Dutch professional sports team Visma-Lease a Bike recently debuted the Aerohead 2.0, a time trial cycling helmet with an outrageous design that seems to have been inspired by Mel Brooks’s cult comedy, Spaceballs. Visma-Lease a Bike is known for thoroughly testing every innovation it implements, and the Aerohead 2.0 cycling helmet is no different. The new time trial head gear was designed and developed in collaboration with American company Giro Sport Design and debuted earlier this month, on the first stage of Tirreno-Adriatico, where it caused quite a stir due to its unusual shape. Considerably larger than most time trial cycling helmets, the Aerohead 2.0 has an unusually large visor that could help with visibility when head-down riding, as well as wider wings and an upward-elongated front tip. It has been described as “ridiculous” and an “eyesore”, but Visma-Lease a Bike swears by its aerodynamic qualities. Read More »

The Dutch Headwind Time Trial Championship is only 8.5 kilometers long, but it is considered one of the hardest cycling challenges in the world. If you’ve ever ridden a bike against a reasonably strong wind, you know just how difficult dealing with the extra drag can be. Now imagine doing it in winds of well over 100km (60mph), over a distance of nearly kilometers, using a single-gear bicycle. Some people say that the Tour de France is the hardest bicycle race in the world, while others think that the title should go to Race Across America, but in terms of difficulty per kilometer, the Dutch Headwind Championship could definitely throw its hat in for the title as well. It only takes place during storms, when the wind force is expected to be at least 7, on the Oosterscheldekering storm barrier, which faces the North Sea. Read More »

This month, Kyle Messier, a 31-year-old bike mechanic, won the Big Red Gravel Run, a 100 kilometer bike race that takes place in Harrington, Quebec. While this is an impressive achievement on its own, what makes Kyle’s win truly exceptional is that he had already pedaled more than 650 kilometers to the race site, and a few hours after winning he got back on his bike and pedealed back home to Waterloo. Messier’s journey from Waterloo to Harrington took him 3.5 days to complete. After winning first place in the rural cycling race,he celebrated with some pizza, slept for a few hours in his tent, and then got started on the 3.5-day journey back home. And it gets even more remarkable still; Kyle was not only completely new to bicycle racing, but he also managed to win the 100-kilometer Big Red Gravel Run while suffering from an abscessed tooth. Read More »

Bored with his daily exercise bike routine, a crafty video game developer from the United Kingdom has come up with a way of spicing up the experience while enjoying the beauty of his country from the comfort of his own home. Pedaling on an exercise bike may keep you in decent physical shape, but it can get pretty boring after a while. Aaron Puzey had been toiling away on his exercise bike for half an hour a day for years when he decided to look for a way to make it a bit more fun. With virtual reality technology widely available nowadays, all he needed to do was find a way of applying it to his needs. So he set out to build an app for the Samsung Galaxy Gear VR headset which would allow him to hook it up to Google Streetview and make it seem like he’s cycling through different real-life locations. His ultimate goal? To cycle the entire length of the UK – 1,500 kilometers from Land’s End to John o’ Groats – without actually leaving his home. Read More »

Mega Underground Bike Park is a one-of-a-kind underground bike trail in Louisville, Kentucky. Spanning 320.000 square feet, with over 45 trails, Jump Lines, Pump Tracks, BMX, Cross Country and Single Track, the park is entirely located 100 feet or 10 stories below the ground! The bike park is one of the many attractions at Louisville Mega Cavern, a man-made, privately-owned limestone cavern that encompasses an area of 100 acres beneath the streets of Louisville. Founded by Ralph Rogers in the 1930s, the cavern is currently used as a business park, entertainment center, and tourist attraction. All set for a soft opening in early February, the bike park will be the nation’s first underground mountain bike course, and the largest indoor park ever built. In fact, it is nearly twice the size of America’s current largest indoor park – Ray’s Indoor Bike Park in Cleveland, Ohio. Read More »

It’s hard to picture a superhero on a cycle, but after watching self-styled ‘Traffic Droid’ a.k.a. Lewis Dediare in action, I have to admit it’s actually doable. Dressed from head to foot in black lycra, with seven video cameras mounted on his cycling helmet, Lewis rides around the streets of London with a single mission – to fight a ‘war of attrition’. You see, the man has taken it upon himself to rid the streets of ‘idiot’ drivers who are a threat to cyclists like himself.

Among the 39-year-old’s other weapons are a camera mounted on a three-foot pole protruding from his bicycle, and a measuring tape. The tape is used to measure the distance that larger vehicles maintain from him on the streets. If it’s anything different from the prescribed amount, he admonishes the drivers and shows them a ‘red card’.

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At one particular Brazilian jail, inmates don’t actually need both wheels on their bicycle to make an escape. By pedaling on stationary bikes, they can reduce their sentence and also get into shape. The medium-security penitentiary of Santa Rita do Sapucai, a mountain range city about two hours north of Sao Paolo, has recently made headlines for its controversial sentence-reducing program. Thought up by the local judge, Jose Henrique Mallmann, who said he was inspired by a piece of news he read on the Internet about gyms in the United States where people generate electricity by riding stationary bikes, this two-month old program has inmates doing the same thing to reduce their stay in jail. For every three eight-hour days riding the bikes, criminals have one day of sentence shaved off. It’s a pretty good deals, but like other recently-implemented programs in Brazilian jails, it sparked some controversy around the South-American country.

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Zheng Sheng, a 23-year-old college graduate from Shanghai, has fulfilled his dream of cycling across Eurasia, traveling 14,000 kilometers all the way to London. When Zheng tried to convince sponsors to finance his daring dream, they all thought he was crazy, but he wasn’t about to let something as meaningless as money stand before him and his goal. With the help of his sister and a few friends, he managed to raise 13,000 yuan ($2,000), which he used to buy all the necessary gear for a bike ride from his home city of Shanghai to London. Before setting out on March 5, he posted on his microblog: “A journey 14,000 kilometers is the goal – here I go!”. He went though all kinds of challenges throughout the 136 days he spent cycling across 11 countries, but believe it or not, this ambitious young man reached his destination on July 18. Read More »

Derived from the traditional equestrian sport the English are so found of, bike polo started out as just another underground urban sport, but is now one of the most popular cycling sports in America.

Bicycle polo can be traced back to 1891, when Irish cyclist Richard J. Mecredy first came up with the crazy idea of riding the bike with one hand and holding a polo mallet in the other. Back then, it was played on grass, just like horse polo, and it wasn’t until the last decade that bike polo started being played on hard surfaces.  Bikers first started competing in Bike Polo games in cities like New York, Chicago and Seattle, but thanks to the Internet, it quickly spread to other US cities, and is now a regimented sport, with a clear set of rules and its own championship – the North American Hardcourt Bicycle Polo Championships.

The game of Bike Polo basically features two teams of three members chasing a street hockey ball, trying to kick it through the opposition’s small goal. Their mallets are made from plastic tubes and old ski sticks, and their fixed gear bikes only have one handlebar, to allow better control of the hockey ball. As you can imagine, this is not the safest sport in the world, especially considering it’s played on hard surfaces and there are a lot of crashes involved. Players try to gracefully avoid bumping into one another, but that’s not very easy to do on a bicycle, and accidents do happen. But that’s precisely what makes bicycle polo an adrenaline filled sport, and that’s why so many people love it.

Bike polo is well on its way to becoming a mainstream sporting event, as authorities keep building more and more sanctioned places to practice the sport, all across the United States, and players hope they’ll soon be able to organize world class bike polo competitions.

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