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news
wolf (copyright fremlin via Flickr CC licensed)Wolf chases long-distance charity cyclist in Canada
The last thing Mac Hollan expected to see when he looked over his shoulder as he rode through Canada’s Yukon territory on Saturday was a wolf chasing him.
Hollan and two friends are riding from Idaho to Alaska to raise money for charity. When his friends stopped to make a bike repair, Hollan carried on, and when he heard breathing behind him, he assumed they had caught up.
But the panting wasn’t two cyclists working hard, it was a wolf who’d decided that Hollan looked like lunch.
Hollan knocked it up a few gears and accelerated down the road, with the wolf in hot pursuit. Once he’d managed to get a gap on the animal, he stopped and got out his bear spray.
He sprayed the wolf in the face and thought it would then leave him alone.
“He backed up about 20 feet and I thought he was going to stop,” Hollan told Canada’s CBA News.
“I thought, ‘What a wild story. I’m glad that’s over.’
“Then he kept running again and came back up to the back of my bike and actually attacked the back of my bike and ended up ripping the bag that I carry my tent stakes and poles in and ripped it off the back of my bike and spilled it all over the highway.”
Four vehicles passed Hollan as the wolf continued to harass him, until a couple driving a motorhome stopped to help.
Hollan climbed aboard, leaving his bike on the roadside, and the wolf attacked the bike. It didn’t leave until another motorist threw a metal water bottle at it, hitting it in the head.
Hollan and his friends were prepared for bears, but not wolves, which rarely attack people. They are carrying bear spray and bear bags and have been keeping a clean camp, a measure that’s recommended to stop bears scavenging for food.
But Hollan says one freak incident is not going to stop him and his friends from riding through Yukon and Alaska.
He said: “It’s kind of hard to worry about it happening again because I think the odds of it happening in the first place were astronomical, and for it to happen twice... I don’t foresee that happening.”
Commenters on the CBA site have noted that this is very unusual behaviour for a wolf, and have speculated that it was either unusually hungry, ill, or actually a large stray dog, perhaps a husky.
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.
Latest Comments
- chrisonabike 20 min 31 sec ago
Apologies - you're quite right! Something about presentation and comprehension...
- wtjs 41 min 12 sec ago
You can find out whether they're lying about 'taking action' by asking them what they actually did. When they refuse to tell you, citing various...
- Bungle_52 57 min 14 sec ago
Blind spots eh. Just a reminder of the lorry driver who was aquitted after killing a cyclist on a roundabout where the jury obviously felt it was...
- GMBasix 1 hour 27 min ago
But don't forget to correct for altitude.
- chrisonabike 5 hours 25 min ago
Also don't forget - Sustrans are a charity *....
- chrisonabike 5 hours 37 min ago
Yes ... but (just due to the large numbers of people affected) this likely would only proceed in the UK at a very ... cautious ... pace....
- EK Spinner 5 hours 54 min ago
Arsehole in the van not with standing, how did they manage to get a risk assessment allowing a race (a group not a TT) group to be competing on ...
- RafaDy 5 hours 50 min ago
I think reviewer completely missed the point here trying to match bike's name with what it can do. Ribble is namin git's bike weirdly, the...
- Moist von Lipwig 9 hours 15 min ago
Bit of googling gone wrong in the article - the JAT is the Junction Assessment Tool, the Joint Approval Team appears to be a coutner terrorism...
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21 comments
Puts being chased by a toy poodle into perspective!
Carry a Glock into Canada from the US and You, not the Wolf, are the offender.
I'd love to know what people's responses would be if he'd have been mauled to death by a wolf but decided to leave the bear spray in his pocket.
My respose would be disbelief. Only one person has ever been killed by wild wolves (note the plural) in North America. One too many, obviously, but this person went into an area where a group of wolves were known to be feeding on (human) garbage.
So this moron got away from this animal but stopped waited for it to come close and spray it? Fucking idiot
Whatever chemical sludge was in this 'spray' could possibly kill this animal which is in its own habitat and simply acting through primeval instinct to feed itself and presumably its cubs
im sick to death of fucking morons interfering with nature and screwing everything up
The moron human was at fault here,i have no sympathy whatsoever with the bloody fool
Did anyone else read this, think of Eddie from American Flyers and start humming ZZ Top's Dirty Dog
Of course, he only has to outcycle his friends.
the wolf was probably KOM on that strava section
Shoot! It seemed like I had finally found a suitable replacement for my oil slick! No race-day bear mace if it has this shoddy result...
I was chased by a wolf while I was out riding once. Well, I say 'wolf' - it was a Jack Russell. Surprisingly quick for such short legs though.
Short legs, but incredibly high cadence!
If someone's gaining on you and it looks like you're about to get dropped, do the graceful thing and let it happen - accept that on this occasion they were faster than you... don't fucking bear spray them! What unsporting bastards.
Oh come on we've all done it. See another cyclist in the distance anf just think to yourself I going to catch up to them. Bet the wolf was well into the red zone
Reckon that drafting situation would ruin most rider's anaerobic threshold.
Why stop so he could spray the poor creature in the face? Why didn't he just keep going?
The 'poor creature' that was trying to KILL him? Keep going for how long? Maybe you are superman but not everyone can outrun a wolf.
He only has to outcycle the wolf. The water sounds like a good idea though.
Due to our superior ability to deal with heat (dogs have to pant) humans have better endurance that most other animals. In fact, when bikes were first created there were a lot of cyclist vs. horse competitions. Once you got to the 2hr mark of exercise the horse would normally succumb to exhaustion (in fact the time/distance may even be less).
Chase a rabbit around and you'll get tired. Stalk around (effectively walk) and the rabbit becomes exhausted.
I think we've all learnt something here today.
So that's why when they escape from the hutch, catching them quickly never works, but walking round for 15 mins does the trick.
As for spraying the wolf, having outrun it over a relatively short distance, it's a predator that would probably have stalked him at a distance for miles, in addition to it being located between him and his following mates. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to resolve the situation on his own terms.
If he was far enough ahead to stop and get out the bear spray, he had already outrun the wolf. Wolves are pack animals. The "Lone Wolf" though much loved in popular culture, is usually alone because it can no longer keep up with the pack. This one, as has been said, was probably old or sick, and easily outrun. (It could of course, have been a large Dog, in which case I suspend my usual love of Animals, and recommend the excellent Richard Ballantine.)