S10 Ep71: Kilometre 0 – Danish Dynamite, part one

<div>The long-awaited Grand Départ in Denmark gets underway with Friday's opening time trial and Copenhagen, a city that celebrates the bicycle, has never been more ready.<br> <br> Danish cycling is enjoying another wave of success with the likes of Mads Pedersen, Jonas Vingegaard, Kasper Asgreen among the ten home riders on the start list.<br> <br> But, like most cycling stories, the history of Danish cycling is complicated. This two-part episode of Kilometre 0 borrows its title from a brilliant book about Denmark's football team that took the world by storm in the 1980s, and tells the story of the rise, fall and rebirth of Danish cycling.<br> <br> In this part, Lionel talks to Brian Nygaard, who worked closely with Denmark's only Tour de France champion, Bjarne Riis. Of course, there is a heavy asterisk against Riis's 1996 Tour win because it was fuelled by EPO and came in the middle of the sport's darkest days – although the depths of skulduggery were not truly brought to light until the Festina affair two years later. As CSC team manager Riis was then a key player in the next big doping scandal to blight Tour – the Operacion Puerto blood-doping investigation which forced his team leader Ivan Basso out of the 2006 Tour on the eve of the opening time trial. Brian had a front row seat for that.<br> <br> Kilometre 0 by The Cycling Podcast is supported by Supersapiens. Supersapiens is a continuous glucose monitoring system that helps you make the right fuelling choices. See <a href="http://supersapiens.com/">supersapiens.com</a><br> <br> <em>The Cycling Podcast was founded in 2013 by Richard Moore, Daniel Friebe and Lionel Birnie.</em> </div>