Domestique Cycling Podcast

Doug Ryder joins Aidan Burgess on the Domestique Hotseat to discuss the rise of Pinarello-Q36.5, Tom Pidcock’s Tour de France ambitions, and the big signings that could take the team to another level. After a breakthrough 2026 season, Ryder explains why the team is attracting some of cycling’s biggest names and why he believes an even bigger victory is just around the corner.

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Ryder reflects on the team’s return to the Tour de France and Pidcock’s impressive rise from 30th to fifth...

Matevž Govekar joins Aidan Burgess on the Domestique Hotseat after a long 2026 season with Bahrain Victorious. The Slovenian sprinter talks openly about a year that did not go his way, the Tour of Guangxi, home European Championships in Slovenia, and why riders feel they have to stop races to be heard on safety.

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Govekar admits this was not one of his best seasons. He explains the self-doubt, the criticism after races, and the one friend he texts when a sprint goes wrong. He al...

Tadej Pogačar won 22 races in 2026, including three Monuments and a fifth Tour de France. Then he crashed out of the Vuelta in August and did not race again. So was he still the rider of the year, or did Remco Evenepoel and Paul Seixas do enough to take it from him?

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The road season is o...

Is the 2027 Tour de France built to stop Tadej Pogačar? The route has 71 km of individual time trials, the most since Bradley Wiggins won in 2012, and only three summit finishes. Bram and Ethan go through every stage.

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The race starts in Edinburgh on 2 July and ends in Paris on 25 July, after 3,479 km. The Brit...

MyWhoosh is free, it pays out real prize money every week, and it runs the UCI Cycling Esports World Championships. So who pays for it? Matt Smithson, Director of Esports and Game Operations at MyWhoosh, joins Aidan Burgess on the Domestique Hotseat to answer that question.

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Matt explains why the UAE built its own indoor cycling platform. He talks about the summer heat, national pride, and wanting to show what the country can build. He is open about the wealthy stakeholders behind the...

Michael Matthews joins Aidan Burgess on the Domestique Hotseat after taking silver at the World Championships in Montréal, 13 seconds behind Brandon McNulty. It is the end of a year that started with a horror training crash in March, when Matthews broke bones in both arms and his face.

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Matthews explains how he raced Worlds phase by phase, what it was like in a chase group where the USA had three riders, and why he replied to a critic who said he did n...

Paul Seixas won Il Lombardia at 20 years and 16 days old, the youngest winner in the race’s history. He set his own pace on the Civiglio with 19 kilometres to go, and only Tom Pidcock and Giulio Ciccone could hold his wheel, for less than a kilometre. He won in Como by 48 seconds over Enric Mas, with Ciccone third in his last race for Lidl-Trek. Remco Evenepoel won the sprint for fourth. Isaac del Toro lost almost five minutes with a bad knee.

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CPA president Adam Hansen joins Aidan Burgess on the Domestique Hotseat after a brutal end to the season for rider safety. Finlay Tarling died at the Volta a Portugal, a police motorbike rode into riders at Tre Valli Varesine, and the riders fought the Vuelta over its final stage in Granada.

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Hansen explains how the riders’ union works in practice. He covers how complaints in the peloton reach race organisers, what SafeR can and cannot force organisers to do, and wh...

Il Lombardia is on Saturday, and for the first time since 2020 Tadej Pogacar will not win it. Remco Evenepoel goes to Como as the new European champion. In Slovenia he crashed on a descent, attacked again and beat Giulio Ciccone in a photo finish.

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We look back at the Euros. Evenepoel crashed and got bac...

Thor Hushovd, former world champion and now general manager of Uno-X Mobility, joins Aidan Burgess on the Domestique Hotseat. This is the week the UCI confirmed new standards for finish barriers and a push for GPS tracking. Thor says the talking has to stop and the action has to start.

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He talks about what it is like to run a team of 50 riders and fear the worst phone call. He says every 10 metres of road holds a danger, and that he has had...

Brandon McNulty won the 2026 World Championships road race in Montréal. He attacked alone with 33 kilometres to go, held on by 13 seconds, and became the first American to win the elite men's title since 1993. Michael Matthews took silver the day after his 36th birthday. Mathieu van der Poel attacked from a long way out and still took bronze.

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Alice Towers should have been lining up for Great Britain at the World Championships in Montréal this week. Instead, a crash in a wet race in France left her unconscious, in hospital and with a concussion. She has no memory of it. Two weeks later she sits down with Aidan Burgess to explain what the injury has done to her.

