Five years after winning the Lancaster Grand Prix, and with his riding career over sooner than expected, Josh Whitehead is back in the North West as sports director of 360cycling’s under-23 men’s team. In a Ramsbottom coffee shop, he explains how data is shaping his new career, and why it only takes you so far.
Five years after winning the Lancaster Grand Prix, and with his riding career over sooner than expected, Josh Whitehead is back in the North West as sports director of 360cycling’s under-23 men’s team. In a Ramsbottom coffee shop, he explains how data is shaping his new career, and why it only takes you so far.
For every British rider the move to a European team has worked for, camsmajaco co-manager Ian Mansel-Thomas can point to another it hasn’t. In his second journal entry he argues that the problem isn’t Europe but the age at which riders go: 16, with school, exams, and friendships all still at home.
Hope Inglis returns with the second entry in her 2026 journal for The British Continental. Looking back from the end of a placement in an air-conditioned Birmingham office, the London Academy rider describes keeping a racing season going around a full-time job — the annual leave spent driving to a muddy field in Belgium, the week she commuted to work from a campervan, and the tan lines her work trousers hide.
George Stephen returns with the second entry in his 2026 journal for The British Continental. Writing from Mallorca after burnout forced him out of the National Championships, the BCC Race Team rider and Nottingham student pays tribute to the people who never appear on the results list — but without whom no bike rider gets anywhere.
Fifth in the national time trial on caffeine alone, then two laps of bluff and counter-bluff in Aberystwyth that settled the under-23 title — Mattie Dodd on a Nationals he can barely remember, and a stand-off he could not win.
A first UCI win on stage 4 of the Ronde de l’Isard, a week of donkey work in the Alps and eight summits’ worth of climbing points at the Giro d’Italia Next Gen — Mattie Dodd on the best month of his season, and the prize he has since mislaid.
A week at the Tour de Bretagne leaves Mattie Dodd feeling the strongest he has all season, if without the result to show for it — before fighter jets, First World War mines and his new team’s first road race win enliven a run through the Ardennes and Flanders.
George Stephen is the latest contributor to The British Continental’s 2026 journal series. The BCC Race Team rider and Nottingham student writes about a Movember ride that came to mean more than he expected, the crash in France that changed everything, and the diagnosis that arrived just as he had got back to racing.
We are really pleased to introduce Ian Mansel-Thomas as the latest of The British Continental’s 2026 journal contributors. Ian co-manages the junior super-team camsmajaco, and in his opening entry he examines how junior racing has come to resemble the WorldTour — and the rider-agent landgrab that now reaches under-16s.
