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Tour de Cycle HireVideo: London to Paris by Boris Bike
Boris Bikes. Despite their weight and impracticality for long rides, they've been ridden up Mt Ventoux, round the route of the first stage of the 2014 Tour de France, and now all the way from London to Paris.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. On his blog CycleLove, designer James Greig tells how he agreed to join a refreshingly daft trip - over 300km from the UK capital to the French on London's iconic hire bikes.
Greig writes: "Completely out of the blue, I received a phone call from my friend Graham [McLoughlin] at Borough: “I’m going to ride a Boris Bike from London to Paris. Do you want to come with me?”
"Without thinking I said yes.
"It sounded like a fun trip. And I’d been wanting to do a London to Paris ride for a while (having read about the kind of nutters who do it in 24 hours on single speed bikes without stopping)."
They enlisted friend James Holt as a third rider and accompanied by filmmaker Chris Lawson, and cameraman Colin Greenall, off they went.
Well, almost. First they had to plan a route. Their sanity and lack of training was questioned, but, says Greig, "when we plotted our Airbnb accommodation into Google Maps and crunched the numbers, it seemed perfectly doable — if — we stretched the journey over a few more days than you might usually take."
It's France in the summer after all — what's the rush?
They came up with a route that went London - Brighton - Newhaven - Dieppe - Rouen - Bennecourt - Paris. Here's the tale:
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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Christ people are boring Looks fine to me. You have 20 trillion traditional looking bikes to choose from if you don't like this!
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Should have lead with > CHPT3 files for Chapter 11 (Though not technically correct as it's not a US company)
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" To be fair it is a completely unsolvable problem…. Like aging, belly button lint, or fascism. "
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8 comments
That's all nice, but where is the vid where 3x nutters from Paris cycle on a hire bike to London???
I recall that someone cycled from London to Paris on a Boris bike about 2 or 3 years ago and then got the bike back to the hire point - all within 24 hours.
Enjoyed that, thank you. Le Big Mac though. In France?!
Meh, I did it in 3 days on a Birmingham Hire Brompton but didn't take along a film crew to carry my luggage.
Lol! Nice bit of scorn poured all over that piece my man!
Meh, a Boris bike is only 10kg heavier than a brompton. Every achievement is still an achievement, and nor to be pissed on, tw@
Meh, a Boris bike is only 10kg heavier than a brompton. Every achievement is still an achievement, and nor to be pissed on, tw@