Team Tuesday fly up Gibson Street, then forget how legs work

Team Tuesday opened their account for the day in spectacular fashion, with Iain setting a personal best on Gibson St Climb — 0:44, three seconds quicker than ever before, right at the start of the ride home. This is the hill of the Tour, short and steep and unforgiving, and to take time off it rather than simply survive it is no small thing. It set the tone, or at least it should have.

Moments later came another personal best, this time on the Half Climb version of the same brutal ramp, and then third-best-ever honours on the traffic-light-trimmed Gibson Street segment further up. For a few glorious minutes, Team Tuesday looked like a team transformed, taking the hill apart piece by piece with the lights conveniently in their favour.

What followed was rather more Metronome-shaped. The Chilli Road Dash Reversed produced the slowest of nineteen attempts, some 89 per cent off the best, and the Cote de Four Lane Ends was the slowest of nine tries, down 43 per cent. A nameless segment further along fared little better, also the worst of nine. Somewhere in there the legs that had powered up Gibson Street clearly went missing, last seen heading towards Byker with the crosswind for company on a warm evening, the breeze at least behind or across rather than in the face.

But this is Team Tuesday, and consistency is the whole point: they found something again for Four Lane Dash, second-best ever at 0:38, to send Iain home on a high after all.

In the general classification, nothing changes at the sharp end: Team Friday still lead at 25.1 km/h across four legs, with Team Wednesday second. Team Tuesday remain fourth, their podium of segment bests not quite enough to shift the bigger picture, but proof there’s real form in there when the lights, and the legs, align.