Kelly

Il Lombardia is the final Monument of the men’s road season and one of cycling’s most distinctive one-day races. The Italian Classic is built...

The Bretagne Classic is one of the oldest surviving one-day races in professional cycling, although its modern name hides much of that history. For...

The Bretagne Classic is one of those races whose importance can be easy to underestimate if you are new to professional cycling. It is...

The Tour de France 2026 will be remembered first for Tadej Pogačar winning a fifth yellow jersey, but reducing the race to that one...

The Vuelta a España is the youngest of cycling's three men's Grand Tours, but nearly a century after its creation it has developed an...

Festina should have been remembered as one of the defining teams of 1990s cycling. It had Richard Virenque, Laurent Dufaux, Laurent Brochard, Christophe Moreau,...

Paris-Roubaix has always stood apart. Even in a sport built on hardship, it developed into something more severe, more elemental and more mythic than...

The Tour de France Green Jersey, known as the "maillot vert," is awarded to the leader of the points classification in the Tour de...

La Classicicissima is another old old bike race, starting up in 1907 (and an amateur 2-day version in 1906). The soon to be 2-time Tour de France winner Lucien Petit-Breton won the first race. The 1920s were dominated by Costante Girardengo who won the race 6 times and had 5 further podium places. The Italian dominance continued into the 1940s with heavyweights like Alfredo Binda, Gino Bartali & Fausto Coppi all winning the race.

Kelly started his career by getting a ban for riding in apartheid-era South Africa as prep for the 1976 Olympics. Banned from them, he moved to France to race, won the Junior Il Lombardia and the rest is history.