Tour Divide Race: Day 15, Radio Free Divide
If famed Euro-roadie commentator Phil Liggett was raised by Confederate infantry reenactors and ate a panfried catfish steak with his eggs every morning, he'd be Joe Polk. Joe is the producer, color commentator and chief engineer of the podcast MTBCast! (mtbcast.com), and he's how I start my day this time of year. Joe works late into the night so that I can wake up, make coffee while the new episode downloads, mount my single speed and head out for a little gravel grinder before the heat index reaches 100. In twenty minutes I can catch up on the previous day's racing via racer call-ins and Joe's contextualizing. His podcasts on Tour Divide and the Great Divide Race, as well as Individual Time Trial efforts, are informative, motivational, inspirational, and most of all, entertaining. The podcast medium seems especially suited to the self-supported, honor system, no-entry-fee-no-prize-money attitude of Divide racing; podcasting itself, like Divide racing, is egalitarian, and the listener ingests the news of the dirt world on their own terms. I'm a podcast junkie and can tell you the distance between a scattershot Dixie-cup-on-monofilament mess and a professional-quality program is as wide as the Divide is long; MTBCast! is top-shelf, and if you want to keep apace with what's happening out there, it's essential.
MTBCast! is how I learned that British rider Paul Howard was passed by the mystery racer I blogged about a couple days ago. Anchorage elite distance mountain biker Pete Basinger is, at 3:30 Mountain Time, just about to cross into Colorado. He started several days behind the TD field, but he represents this season's biggest threat to Matthew Lee's ITT record. Pete is a heralded name in the enduro cult and his colossal thighs may be visible from Google Earth. NOTE: Matthew Lee holds the ITT Great Divide Mountain Bike Route record from 2007 (17:22:30) when he rode a "prologue" to the 2007 border-to-border Great Divide Race, so he's not only the Tour Divide record holder, but the fastest rider ever to roll from Banff to AW. Matthew Lee also holds the Tour Divide race record of 19:12:00 from 2008.
To steal from Phil Liggett, the Petervarys are riding like a man with four legs. Tandem-Onium is in Platoro, Colorado, just north of the New Mexico line. Close behind is Kurt Refsnider. Your leader, Matthew Lee, is pinning for the lake-of-stew-and-whiskey-too waters of Hopewell Springs and with seven hours of daylight left will probably make the three-legged-dog village of El Rito.
Check out Aaron Teasdale's spirited photos from the start in Banff and Day 1 of Tour Divide--it's the last time these racers enjoyed clean kits: http://www.adventurecycling.org/gdrgallery2009/ Aaron is a keen backcountry bikepacker and writes and shoots for the Adventure Cycling Association's Adventure Cyclist.
--Jon Billman
--Photo by Aaron Teasdale
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hey Jon
love the comments.I think this is the second time you`ve mentioned 19 odd days as a record.It is in fact 17.21 but even that comes with some footnotes.Matt would of hung around in 07 waiting for the GDR to start so no doubt would have lost some time but he did ride 17 days 21 hrs that year.Last year he did 19 odd hours in the first true Banff to Antelope race.He had mechanicals and wasnt pushed,all the potential competition was racing border to border ;-).
Hes keeping a cracking pace this year though despite the rain and the problems that causes and with the longer Canadian section but so is that mystery racer.
Posted by: carl hutch | June 27, 2009 at 07:54 AM