Gareth Winter

My grandmother, Branda Winter, bought her first bike in 1949 from Algurn Cycles in Wandsworth. It cost my great-grandfather £35. It's still hanging in my dad's garage.

She never framed it as a passion. It was just what you did. Post-war Britain, no money, nowhere to be, two wheels and the open road. Cycling gave an entire generation something that nothing else could: freedom.

Nan met my grandfather at a local cycling club. Every weekend, he'd ride home from his RAF base in Wiltshire (140km each way, because apparently suffering is hereditary) to spend the weekend racing at Herne Hill and Brands Hatch. Powered by Nan's homebakes. Motivated by love. Racing for the pure, uncomplicated joy of it.

I wear his first gold medal on a pendant every time I ride. The year they met. I take him with me wherever the road goes.

That's the bar. And it's the right bar. Not someone else's standard. Your own. Always improving, never comparing. The only competition that actually matters is with who you were yesterday.

My parents met at a roller-racing event in Peckham. Of course they did. While my schoolmates were queuing for Disneyland, I was cyclo-touring across the UK in the rain, drinking from rivers and living off flapjacks, wondering why anyone would choose to holiday any other way.

I still don't have a good answer. But cycling gave me something those holidays never could: the understanding that hard things are worth doing, that suffering has a purpose, and that the best views always come after the worst climbs.

Now I'm a father. And it's my turn to pass all of that down.

In 2010, I joined Sky News and Sky Sports. Wide-eyed and about to walk into the most extraordinary decade in British cycling history.

I was there when Sir Bradley Wiggins became the first Briton to win the Tour de France. I worked on the creative around Team Sky's dominance, first under Wiggins, then Chris Froome, the team that Sir Dave Brailsford built into the most formidable cycling operation the sport had ever seen. The marginal gains culture. The precision. The relentless, almost obsessive attention to every controllable variable. I absorbed all of it.

I was there for the London 2012 Olympics. Sir Chris Hoy, six-time Olympic champion, becoming a national icon in a velodrome that felt like it was built specifically to make the rest of the world feel inadequate. Geraint Thomas. Victoria Pendleton. The Great Britain track cycling programme dismantling the world record, then dismantling it again. I had a front-row seat to one of the greatest team sporting achievements in British history, and I was helping tell the story.

The Paralympic Games. More records. More gold. The same philosophy, different athletes, the same standard.

My role evolved. I grew into leading creative outputs for Sky's cycling sponsorship, working alongside the performance team, the coaches, the nutritionists, the psychologists, the chefs. People who treated every marginal detail as the difference between winning and second place. Being inside that environment changes how you think. It changes what you accept. It changes your standards permanently.

You are a product of your environment. And for almost a decade, my environment was the best in the world.

When Sky withdrew from cycling sponsorship in 2019 (Team Sky became INEOS, British Cycling moved on), it left a cycling-shaped hole that no amount of corporate work was going to fill.

I became Creative Director of Veloforte, the UK's fastest-growing sports nutrition brand, and spent eighteen months doubling their revenue. I got to work with more world-class athletes: Alex Dowsett, Hour Record holder and one of the most data-disciplined riders in the sport; and Neah Evans, one of Great Britain's greatest endurance riders, with Olympic silvers at Tokyo and Paris alongside multiple World and European titles. Helping everyday people become better athletes and better versions of themselves turned out to be exactly as purposeful as I'd hoped.

Everything I've done has been about one thing: helping people perform at a higher level.

At Sky, I told the story of athletes achieving things no one thought possible. At Veloforte, I helped people fuel better so they could ride further, recover faster, and feel genuinely good doing it. Now, as Creative Director at Mindvalley, I'm doing the same thing at a bigger scale: taking the world's leading thinkers on performance, mindset, and human potential and turning their ideas into learning experiences that actually change how people live.

The throughline is the same as it's always been. The road, the velodrome, the boardroom, the blog. Same mission. Different terrain.

Roadbook of Cycling is not Cycling Weekly. It is not GCN. It has no advertisers to protect, no access deals to honour, no reason to give a bike 9/10 when it deserves 7.

Every story, every review, every recommendation, every piece of advice on this blog has been earned the hard way: battle-tested on real roads, pressure-tested in real races, and informed by fifteen years of working alongside people who set the actual standard for what excellence in cycling looks like.

If I say something is good, it's because it is. If it's not, I'll tell you that too. Because the only currency this blog has is your trust. And I have no intention of spending it.

I work with a small number of brands whose values I'd stand behind regardless of whether they paid me. If that sounds like the kind of partnership you're looking for, I'd love to hear from you.

A few things worth knowing: I've worked with Sir Dave Brailsford, Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Chris Hoy, Geraint Thomas, Chris Froome, and Alex Dowsett. I've worked at Sky across Sky Sports, Sky News, Sky Cinema, and Team Sky. I've ridden Sa Calobra three times (one DNF, one 30:47, one 29:53). I carry my grandfather's medal on every climb. And I believe, genuinely, that cycling is one of the best things that can happen to a person.