The Slow Ride: A Cycling Podcast · WideAnglePodiumNetwork

The Beer Garden

·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

They relive the chaotic final 50km of Flanders where every top rider attacked in a spectacular showdown.

Episode 525 begins slightly sideways. Tim calls it episode two, catches himself, and lands on 525, which pretty much sets the room temperature. Cobble nostalgia rolls in fast. Spencer uses Paris-Roubaix week to remember the old Grumpy's-Roubaix ride in Minneapolis, where the group chased brick roads and imagined the Merckx and DeVlamic era as cycling heaven with worse pavement. Then the belt returns. The panel tries to decide whether Paulus has earned the Slow Ride podcast championship belt by winning races that seem to point toward bigger races. The logic should fall apart. Somehow, in this room, it holds. Dwarves, Piedmont, Japan Cup, San Sebastian, and Tour Down Under all get dragged into the argument until time starts feeling like another climb on the course. Spencer wobbles at first. Japan Cup pushes him over twice, and Toms loses the full 69-episode dream. There is fake ceremony, naturally. Paulus becomes the new owner of the illustrious Slow Ride Podcast championship belt, delivered with exactly the kind of official nonsense cycling podcasts do best. Then the messages arrive. Tim brings in feedback from friends of the podcast, including a defense of Quinn Simmons and his short WorldTour win. The panel acknowledges the 25-kilometer win, argues with it anyway, and folds it back into the running bit before it can become a clean correction. The clip ends by crashing into a glossy Criterium Nation-style monologue about physics, spirit, city streets, and crit racing's golden age. The joke is the whiplash: one minute they are assigning Japan Cup legacy points, the next they are floating through the raw soul of sport like a race promo wandered into the studio.

As heard by us

A cycling chat that turns race details, nostalgia, and listener pushback into a very funny argument.

The Slow Ride spends this stretch turning cobbled classics chatter into a back-and-forth argument, then lets that argument wander into nostalgia and a slightly absurd championship-belt handoff.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want cobbled-classics talk that keeps drifting into jokes, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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