Sa Calobra is a road built for no reason except to reach a cove. It was completed in 1932 to the design of the engineer Antonio Parietti, who was given a limestone gorge in the Serra de Tramuntana and instructed to get a road down it, and who solved the last problem by looping the road through 270 degrees and passing it underneath itself — the Nus de sa Corbata, the tie knot.
Because it is a dead end, the climb is always ridden as the return: down ten kilometres to the sea at Port de Sa Calobra, then back up the same road, 701 metres of it. The gradient is remarkable for how little it varies. Nine of the ten kilometres sit between six and seven per cent, and the road holds that angle through every hairpin, which is why it has become one of the standard European venues for threshold testing. Only the final kilometre changes character, and it is the steepest of the climb.
Riders who know it treat it as a laboratory rather than a mountain: same road, same gradient, same hour of the morning, and the only variables are the rider and the bicycle.
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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