every exhibitor that makes sense to some. Indeed, with the exception of one or two of cycling better known brands. Boardman Elite and Bianchi, most were at the end of the cycling spectrum that says commuter or courier rider that seek form over function. Indeed the more conventional the product on offer the more out of place it looked.
A number of the products quirky or not, really did impress and I shall review them and in some cases road test them too. There was the stuff that did interest me. The bespoke frame builders, some of whom were brazing but joint and brazed steel frames that are becoming popular again amongst some sections of the regular cycling community. Sadly when we were there these craftsmen were not drawing anywhere near as much attention as the stand selling those bloody ridiculous Dura Ace equipped Bamboo framed bikes…… yes, exactly what I thought!
As I say, there was a kind of studied pedantry to the wares on offer. Quill stems, rat trap pedals with old style toe clips barely a modern pedal on view. I fell in love with a gorgeous titanium framed bike… The frame was brand spanking new, but everything on it was a (admittedly beautifully done) restored and refurbished ‘80s item. The entire group and finishing kit was old style 5 speed friction shift Campagnolo record. It gleamed. It stunned….. its price tag made me wince……. no, trust me you don’t want to know.
When it comes to anything approaching regular bike choices these folk are cautious. Yes I want something that says serious cyclist, but I don’t feel comfortable going into my LBS, so I’ll stick my nose in the trough with names I recognise Boardman, Bianchi and Cinelli… We can’t be seen to be going into Halfords or Evans and buying something cheaper and far more appropriate to our needs, it has to say chic. It has to say, “at weekends my other bike is a Porsche and my winters are spent at Cortina or Chamonix”.
Yes it was a Hipsters show and if thats your thing, good on yer. You’re riding a bike and anyone who has read my drivel before, knows that this will always get my vote. I half begged to be given this assignment and I’m glad I went for the few products that were in my jaded opinion worthy of attention and for the wonderful (and well attended) interview and Q&A with my hero of the entire show, Martyn Ashton. Will I go again next year? No. But I love Brick Lane, the street food etc, the tiny record stalls and the markets. I even like the quirky nature of SPIN….it’s just that very little of it was for me.
Woaw! A Big Deal for Eileen Roe as she seals her first win of 2016 in Round One of the Matrix Fitness GP in Scotland, wining a four-way sprint up-to the finish-line for Lares.
Round one of the Matrix Fitness Grand Prix took place in Motherwell this year. One of six-in-the-series, saw former National Circuit Champion and Scottish local Eileen Roe take the victory in a four-way sprint up-to the finish-line to the cheers of a home crowd.
Now riding for Belgium outfit Lares-Waowdeal on the continent, Eileen had wanted to returned home, feeling a little lonely after a nine-week stint in Europe. Being the only fluent English speaking girl on the squad, rode the first Women’s Lincoln Grand Prix on the weekend before finishing tenth, behind winner Alice Barnes, Drops Cycling Team, and Nikki Juniper, Team Ford Ecoboost who came in seventh.
It was Barnes that initiated the first move in Motherwell after Aprire-HSS Hire, Team WNT and Podium Ambition p/b Club La Santa drove the peloton for a couple of laps of the relatively square one-point-two-kilometre-circuit that finished with a long drag from the bottom final corner.
Juniper had counter-attacked and Roe knew which girls she had to look out for. She had seen how well Barnes rode to victory at Lincoln, and decided to go with group, with Annasley Park, Team Breeze joining them as the peloton strung apart, they soon built up a fifteen second lead.
The race was run over forty-five minutes with five final count-down laps to the finish line.
With two laps to go there was a pile up which unfortunately took out Mel Lowther who was later taken to hospital to be checked over.
The four leading riders increased to a twenty-five second gap on the chasing group as they started passing back-markers. An aggressive ride by Barnes also saw her claiming the two sprints and the jersey along the way.
