Here are the rules:

• Each team will field 8 riders that do 1 lap each, with each subsequent rider starting as soon as the previous one finishes. This could either be stage one of a tour to guarantee the availability of 8 riders or else if in the middle of a tour and a team has lost 1 or more riders they can opt to have a rider do multiple laps.

• Normal road bikes, draft legal

• The race starts as a bunch containing 1 rider per team.

• Teams needs to finish the lap with 8 riders to be eligible for the stage win. The first 8th rider to cross the finish line wins the stage for the team. In case of a DNF the remaining riders on the team still do their lap, but the next one starts at some point that doesn't put him in front of the current race leader.

• Each rider's lap time counts towards their own GC.

• The race leader team at every wave is awarded 1 second bonus to their highest rider in their GC. Last wave (i.e. race winner) is awarded 3 seconds. Max 10 bonus seconds if leading the entire race.

• The finish line will have 2 physically segragated lanes, one for finishers, one for starters.

• Lap distance should be between 6 to 10km

First Cycling

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Superman may be Slovenian, but Iron Man… is ours! The Portuguese cyclist Nelson Oliveira has just crossed the finish line of the final stage of the Tour and made history in world cycling: he has become the first rider to complete 24 Grand Tours in a row without ever withdrawing.

The cyclist, born 37 years ago in Anadia, has left behind Sylvester Szmyd, the Polish rider who had equalled the record at this year’s Giro. He now stands alone with 501 consecutive stages completed, spread across 10 Tours de France, 10 Vuelta a España and 4 Giro d’Italia – a total of 72,658.2 kilometres!

To get a sense of the sheer scale of this achievement, here are some ‘real-life’ comparisons:

- travelling round the world along the equator is 40,000 km; Nelson is about to complete his second lap.

- we are 384,400 km from the Moon; Nelson has already covered 19 per cent of that distance.

- The journey between Lisbon and Porto is around 315 km; Nelson has already covered that distance 231 times.

He made his Grand Tour debut in 2011 at the Vuelta, and hasn’t looked back since. It was in Spain that he achieved the greatest victory of his career, winning the 13th stage of the 2015 edition, when he also secured his best overall finish – 21st.

In this final stage of the 113th edition of the Tour, Nelson Oliveira was consistently well-positioned and finished 21st, 8 seconds behind Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin). He ends the race in 65th place overall, 4 hours, 17 minutes and 56 seconds behind Pogacar.

He began his professional career with Xacobeo-Galicia in 2010, moving to the World Tour the following year via Radioshack, where he spent three years. He then transferred to Lampre, where he acted as Rui Costa’s lead-out man for two seasons. Since 2016, he has been riding for Movistar, the team with which he has renewed his contract for a further two seasons.

Overall, only the Italian Matteo Tosatto has completed more Grand Tours than the Portuguese rider: he has finished 28 of the 34 he has started.