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Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op goes dotty for the Tour

Sheffield shop gets polka-dot makeover

The Sheffield branch of shop chain Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op has gone dotty for the Tour de France.

The Steel City hosts the finish of the second stage of the Tour on July 6, after the race meanders through the Pennines, climbing Cragg Vale and Holme Moss before finishing a couple of kilometres town centre.


Edinburgh Bicycle Sheffield gets a polka-dot makeover for the Tour

It’s a stage with enough hills that whoever wears the polka-dot King of the Mountains jersey is likely to have earned it, so Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op’s Sheffield shop has come over all spotty and been decorated with a giant mural of the iconic red-on-white pattern.

The staff in the Leeds and Sheffield shops have been issued with bright new yellow uniforms, which should make it easy to spot them, with ‘Le Edimbourg Bicyclette’ on the front and ‘domestique’ on the back. And if that’s not enough, check out the berets. Strings of onions are apparently not going to figure in the new look, though.


Tour-winning derailleurs since 1947 - a cabinet of curiosities for real gear freaks

Tech fans will want to pop into either shop to take a look at the collection of derailleurs through the years that both will have on display. Highlights include a Campagnolo Nuovo Record derailleur, as used by Eddy Merckx over four consecutive Tour victories (1969 to 1972) and the Mavic 851 SSC mech, with which Greg Lemond achieved his extraordinary victory in 1989 by the narrowest margin - just 8 seconds.

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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