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She is open about the symptoms. There was a pounding headache that felt like her heart was beating inside her head, and h...

Andreas Leknessund joins Aidan Burgess from his hotel room in Montréal, the day after the World Championships time trial and just over a week after finishing the Vuelta a España. With Tadej Pogačar out after his Vuelta crash, the Uno-X Mobility rider says Sunday's road race is "more open than ever".

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He talks through his own time trial, where he rode the 400 watts he was aiming for and still finished 32nd. He also explains what three weeks of the Vuelta...

Remco Evenepoel won his fourth straight world time trial title in Montréal by 57 seconds from Filippo Ganna, and now he goes for something no man has done: the time trial and the road race at the same Worlds. Tadej Pogačar is out. Paul Seixas and Isaac del Toro finished one and two on this circuit two weeks ago. Mathieu van der Poel has just ridden 174 kilometres alone in Luxembourg. The 2026 World Championships road race is on Sunday: 273.7 kilometres and twelve laps of Mount Royal.

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Enric Mas is the winner of the 2026 Vuelta a España, the first Spanish winner of his home Grand Tour since Alberto Contador in 2014. Four Vuelta podiums, three of them second places, and at 31 he finally has the one that counts. Primoz Roglic is second at 2:15, Felix Gall third at 2:44.

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Bram and Ethan go through the final week: two more sprint wins for Matthew Brennan, who finished his debut...

Finlay Pickering finished the Vuelta a España sick, and he tells Aidan Burgess he never once thought about climbing off. The Jayco AlUla rider spoke to us on the morning of the final stage in Granada, a day after Mikel Landa's win on the Collado del Alguacil and two days after the worst day he has ever had on a bike.

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He is honest about what went wrong. A good...

Enric Mas reaches the second rest day of the Vuelta a España in red, 2:06 ahead of Felix Gall and 2:10 ahead of Primož Roglič. The man with four Vuelta podiums and no Grand Tour win is now the favourite, and Bram and Ethan spend this episode working out whether he can actually finish the job.

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Mas took 27 seconds at Calar Alto and another 25 on La Pandera, and Movistar have controlle...

Finn Fisher-Black joined Aidan Burgess on the first rest day of the Vuelta a España, four days after Tadej Pogačar crashed out of a race he was leading by nearly four minutes.

He is honest about his former teammate. People assume Pogačar wins so often that a bad day cannot really hurt, and Fisher-Black says that is exactly backwards. Everyone starts each race the same, everyone wants to win, and nobody turns up to a Grand Tour without doing the work. He explains how the news travelled through the bunch, how quickly the racing sto...

Tadej Pogacar took the first red jersey of his career in Monaco by nine hundredths of a second. Ethan Hayter lost it on the line, then spent all of Sunday in the breakaway trying to take it back, and finished the day 29 seconds down. In Manosque, Wout van Aert attacked with two kilometres to go and Pogacar closed him down, then refused to pull. Behind them, 20-year-old Matthew Brennan came past both to win his first Grand Tour stage, on his first ever road stage at a three-week race. Two days in and this Vuelta has already given us...

Magnus Cort is retiring at the end of 2026, and he tells Aidan Burgess exactly why. He is still winning, he became Danish champion for the first time this year, and that is the point. He does not want to squeeze everything out and finish the sport struggling at the back.

He also confirms his selection for the Vuelta a España, the Grand Tour he likes best and the one where his career started with two stage wins. He talks through where his chances are, why Mads Pedersen and Wout van Aert worry him more than Tadej P...

Tadej Pogacar arrives at the Vuelta a España chasing the one Grand Tour missing from his palmares, seven years after finishing third here on debut at twenty. Primoz Roglic is now expected to start, five weeks after being hit by a car in training, still hoping for a fifth title that would make him the outright record holder. Felix Gall and Oscar Onley come in off the back of Burgos, where five seconds separated them, and on Monday morning Visma confirmed that defending champion Jonas Vingegaard will not race again this season. We don't think the GC battle i...

Zoe Backstedt came out of her first Tour de France Femmes with an all time 20 minute power best, a stage 9 pain face that went round the internet, and a very clear idea of what the race is missing. She tells George Burgess what nine days of it actually asked of her.

Her job at CANYON//SRAM was to protect Katarzyna Niewiadoma-Phinney and Antonia Niedermaier, which she describes as bodyguard duties for the whole week. That means positioning, following attacks she was not built to follow, and an endless loop back to the team car for bottles and...

