22. Chaves wins Il Lombardia

The Cycling Podcast

October 6 | In the latest Telegraph Cycling Podcast the team looks back at Il Lombardia, the season’s final monument and the first ever won by a Colombian, Esteban Chaves. The diminutive Chaves, who rides for Australian team Orica-BikeExchange, was the best in a three-man sprint in Bergamo to cap a brilliant year, in which he finished second in the Giro d’Italia and third in the Vuelta a España.

Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe discuss Chaves’s win, Astana’s curious tactics and the fallout from a typically incendiary interview with Oleg Tinkov, whose Tinkoff team is about to close its doors as Tinkov ends his sponsorship. The Russian exits pro cycling with some barbed comments about the state of the sport and one of his star riders, Alberto Contador.

There’s a look ahead to the world championships, which begin in Qatar on Sunday with the men’s and women’s team time trials and an interview with Hannah Barnes, who will ride the team time trial for Canyon-SRAM and also the road race, a week later, for Great Britain.

After last week’s podcast was dedicated to a discussion on the controversy engulfing Sir Bradley Wiggins after the leak of his therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs), we return to this topic with a selection of listeners’ responses to the issue.

The Telegraph Cycling Podcast is sponsored by Rapha and Eurosport