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This week Talking Luft’s Top Six Most Influential is from one of my personal favourite races with one of my best mates from the peloton: it’s the Vuelta España with Sam Bewley.

Sam had a great career on the road, riding all three Grand Tours in his thirteen-year pro career and is now a successful DS at Israel Premier Tech. We were teammates at Green Edge and rode a couple of our Vuelta’s together back in the day, which made making this pod even better!

Each Grand Tour has its own characteristics, and the Vuelta would have to be the wildest of the three. We both raced there in the 2010s when the race was settling into its current format with the super tough finishes and more open racing than we were used to at the time.

As always, our selection of the most influential parts of the race includes some of the action from the stages, but also the stories, the climbs, crosswinds, routes, and riders that have made this race so special. There are even a few first-hand accounts of some of those key stages and some nice bits of detail that you would certainly never have seen on TV!

I loved having Sam back on the pod and being able to chat about some of those stages and moments, as well as one superb post-race beer session (post our race - if not the race…) which I have to say is my absolute favourite moment from any of my Grand Tour experiences; a special memory and a great story to tell.

This one is a blast, and on the eve of the race itself, I hope it leaves you thirsty for a bit more Vuelta action!

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Life in the Peloton is proudly brought to you by MAAP

This week on Life in the Peloton we get away from skinny tyres and dive back onto gravel with Haley Smith and Rosa Klöser, two stars of the privateer gravel scene

Many of you will have seen the epic finish at this year’s Unbound Gravel, which ended in a gripping nine-rider sprint in Emporia.

Both Haley - who is a former winner of the Lifetime GP overall, and Rosa - the eventual winner that day, were in that group fighting for the win in the most prestigious gravel event on the calendar.

While Haley made the switch to gravel racing after representing Canada in mountain biking at the 2021 Olympics, Rosa is relatively new to competitive cycling - having taken up racing just a couple of years ago.

We kicked off our chat going into some great detail about that final in Unbound, but I also wanted to understand the importance of the race as an event and what it means to win it. We also got to discuss how the women felt that the race had benefitted from differing start times for male and female athletes in 2024.

Like ourselves here at Life in the Peloton, both Haley and Rosa are supported by MAAP, and even though Haley and Rosa are rivals, I wanted to take this opportunity to have a chat about but how the world of privateering works for these athletes, and what being a privateer really means.

It felt like the hour flew by for me, I love learning more details about the world of gravel, the races and these athletes through different perspectives.

As ever - sit back, relax and enjoy.

Cheers,

Mitch

The Dirty Docker is almost here! Dirty Docker is my multi-day event for all things cycling and running in the Macedon Ranges. For the last few weeks of winter, you can get an exclusive discount code by signing up to the Life in the Peloton Newsletter here.

The Life in the Peloton book is OUT NOW! Get your copy now exclusively at maap.cc! Can’t wait for you to read it.

Life in the Peloton is proudly brought to you by MAAP

This week on the pod I managed to catch up with one of the revelations of the season and one of the big players of last month’s racing at the Dauphiné and Tour de France, Matteo Jorgensen.

2024 has been a huge season for Matteo. After four years knocking at the door at Movistar, last winter he made the switch to Team Visma Lease-A-Bike and he hit the ground running winning both Paris-Nice and Dwars Door Vlaanderen back in March, before coming back into top form for the summer months.

I first met Matteo back in 2020 when I was still racing and I was so happy to get this chance to get to chat with him at this stage of his career, because in many ways his development is the perfect example of how the sport has changed in a short time.

It was fascinating for me to hear some of the inner workings of Visma Lease-A-Bike compared to a more traditional outfit like Movistar, and to learn how the riders and teams need to work in order to perform in 2024. The changes and improvements in diet, training and race preparation are really eye-opening and I loved hearing the detail of all of this.

When I spoke to Matteo he was between the Tour and Olympic Games where is representing the USA. Not only was it pretty cool to manage to get some time between the two races, but it also gave us the chance to chat about how you go about balancing two huge goals like the Tour and the Olympics.

We covered a lot of ground in our chat, Matteo is a really great and open guest who happens to be literally at the top of the game!

There is so much here to unpack that I’ll leave you to sit back, relax and enjoy!

Cheers!

Mitch

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