Rabbit Holes: The beginner's guide to pro cycling
Spin Cycle
Escape Collective
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cycling's a beautiful sport. It's also a nightmare for new fans to get into – a mess of jargon, history, and tactics. Journalism professor (and new cycling fan) Holly Johnson has questions, and together with Iain Treloar, is on a mission to decipher pro cycling. In the first episode: a chat with Jonathan Vaughters about how teams work.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, wow, here we go. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello and welcome to a sort of side tangent for rabbit holes. |
| 0:10.0 | This is a new thing that we're starting called the beginner's guide to pro cycling. |
| 0:19.0 | The Origin Story. For a while, we've been figuring out, or trying to figure out, how to connect with people who are just coming to the sport, |
| 0:27.3 | and trying to reach beyond our long-time fan base and bring newcomers into the fold. |
| 0:31.9 | But the question, where to begin? |
| 0:38.3 | Then we had a new member, Holly, which is a journalism professor from the US, reach out to us. |
| 0:43.2 | She came to us by way of the Netflix series Unchained, and she had a lot of questions, like |
| 0:48.0 | 12 pages of questions. |
| 0:50.7 | Once we realized we wouldn't actually think of because we've been doing this for a while. |
| 0:55.0 | Questions like, why do team names change? |
| 0:57.0 | Who decides what stage is a queen's stage? |
| 0:59.0 | Why a queen? Why not a king? |
| 1:01.0 | Is Grenadiers a type of beverage? |
| 1:03.0 | And then there's all the other questions that you've got in cycling. |
| 1:06.0 | Like, why is that guy wearing a yellow shirt? |
| 1:09.0 | Why is that guy wearing a green shirt? |
| 1:10.0 | Is there a national team? |
| 1:11.6 | Why are they all riding so hard against each other, but only one person will win and |
| 1:16.6 | the team doesn't really get the glory just the dude does? |
| 1:19.6 | It's a bit of a silly sport when you really think about it. |
| 1:23.6 | So in the end, we decided probably the best thing to do was to take our newcomer Holly along on the ride and go straight to the big voices in the sport and hit them with the questions about why cycling is the way it is, where the traditions come from and how it all works. |
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