It pains us to report this morning that Stephen Phillips is out of the Race. It seems that circumstances have slowly conspired almost from Day One to finally leave him without the option of continuing. And on Sunday he announced via his Facebook page that his record attempt was over.
The outside hall of the Berlin Bike Show (photo: Dimitri Hempel)
Stateside around this time of the year, cycling fans who eschew the Conveyor Belt in favour of the Bespoke gravitate towards the annual North American Handmade Bicycle Show. And on this side of The Pond, similar-minded people are finding themselves drawn each spring to the German capital for the Berliner Fahrrad Schau.
In the WCR Grand Tour, the big adjustment from normal life to hammering solo on your bike for most of your waking hours will at this stage have been made by most of our racers. The rhythm of riding hard for ten, twelve, or more hours with barely a day off in between (barring illness or enforced airplane use) can have a frightening relentlessness to it from a certain perspective.
The Grand Tour is not for the faint of heart – but its riders seem to have their respective end goals always in sight, and an awareness of events occurring beyond the immediate vantage point of their saddles. It’s Life, lived in the moment but equipped with room for a view of the Big Picture, so to speak.
Brooks Bar Corks are almost as versatile as Proofide. Courtesy of Richard Dunnett.
The metaphorical firework which we metaphorically launched on February 18th in Greenwich, London has metaphorically exploded. The WCR Grand Tour is in full flight, and its individual riders have been scattered like so many brightly coloured hot shards of flame, firework-like across the Globe. And to (perhaps over-) extend the analogy, we feel sure that they will continue glowing against the metaphorical Night Sky until they have all put down their 18,000-odd miles, hit two antipodal points, etc., etc.
Where do we start? A week is traditionally a long time in politics. However, if competitively circumnavigating the earth by bike had already been a common pursuit at the time of the phrase’s invention, we feel sure that it would instead go something like -
“A week is a long time in competitively circumnavigating the earth by bike”.
Opening Night at Merci.
We briefly touched last month on the MY BIKE exhibition in Paris. Hosted by the Cohens at their design emporium Merci, the show was planned with serious bicycle historians and style conscious urban commuters in mind. Fortunately, plenty of both camps made it to the opening night in January, and plenty more have continued to fetch up at the door, hopeful of a glimpse at the future of cycling and cyclewear, as well as its past.
Talking to Zimbabwe’s Seán Conway, one gets the impression of dealing with a man who has a lot of irons in the fire. This makes him no different from the rest of the riders signed up to take a shot at the Guinness world record for fastest circumnavigation of the earth in 2012. But with incidental things likes overseeing solar power projects for schools in Africa, endurance canoeing marathons, swimming the Channel, and even booking transfer flights to keep him occupied, you could almost forget the small matter of an entire planet which will very soon need to be lapped by bike. As quickly as possible. But not Seán.
Besides raising money for Solar Aid, why are you doing this?
Scenes from the hard road, with new Guinness record holder Alan Bate.
Those intrepid souls gunning for a place in the record books when they leave London by bike on February 18th as part of the World Cycle Racing Grand Tour have just had their job made that little bit harder.
We mentioned on the Brooks Blog earlier this week that a rumour was doing the rounds of a soon to be ratified finishing time of somewhere in the region of a hundred days for one complete circumnavigation of the earth.
And bear in mind that the previous best had been set by Vin Cox, and stood at 163 days.
Both Brooks and PEDALeD will be represented at the MYBIKE exhibition in Paris.
No major world city has remained untouched by the resurgence of bicycling as a means of undertaking one’s urban commute, or simply getting around. And by any scale of measurement, we can probably all agree that Paris is a major world city.
It was with this in mind that we took a look last week at one of our Parisian Brooks Supreme Dealers Of Excellence, and today take a look today at MY BIKE, an upcoming exhibition taking place in Paris. It will showcase some should-haves for the bicycliste looking to cut a smart yet practical dash both on and off two wheels.
Niels Albert, left, reckons Sven Nys was probably the better man on the day. Or does he?
“Sven was the strongest today. That’s how it works in a race. The best would win today on a course like this and that was Sven today.”
Seemingly innocuous, but on closer inspection potentially loaded with HIDDEN MEANING, wouldn’t you say? It all depends on the stress given to specific words, or the judicious placement of a comma or full stop.
The quote in question comes from the gracious mouth of Niels Albert, “First Runner Up” and defending champion at last weekend’s Belgian National Cyclocross Championship. Second is going to hurt at the best of times, but at the BNCXC, that most Cyclocross of Cyclocross events, the pain must have been close to unbearable.