It looked at one point like the main peloton would reel-them-in with Podium Ambitions Gabby Shaw and Lauren Creamer chasing hard, and Jo Tindley and Lydia Boylan, Team WNT taking over, but the impetus went off and the four extended their lead.
With the final laps quickly approaching, the girls started looking across at each-others moves, trying to anticipate who would be their biggest rival.
As the final one-hundred meters marker pasted, it was Eileen that kicked the hardest to win the second visit to the Motherwell round on the Matrix Fitness GP.
Chris Maher of CyclingShorts.cc catches up with the delightful Eileen Roe after her solo effort at round two of the Matrix Fitness GP in Motherwell.
Talking to Eileen after the race she had said, “There was a rider represented from each team” in their group, and she though if they worked together, they would say away to the end”.
“I guess that they weren’t bothered about myself because the Tour Series is all about the “team” this year. So I think they were happy to have me along with them and contributing to the work”.
She went on to say that she wouldn’t be contesting any more of the Matrix Series as she returning back to her own team duties shortly before starting a big block of European racing on the continent. Firstly a big 1.1 UCI event in Belgium, the Gooik-Geraardsbergen-Gooik on May 29th, from then-on it continues every week, she went on to say. Check out this Testogen review that is one of the most popular fitness products that can really work out for you.
This is Eileen’s first win of the season, finishing third in the recent Dwars door Vlaanderen.
Results:
Team Classification & Overall after Round One
Rank Team Points
1 Drops Cycling Team 98
2 Team Breeze 79
3 Team Ford Ecoboost 78
4 Podium Ambition p/b Club La Santa 70
5 Team WNT 52
6 Aprire HSS Hire 25
7 Velo Schils – Interbike RT 23
8 Sunsport Velo 21
Sprint 1
1 100 Alice Barnes Drops Cycling Team 5
2 147 Annasley Park Team Breeze 4
3 256 Eileen Roe Lares Waowdeals 3
4 180 Nikki Juniper Team Ford Ecoboost 2
5 27 Jo Tindley Team WNT 1
Sprint 2
1 100 Alice Barnes Drops Cycling Team 5
2 256 Eileen Roe Lares Waowdeals 4
3 147 Annasley Park Team Breeze 3
4 180 Nikki Juniper Team Ford Ecoboost 2
5 27 Jo Tindley Team WNT 1
Sprints Classification & Overall after Round One
1 100 Alice Barnes Drops Cycling Team 10
2 256 Eileen Roe Lares Waowdeals 7
3 147 Annasley Park Team Breeze 7
4 180 Nikki Juniper Team Ford Ecoboost 4
5 27 Jo Tindley Team WNT 2
Individual Round Classification
Rank – Bib – Name – Team – Race Time – Laps Completed – Points
Chris Maher of CyclingShorts.cc catches up with the delightful Eileen Roe of team Lares Waowdeals after her solo effort at round two of the Matrix Fitness GP in Motherwell. Click below to listen to the interview.
The first ever Women’s Lincoln Grnd Prix was a fantastic start to days racing. The 8 lap race was run off at almost 24mph as Alice Barnes crossed the line in 2hours 38mins.
Highlights from the first women’s Lincoln Grand Prix, the third round of the Women’s Road Series. May 15th 2016
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Spin was a show for Hipsters. No doubt whatsoever about that. There was the very deliberate wearing of 20,30,50 year old continental race team kit. I saw one guy. Beard long enough to plait and use as a climbing rope in his Gan team kit, hanging on 
A number of the products quirky or not, really did impress and I shall review them and in some cases road test them too. There was the stuff that did interest me. The bespoke frame builders, some of whom were brazing but joint and brazed steel frames that are becoming popular again amongst some sections of the regular cycling community. Sadly when we were there these craftsmen were not drawing anywhere near as much attention as the stand selling those bloody ridiculous Dura Ace equipped Bamboo framed bikes…… yes, exactly what I thought!