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2018 Rouleur Classic

Last week I spent two days looking around the 2018 Rouleur Classic in London including listening to a range of their talks.

If you’re not familiar with the event, you’ll probably at least know the magazine. Rouleur is a high end cycling magazine and is held in high regard by most people in road cycling. It focuses on racing and the history of it including the brands that have become legends over the decades.

The show features a glittering array of cycling’s who’s who each year and had 14 World Champions in attendance this year. It has a relatively small range of brands exhibiting – mainly in the mid-to-high end of the market and there’s a good chance you’ll see a few super stars as you wander around.

This year I attended on Friday and Saturday and saw a number of the good and great of cycling – either speaking or just attending. Fabian Cancellara, Ivan Basso, Lizzie Deignan, Freddy Maertens, Alice Barnes, Coryn Rivera, John Degenkolb, Koen de Kort, FK Day, Brian Cookson, Michael Hutchinson,Mick Bennett, Mandy Jones, Matt Stephens, Ned Boulting and probably others I didn’t recognise.

The Trek Road team launched their new kit for both mens and womens teams, which was a nice treat for show visitors. I particularly liked the women’s design

It was good to see discussion about the future of women’s racing – although I would have preferred a female host like Orla Chennaoui who was there as well to Matt Barbet.

I have to confess to having a huge crush on Lizzie Deignan, so it was great to see her in person again at the Rouleur Classic 🙂

For a lot of the stars, once they had finished their speaking duties on stage they could be seen either wandering around the show or signing autographs. Ivan Basso did as did Fabian Cancellara and probably plenty more.

With the theme of World Championships there were some stunning items on display from the Horton Collection:

 

There was also a fantastic exhibition of derailleurs including Mavic’s original electric system…

It was nice to see the brand new Cervelo S5 and S3 on display as well as a striking C3 which I liked a lot

It wouldn’t be Rouleur without some bling and there was plenty to see there:

Note the Vielo has Lightweight Disc wheels – not a cheap option for your gravel bike!!!! The complete weight was 7kgs according to the Vielo guys.

I’m over Gulf Racing paint jobs personally but it looks like I might be on my own with that given the above from Fat Creations. The Trek they had on display was pretty funky too….

The Felipe Pantone painted Specialized was absolutely stunning. The paintjob is amazing and the bike is being auctioned to raise money for World Bicycle Relief. Sotheby’s have put a value on the bike at £35,000. If you’d like to bid or watch the bidding when it’s auctioned on November 17th – sign up here: https://www.rmnc.cc/

 

Elite had their Fuoripista trainer on display (a friend said it looked like a saw horse!) which I thought looked amazing…

I was less keen on the Windy Milla collaboration that Assos had … in fact I thought it looked dreadful … but each to their own:

The team at Rouleur were doing a brisk trade in their own books and merchandise too – at some points they had a queue around 10 people deep waiting to buy some goodies. In fairness, most of it is really nice stuff and it’s great to see the brand is strong enough that people want to support it

Tacx had the brand new Neo 2 on display

This historic Zipp bike attracted a lot of interest too….

As a cyclo-cross fan it was good to see a few champions bikes on display like Tom Pidcock and Ben Tullett

All in all I had a great time – the interviews were great, as were the stands and the opportunity to see some very famous faces up close.

If you’ve not been before – put it on your list for next year!

Thanks for reading