Demi Vollering is a two-time champion of the Tour de France Femmes, and she had to win the last two stages to get there. Kasia Niewiadoma rode away from her on Mont Ventoux on Friday and took yellow. Vollering took it back in Nice on Saturday by eight seconds. Then she attacked again on the final climb of the race on Sunday, when sitting on the wheel would have been enough, and won by 1:18. We go through all of it, including the stand-off between Vollering and Reusser on the Ventoux that nearly cost her the race, and why Bram...

Pauline Ferrand-Prevot came to defend her Tour de France Femmes title and is five minutes down after five stages. Marlen Reusser has the yellow jersey, Demi Vollering is twelve seconds behind her, and the race the whole spring pointed towards has turned into something nobody predicted. We go through how it happened, and why nothing about Ferrand-Prevot's week looks like the rider who dominated this race in 2025.

Before that, the first week did everything the men's Tour did and more. Lorena Wiebes won the first two stages and was untouchable in both, to the point where the...

Emily Dixon spent her childhood throwing tantrums on mountain bike trails. She did swimming, gymnastics, dance and netball, and she was, in her words, pretty mediocre at all of them. Then lockdown cancelled everything, her dad started riding Zwift in the garage, and she got jealous enough to put a neighbour's old road bike on a trainer and ride it in her sneakers.

Six years later she is racing in Europe with two professional wins to her name.

In this episode she tells Aidan Burgess how that actually happened, and she is unusually honest about...

Rune Herregodts has one month of his Belgian national champion's jersey behind him, and he is out of contract at the end of the season. 

In this episode he tells Aidan Burgess that he expects to leave UAE Team Emirates XRG, that he is talking to a few teams, and that there should be news quite quickly.

Before that, he takes us inside the strongest team in the world. He explains why UAE keep December training camps deliberately relaxed, with no crazy interval sessions and no weighing food, so that riders can hold the stricter p...

Tadej Pogačar has won his fifth Tour de France, and he now stands level with Merckx, Hinault, Anquetil and Indurain. Five stage wins, Marco Pantani's Alpe d'Huez record beaten by more than a minute, and then a Queen stage spent riding as a domestique for his own teammate.

Remco Evenepoel finished second at 6:26 with two stage wins and the best climbing week of his career. Isaac Del Toro is third and in white on his debut. Paul Seixas is fourth at nineteen years old. And on a final stage shortened by the wildfires in the southwest, M...

On the second rest day of the Tour de France, Michael Storer joins the Domestique Hotseat to talk through a brutal and record-breaking second week of racing. He gets honest about backing up a second grand tour after the Giro, why the heat has been reshaping the race, and what changes now that Jonas Vingegaard has crashed out of contention.

Michael also reflects on racing against a dominant Tadej Pogačar, breaks down what to expect from the rest day time trial between Remco Evenepoel and Pogačar, and gives his take on the 2AM doping controls th...

Jonas Vingegaard's Tour de France is over. The two time champion crashed twenty kilometres from the summit of Plateau de Solaison on stage 15 and abandoned with a suspected broken collarbone, ending his record of never finishing lower than second overall at this race. Remco Evenepoel beat Tadej Pogacar in an uphill sprint on the stage for his first ever Tour road win, while Isaac del Toro completed the podium and reclaimed the white jersey. Pogacar's overall lead is now five minutes over Evenepoel, with del Toro third and Paul Seixas fourth, all within 6:23 of yellow.

We also...

Ben Healy and Michael Valgren sat down with us on the first rest day of the Tour de France, nine days into one of the hottest editions in memory. The result is an honest conversation about racing in temperatures that have barely dropped below 35 degrees, and what it takes for a team like EF Education to keep chasing wins in the heat.

Healy is refreshingly open about his biggest weakness. The heat, he says, is a real Achilles heel, and it is stopping him from performing at his best when it matters most. He explains how the...

Gene Bates, Sporting Manager at Jayco AlUla, joins the Domestique Hotseat with Aidan Burgess on the eve of the Tour de France in Barcelona. We get into the team's plan to hunt stages instead of riding for GC, Michael Matthews' comeback from two broken wrists, Mauro Schmid's move to Q36.5, and why Bates thinks nobody can stop Pogačar this July.

He also opens up on managing Ben O'Connor after a huge 2024, how Jayco keeps its Australian DNA while becoming a truly international team, the stage 1 team time trial, and why they will happily pat a departing r...

Damiano Caruso is riding his eighth and final Tour de France. Before the start, he joins us to talk about Paul Seixas' reported €13 million contract, why he thinks it puts unfair pressure on a 19-year-old, and why he'd always choose a team that feels like family over a bigger paycheck.

