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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.
Latest Comments
- john_smith 1 sec ago
Straight into the sun is perhaps an exaggeration, but at that time it would be about ESE, and there are bits of the road which head roughly SSE, so...
- john_smith 8 min 45 sec ago
7 October was just a bit of harmless fun until the "msm" ramped it up.
- hawkinspeter 8 min 58 sec ago
It's not censored if you just pirate it
- stonojnr 1 hour 13 min ago
an example of Kesgraves "best cycling infrastructure in the country" https://maps.app.goo.gl/GsCMbzDUTPdq59qS9
- ktache 1 hour 16 min ago
They are not going full gas at every point. They would destroy themselves. And tactics, they save themselves for when effort is really needed....
- wookey 1 hour 21 min ago
It turns out that that is national police policy. We found out from this process that there is national 'secured by design' policy which causes...
- mtbtomo 2 hours 1 min ago
Been available for quite a while, full GRX mechanical 12 speed. Probably around the same time as 105 mechanical 12 speed if I were to guess.
- TheBillder 2 hours 6 min ago
Less harmful citrus degreaser is easy to find at £8 or less for 5 litres. Works ok for me, even diluted up to 4:1. Both paraffin and white spirit...
- Veganpotter 2 hours 12 min ago
Nope, it's to keep your straps down and quieter. Plus most sunglasses are polycarbonate and aren't going to shatter like glass anyway
- Steve K 2 hours 43 min ago
And, more seriously, where's the coverage of the closure of the cycle lane which forces you to cycle on the Totton bypass.
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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@