With the UCI world championships already well underway and the men’s road race fast approaching, a torrent of new tech has been breaking cover, and a similar stream of custom colourways are cropping up around Glasgow.
We’ve already highlighted the new Hope track bike, which doubled its seatpost count in a novel design. Elsewhere, Canyon unveiled Chloe Dygert’s new Canyon Speedmax CFR Track, shortly after announcing it had done the unexpected and found the tartan paint.
Today it’s the turn of Colnago, with its sponsored Slovenian superstar, Tadej Pogačar, who will be riding a new ‘Glass-wegian’ edition V4RS race bike around Sunday’s 271km Scottish strade between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The limited edition colourway was designed by Pogačar himself, with help from the Colnago team. It is described as a ‘prismatic varnish’ and features holographic pigments that create special colour-changing effects.
As with all iridescent designs, the frame’s paint will appear to be different colours depending on the direction of the light hitting it, returning a rainbow-like effect that provides an intentional nod to the rainbow-striped jersey he’ll be trying to win.
If he is to return to Slovenia with said stripes, he’ll have to overcome the talented Belgian trident of Wout Van Aert, Remco Evenepoel and Jasper Philipsen, as well as on-form Dutchman Mathieu Van Der Poel.
He will also have to put the difficult finale to July’s Tour de France behind him, in which he finished 2nd behind a dominant Jonas Vingegaard by 7m 21s, the biggest winning margin since Vincenzo Nibali dominated in 2014 after Chris Froome crashed out early.
Pogačar comes into the race as an outside favourite. The flatter latter half of the race, which laps Glasgow 10 times, would appear to favour rouleurs such as the aforementioned Van Aert and Van Der Poel, or even Denmark’s Mads Pedersen who won his 2019 title just a few hours south of Glasgow in Harrogate, England.
Of course, it’s impossible to rule out the 24-year-old, whose palmares include a brace of Tour de France general classifications, monument wins at the Tour of Flanders and Il Lombardia, a handful of other one-day classics wins, and countless stage race overall victories.
