Lance Armstrong last night used the power of Twitter to invite scottish cyclists, and anybody else who's in the area to join him on a bike ride and at very short notice 300 turned up to join him for a ride.
A few hours after issuing the invite, Armstrong tweeted the meeting point and start time – noon from the Ashtree House Hotel, 9 Orr Square, Paisley. As it turned out he was running a bit late… he tweeted that too.
Armstrong is in town to catch a U2 concert en-route to taking part in the Tour of Ireland which starts on Friday, he will then be hosting an international Livestrong cancer summit in Dublin Castle next week.
Before touching down in Scotland Armstrong quipped that he would be packing his rain gear – a wise move, given the misty looking pics we've seen. The power of the web being what it is Armstrong said thatt the customs officers at Glasgow Airport were quizzing him about tomorrow's route…(lads, great though the powers of Lance are, a working knowledge of the road network around Paisley is probably expecting a bit much – he's from Texas).
As predicted here, given the pulling power of Lance and the fact that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity it did turn out to be a very big ride indeed – imagine how many might have turned up if he's issued the invite for tomorrow… maybe the officers at the airport were right to ask him where he was going. To make a magical experience even more magical Lance wasn't even the only cycling legend on the ride the Flying Scotsman, Graeme Obree turned out too.
If you did go on the ride, let us know how you got on.
Thanks to GrantTod for the pic!
Plucked from the obscurity of his London commute back in the mid-Nineties to live in Bath and edit bike mags our man made the jump to the interweb back in 2006 as launch editor of a large cycling website somewhat confusingly named after a piece of navigational equipment. He came up with the idea for road.cc mainly to avoid being told what to do… Oh dear, issues there then. Tony tries to ride his bike every day and if he doesn't he gets grumpy, he likes carbon, but owns steel, and wants titanium. When not on his bike or eating cake Tony spends his time looking for new ways to annoy the road.cc team. He's remarkably good at it.