Life In The Saddle

Not a bad month considering I had 3 days off with a stitched up jaw and a week off in Italy.

This last week has been a great one. I've been in the Treviso region of Italy with the Wiggle Honda team; photographing, interviewing and getting to know the athletes, so that we can create more great content from them for the Wiggle site over the coming months. I spent the week at the Castel Brando hotel with the team, alongside our Wiggle photographer Gus Farmer. It was a really enjoyable experience; Team Wiggle Honda is a really inspirational group of people, and it was a pleasure to be in their company for a few days. To find out a bit more about what we did each day at the camp, check out this blog on the Wiggle site: ' Dispatches from the Wiggle Honda Training Camp' (Link) . I arrived back in the UK yesterday evening, and was itching to get out on the bike. Despite a week in the stunning Italian Dolomites, watching cycling every day, I unfortunately didn't manage to get a ride in. A week is a long time for me to go without riding! So, back on the Isle of W...

CHRISCROSS from chris akrigg on Vimeo .

The above graph shows the trend in the number of times that the word "cycling" has been queried on Google and in headline news in the past 10 years. Does it suggest a 2012 Olympic legacy? Or a failure? A friend recently asked me what it means, so I thought I would put forward my explanation in a blog post. The initial reaction to the graph is likely to be surprise that there has been a significant decline in the height of interest since 2004. To some extent, I think you can ignore the first part of the graph however, this period was plagued by doping scandals and press attention that ultimately cycling did not want. The best period to look at is 2011 and beyond. Bearing in mind this is only searching the English word "Cycling", most of the data is from English speaking countries. 2011 saw Cadel Evans' victory at the Tour de France, causing the significant growth in the July spike, particularly from Australian searchers/readers. The biggest peak though,...