EDWARD PICKERING

This is the first July since 1984 that I will not sit down every day to watch the Tour de France. The postponement of the world’s biggest race has left us all with a gaping midsummer void in our lives, and the theoretical possibility of actually getting some DIY done this month is no compensation for that. There’ll be a Tour in September, but that’s ages away.

However, the Procycling team have put together a special edition of the magazine for all those suffering from Tour withdrawal symptoms this July. In lieu of an actual Tour, here is a 21-feature, 21-stage mag packed with insight, immersive stories and great interviews. You can tackle a stage a day, or bingeread the entire Tour in one go.

On a separate but very important subject, we’ve been watching the Black Lives Matter protests and we’re not at all immune at Procycling to the justified criticisms levelled at society as a whole for its failure to achieve equality. Cycling is a very white sport, which doesn’t reflect the composition of the societies in which it takes place, and we need to ask ourselves why we have failed to attract diverse participation. There are just a handful of black riders in the WorldTour, Women’s WorldTour and ProConti divisions. To cycling’s shame, there have been incidences of overt racism within the peloton, which we as a sport haven’t done enough to address. To our shame at

Procycling, we haven’t addressed the under-representation of non-white athletes beyond a small number of interviews and features and it’s clear to us we haven’t done enough.

We promise to do better in the future. The change in the sport has to start now, and we hope that in a few years time, with contributions from us and from all of cycling’s stakeholders, cycling will have grown into the diverse, inclusive and representative sport that it should be.