JOHN JENKINSON

This Salford man knows Cycling Plus better that anybody- he's been buying it since the very first issue in 1992

I’d only been riding for a few years in the early ’90s when I began planning my first major holiday – Bordeaux to Barcelona over the Pyrenees.

Cycling Plus had just come out and was this exciting, glossy magazine – even if it doesn’t look like that looking back now – and it helped me prepare for that trip. I remember it having more of a mountain bike slant back then, it’s almost unrecognisable to what it is now.

The magazine has always influenced my buying decisions. I’ve still got two bikes it recommended, separated by 22 years – a Specialized Allez from 1993, which remains the best bit of kit the magazine has ever recommended to me, and a Cannondale Synapse from 2015.

I’m not what you’d call a ‘traditional’ rider. I work in IT and if you don’t change you get left behind, so I embrace technology. Shimano’s STI handlebar shifters are my favourite development through the

Cycling Plus years, even if they do predate 1992 by a few years. They transformed how you rode. I got my first carbon bike early, in 1994, and it was only recently that I had to let it go. It was on the roof of my car on the way to a triathlon and my mind was totally on that, otherwise I would have remembered where it was before I trashed it going through a car park entrance.

I’ve always had a soft spot for steel bikes, with their ornate paint jobs, and it’s sad that you don’t see as many any more. There’s plenty I miss from pro cycling, too, like Mario Cipollini and the flamboyant outfits he used to wear. Sprinting is still exciting but perhaps lacks something that it once had. And Marco Pantani, my favourite rider… I like Indurain, Cavendish and Wiggins but Pantani was thrilling. Yes, there was controversy but when he attacked it was just fantastic. He soared like an angel.