We also cover Bahrain Victorious' chaotic run to the pink jersey at this year's Giro d'Italia, his prediction for Pogačar vs. Vingegaard, and why, heading into retirement and a new role as directeur sportif, all he wants is to arrive in Paris without any regrets.

On Saturday the 113th Tour de France rolls out of Barcelona: 21 stages, 3,333 kilometres to Paris, opening with a team time trial for the first time since 1971. For the sixth year running it comes down to Tadej Pogačar against Jonas Vingegaard, and this time the Dane arrives off a crushing Giro win with his cleanest run-in since 2023. 

But two new faces are forcing their way into the picture: 19-year-old Paul Seixas, France's biggest home hope in decades, and a rebooted Remco Evenepoel at Red Bull.

In this big preview episode we go through all 21 stages on...

Three-stage races, one clear message: the Tour de France is coming, and the favorites are flying.

Tadej Pogačar turned his Tour de Suisse debut into a public training camp - a 69 km solo on stage 1, a time trial win by four-hundredths of a second over Mathieu van der Poel, and a mountain win to finish. Three stages, the overall, and not a rival within six minutes. We break down the stage-1 "glitch", Narváez's 90 km breakaway raid in a thunderstorm, Van der Poel's surprising time-trial form, and what Primož Roglič's quiet week says about the twil...

The Critérium du Dauphiné is done, and a 22-year-old just announced himself to the world. Bram and Ethan break down Isaac Del Toro's back-to-back summit wins on the Grand Colombier and Plateau de Solaison, Paul Seixas' brave ride and painful final-morning abandon, and what it all means for the Tour de France.

Is Del Toro already a better climber than Remco Evenepoel? We think so. We also dig into the soaking-wet Copenhagen Sprint that ended in carnage and handed Jasper Philipsen a big confidence boost before the Tour, and ask whether he can take green in 2026.

Michael Storer has just delivered the best Grand Tour result of his career, finishing seventh overall at the Giro d’Italia for Tudor Pro Cycling. In this conversation, the Australian reflects on the race, explains why Jonas Vingegaard could beat Tadej Pogacar at the Tour de France, and offers a different perspective on cycling’s safety debate.

We start with the Giro. Storer discusses the breakaway that reshaped the general classification, the crash that ended Adam Yates’ challenge, his strongest WorldTour time trial performance yet, and why sitting at the back of the peloton can sometimes be the sa...

The Critérium du Dauphiné 2026 (now the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes) is wide open, and 19-year-old Paul Seixas arrives as the favourite ahead of Isaac del Toro. Two days in, the breakaway has won both stages by method of Alex Baudin and Anthon Charmig while the GC men wait. 

We break down stages 1 and 2, why João Almeida is out of the Tour de France, the team time trial, and the brutal mountain finale on the Grand Colombier and Plateau de Solaison.

Plus: Demi Vollering's stunning comeback to win the Giro d'Italia Women 2026, becoming only the secon...

Brent Copeland rarely gives interviews. As General Manager of GreenEdge Cycling (Team Jayco AlUla and Liv AlUla Jayco) and President of the AIGCP, the teams' union, he sits inside almost every room where cycling's future is being decided. In this conversation he opens up on all of it.

We start with the Giro d'Italia: the stage 2 crash that took out Andrea Vendrame and changed the entire race, and what the Tour de France build-up looks like with Michael Matthews on the moment. 

From there we go deep into SafeR, the body working on rider safety. C...

Jonas Vingegaard wins the 2026 Giro d'Italia with five stage victories and a final margin of over five minutes, completing the Grand Tour treble. But was it the race we hoped for?

Bram and Ethan break down everything from the Giro: the GC fight that was won early, a surprise podium, the breakout of Alfonso Eulalio, Felix Gall's second place as a statement to his own team, Jai Hindley's love affair with Italian racing, the sprint battle between Jonathan Milan and Paul Magnier, Toon Arts' unexpected emergence, and the wildly uneven team performances from Visma, Bahrain, Lidl-Trek, and...

Uno-X Mobility's Johannes Kulset joins us fresh off a massive Giro stage win for the team. Fredrik Dversnes went into the break on a pan-flat sprint stage and executed a plan the team had been sitting on since day one. Johannes breaks down exactly how it happened, why the win means more than most people realise, and what the team is hunting in the final week.

We also get into: why the Giro and Vuelta produce better racing than the Tour right now, what it actually feels like to get dropped by Vingegaard while he's nose-breathing, the...