To our inGamba family:

We know that coronavirus (Covid-19) has become a global concern. We, like you, have been watching closely to determine what the impact of this new sickness means for our families, friends, and businesses. 

Gary Halvorson is a Juilliard-trained musician with a list of directorial credits as long as your arm. His incredible career has taken him from the rarefied atmosphere of opera and the symphony to sitcoms and back again, and as you’d expect, he knows how to tell a good story.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years! It still feels like yesterday. I’m very happy to remember this day because it’s one of the most beautiful memories I have of all my years in cycling. That stage wasn’t the best for our riders. In ’94, the team was built for sprinters, because we had Mario Cipollini and Adriano Baffi and no great climbers for the mountains. So with Ventoux, the stage to Carpentras looked impossible for us.

I started waking up before dawn when I was 17 years old. That summer, I worked on the docks down in Seattle alongside my father, who was the line manager. We processed fish in a cavernous, refrigerated space roughly the size of what I imagined a rich person’s “great room” would be. The work, unfortunately, wasn’t great. On our feet for as long as 14 hours, we started at six in the morning, which meant we caught the 4:45am bus from our house in the suburbs in order to arrive in time to don hairnets and arm gaiters before sliding into our respective spots on the processing line. 

Rick Zabel is the third generation of a proud racing dynasty, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Detlef Zabel and his dad, Erik, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest sprinters of all time. It can’t have been easy stepping out of the shadow of a man who won Milano-Sanremo four times and the points classification in the Tour de France over six consecutive years, but over the past few seasons Rick has established a reputation both as a valuable leadout man and as a sprinter in his own right, memorably beating a talented pack that included Mark Cavendish in stage two of the 2019 Tour de Yorkshire. But when he’s not competing on the World Tour, he spends a lot of his time in Mallorca, where his family have had a home since he was a kid. We caught up with him to get his take on inGamba’s newest destination and to find out more about this special Mediterranean island. 

01. Start the morning with high fives or hugs. Ideally both. But in case you’re not a hugger, know that you can still take the jersey with high fives alone. Five points for each.