10 YEARS OF THE TRANS CONTINENTAL

The brainchild of British rider Mike Hall, the Transcontinental Race has become a must-do event for ultra-distance aficionados the world over. James Shrubsall charts its unconventional and epic rise to prominence

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with only a handful of hours left to ride of what had been an epic journey across Europe, Christoph Strasser was almost within sight of victory. After thousands of kilometres toiling through Europe, he was so close – and yet it wasn’t that simple. It was pitch dark, the batteries in his lights had run down and he had a puncture to try to fix.

To cap it all, he already had lost his all-important GPS tracker, issued to all competitors. He may have been within shouting distance of the chequered flag but at that point, having stumbled around in woodland for nearly an hour looking for the offending item, victory seemed a long way off indeed. With nearly 4,000 kilometres (2,485 miles), 40,000 vertical metres and 350 riders all behind him, the 41-year-old Austrian ultra-distance star was beginning to feel that the Transcontinental Race bubble in which he had existed for the past eight days was in serious danger of bursting.

The race had broadly gone to plan up to that point, but the final 150 kilometres were nothing short of disastrous. “They were a catastrophe really,” he says. “I had a little crash on a gravel section and lost my tracker… Looking for it in the middle of the night, I was walking in the woods for an hour. Then I had to fix a flat tyre without lights.” Strasser had been dreading the off-road sections, and now his worst fears were being borne out.