Teide is the longest ascent in this collection by a factor of two. It starts at the Atlantic and finishes inside the caldera at around 2,350 metres, on the shoulder of a volcano whose actual summit, at 3,715 metres, is the highest point in Spain and is reached only on foot.
Forty-eight kilometres and 2,260 metres of gain, and an average that says almost nothing useful. The first thirty kilometres climb steadily at six to eight per cent through banana terraces, then pine forest, and it is here that the day is decided. Above the treeline the road enters the caldera and the profile breaks apart: several kilometres of descent, then a series of shallow rises across the lava fields to the high point. Riders who treat the first two-thirds as a warm-up do not enjoy the last third.
What Teide asks for is not a climbing bicycle in the narrow sense. It is three hours of sustained effort ending in thin air on a road that stops being a climb and becomes something else, which is a broader brief than any pass in the Alps sets.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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