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.
この記事は Cycling Weekly の March 28, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Cycling Weekly の March 28, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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