THE MAN WHO LIVED ON HIS BIKE from Guillaume Blanchet on Vimeo.
According to Adventure Journal, Guillaume Blanchet spent 382 days in Montreal filming himself living life from the seat of his bike. The result is a fun, playful short film centered on the joy of riding a bicycle. Blanchet made the film in honor of his father, an avid cyclist who’s logged more than 120,000 KMs in his life.
The last weeks of December are a time for reflection, introspection, and a flood of Best-of and Top-10 lists across the Internet. I don’t have a top 10 list to share with you (instead I encourage you to go back and read all of the interviews on The Bicycle Story and pick YOUR 10 favorites to share with everyone you know). But, I do have one fantastic article to share with you; hands down the best piece of cycling-related writing I read this year.
Philip Gourevitch’s July 2011 New Yorker story, “Climbers” explores the history of the Rwandan national cycling team, its rising stars, and its founders to tell a smart, informative story about tragedy and redemption in Rwanda.
At over 13,000 words, Gourevitch’s complex narrative is difficult to summarize in a few lines. The stars of Team Rwanda were mostly young boys at the time of the 1994 genocide. A mix of Hutu and Tutsi, the team offers its riders both an escape from poverty and an outlet that helps them deal with the horrors of their pasts. The team’s success and the riders’ status as national figures also brings with it new found pressure and expectations from family, fans, and friends.
The head of Team Rwanda Jonathan “Jock” Boyer is a former pro-cyclist who had success as one of the first American’s to race the Tour de France and later as the winner of the 1985 Race Across America. His life fell apart in the decades following his professional cycling career as his business crumbled, his marriage ended, and he spent a year in prison for “lewd acts with a minor.” Mountain bike legend Tom Ritchey (Boyer’s childhood friend) reached out to him to help found the Rwandan cycling team, which has in-turn marked the start of Boyer’s own redemption.
If “Climbers” was just an article about the history and relative-success of Team Rwanda it would be fascinating and enjoyable. That Gourevitch uses it as a catalyst to discuss the devastating genocide and the country’s progress towards reconciliation and recovery makes it a valuable piece of long-form journalism.
Now you should take the time to go read it yourself.
Posted in Cycling Media, Everything Else, History, Racing
Tagged jack boyer, new yorker, phillip gourevitch, rwanda cycling, team rwanda
Photographer and Filmmaker (and previous Bicycle Story interviewee) Brian Vernor just released the mini-documentary he made about the Trans-Andes Challenge, a 250-mile stage race across Chile’s Patagonia region. The film was part of the 2011 Bicycle Film Festival, but now that the festival has completed its run of showings across the US, Vernor is releasing his doc in-full online.
Vernor is known for incorporating a surf-film aesthetic into his work and that holds true for this as well in the way he shows the landscapes, the people and places on the region, and the life and culture of the racers between stages.
Trans Andes Challenge, The Film from Team Jamis on Vimeo.
Dutch writer and bicycle tourist Grace Johnson launched a new online magazine this month called Bicycle Traveler. The free (and advertisement-free) digital publication is, as you’d imagine, focused on stories and photography about bicycle touring.
The content in Issue #1 is a bit of a mixed bag. Several of the articles appear to be excerpts from bicycle touring blogs and they read that way. But, the feature article more than makes up for it. It’s about Eric and Jack Attwell, two South African brothers who rode the length of Africa then all the way to London in the 1930s. It is well written and provides a fascinating snapshot of both 1930s bike touring and Africa itself.
I’m looking forward to future issues of the magazine. It’s a respectable and ambitious project, made all that more ambitious by the fact that Johnson and her husband Paul Jeurissen are in the midst of their own world-wide bike tour. The two of them sold their house in the Netherlands in 2010 and set off on the road.
Go check out the Bicycle Traveler site, download the first issue, and explore the magazine for yourself.