In a few days, 2022 will come to an end. The usual holiday slowdown comes with a little added poignancy this year; the remaining staff of CyclingTips will wind down for a well-deserved break, and those that are leaving will enter an indeterminate period of soul-searching. Before things drift into a festive fog, though, it’s time for our annual look back at the year that was.
For something that ended with turbulence, it was an objectively stellar year on CyclingTips. The crew churned out more than 2,000 articles – an average of almost six a day, with obvious peaks around key events like the Tour de France and Road Worlds. Across the span of the year, that’s a whole lot of news, analysis, investigative reporting, tech, reviews and race coverage, read by millions of people.
In no particular order, here are the fifteen most widely-read articles published on the site in 2022:
It’s a pretty varied list, but I think as you work through the list you can get a feel for what CyclingTips brought the table in 2022. From deeply-researched long reads to clever tech angles – along with a sprinkling of inventive race reporting, and a smattering of breaking news – it’s a little microcosmic sampler of 2022 at CyclingTips.
Of course, there’s much more to the content of this site than just its top-ranking stories. There was a Field Test to ride and write, multiple podcasts to record, trade shows to attend, videos to make. On the ground, we had big crews at the Tour de France Hommes and Femmes, the Classics, and Road Worlds, and smaller crews at the Giro d’Italia and Gravel Worlds and probably some other things I’m forgetting about. That combines to a sum of countless thousands of carefully weighted words, and hours of recorded banter at every possible level of delirium.
The crew that was and the crew that still are pulled together all of that as – in many cases – a reflection of their personal passions. That was always The CyclingTips Difference™ – real stories told by a crew of multi-faceted people, about things that interested them, grasping at something deeper than the surface-level take, searching for nuance and perspective. A tight-knit crew who believed in what we were doing.
Many of those people will finish up in the coming days, or already have. But good people remain. James Huang, Dave ‘Shoddy’ Everett, Amy Jones and Phil Golston will help usher in the next era of CyclingTips – one that may feel different to how the site was, but with some familiar faces to welcome you. Every one of them is a legend, with integrity and voice and vision, and they’ll be there in 2023 to bring you distinctive tech reporting, class-leading video, and personality-filled race coverage. (There are also new job ads for a couple of roles, if that seems up your alley.)
I can’t speak for my colleagues that have gone or are going (the Class of 2022 includes Caley Fretz, Matt de Neef, Dave Rome, Dane Cash, Steve Brawley, Andy van Bergen, Abby Mickey, José Been, Jonny Long, Kit Nicholson and Ronan Mc Laughlin, plus me), and don’t know how helpful it is to mull on the last couple of months. What I can say is that CyclingTips was a joy to be a part of – to have those editorial freedoms, to have gentle guidance, to have an audience that cared as passionately as you all do.
2022 has been a year of highs and lows, big painful stories and little silly ones. At the end of it all, I’m proud of what we did this year, and in the years before it. Whatever the future holds, we’ll always have that.
Happy holidays, tailwinds, smooth roads, peace and love. It’s been a blast.
