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Hello, joining you on a very bleak Tuesday in Berlin, where there's no powerful sense of mourning for Germany to exit from the football world cup, because frankly no one seemed to care that much in the first place.

My name is Daniel Frieber. I am the host of this week's episode of cycling podcast. We continue our mazy backwards slalom through the highs and lows of the 2022 season.

This indeed is the penultimate episode of that sort of series. We've still got team of the year to come.

But today we're going to be awarding, crowning, sharing with recyclable confetti, the individual who produced the comeback of the season.

And indeed hearing, at great length from him. But first, coming to us from the mean streets of Pietrassanta in Tuscany, Italy, where the biggest breaking news of the last few weeks, trust me,

because I scoured the local press for the purposes of this intro, was the fearsome guardia costiera sweeping to break up, not one, but two unauthorized Alfresco dinners on the beach on the night of Halloween.

It's a man whose idea of a trick or treat is the choice of a two or three Michelin star lunch overlooking the med.

He's a former spin doctor to some of the sports leading teams, a wine maker, an acclaimed author and somewhat even say poet in common with the most famous product of Pietrassanta,

which is to say the 19th century barge, in his youth, I learn this week,

car d'ouche used to keep an owl, a hawk, and a wolf as pets.

And this guest is as wise as the first of those, as sharp-eyed as the second and as fierce as the third, usually ironically when the apex predator in the team that calls itself the wolf pack is mentioned.

That said, his bark is worse than his bites. He's a great dain, he's Brian Nygard.

I don't know, thank you very much for...

Wow, that was the intro of the year for me at least. I'm going to play that.

I'm going to put that under jingle for my phone ringtone.

I complain, I carpe a lot about the complaints I get for those intros, but we've also had some nice, very nice feedback.

There was someone who wanted me to create a whole episode, and I don't think this will happen.

Whole episode, a sort of mashup mix-up of all of the intros that we've been doing since the weather-by-spire.

I think you can get a pump now.

I've been in Las Vegas announcing title-pipes.

Brian, we didn't have you on last week, and I would have liked to have you on last week, because we were talking to Cycling Media,

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