The Coffee Ride: Olympic cycling coach Tim Decker covers 812km in 24-hour ride for charity
AUSTRALIAN Olympic cycling coach Tim Decker made good on his promise to push his mind and body like never before in a 24-hour bike event last weekend.
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812KM AND COUNTING
AUSTRALIAN Olympic cycling coach Tim Decker made good on his promise to push his mind and body like never before in a 24-hour bike event last weekend.
Decker lined up in ‘Revolve 24’ at the new motorsport park at Tailem Bend alongside cycling journalists Rupert Guinness and Mike Tomalaris who also produced mighty efforts.
Riding from 3pm Saturday to 3pm Sunday to help raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation, they battled the elements as well as severe physical and mental fatigue.
Decker led all-comers by covering an astonishing 812km.
He averaged 34.2km and had three stops of between 8 and 18 minutes in the face of near gale-force winds and getting sandblasted until dark.
“I just got in a zone to be honest for 20 of the 24 hours,” he said.
“What was amazing was how you can make things happen no matter what the challenge if you really want to. In the early four hours we were doing turns into the headwind at 500 watts just to do 24km/h.
“But once again cycling brought people together and that was what was so beautiful about it.”
Decker fell asleep in the car on the way home then slept for 12 hours and not surprisingly wasn’t at Stage 1 of the TDU in Lyndoch on Tuesday.
LYLE TAKES A BREAK - SORT OF
LYLE Baird just turned 80 and usually he would give the Tour Down Under everything he’s got in an official capacity.
But this year one of SA’s hardest working cycling officials has decided to become a spectator despite being part of the action when the race was in its full infancy in 1999.
A life member of Cycling SA and the Kilkenny Cycling Club, Baird said commitments with his son and other bike clubs had taken him away from a race he loved.
In saying that Baird, by the end of the week, will have been an official in six night races at the SuperDrome track and Victoria Park racecourse.
AGENT IN TOWN
GIOVANNI Lombardi - agent to some of cycling’s biggest stars including Peter Sagan - was an interested guest at Trek-Segafredo’s meet and greet in Gay’s Arcade on the weekend.
The Italian four-time stage winner of the Giro d’Italia and two-time stage winner at the Vuelta a Espana was in the company of Sagan’s media director Gabriele Uboldi at Bora-Hansgrohe.
NOT FORGOTTEN
PHIL Liggett and Paul Sherwen were MIA on our SBS Tour de France screens last year and it didn’t gone unnoticed by the cycling public including an air-hostess on a domestic flight in Australia.
Liggett said the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO) - organisers of the Tour de France - thought their decision to take the iconic voices of cycling off the airwaves would be a 24-hour storm that would pass but they got thousands of complaints that lasted for weeks.
But the biggest surprise came on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane last year when a flight attendant checking Liggett’s ticket told passengers: “Phil Liggett is on this flight - I used to sleep with this man every July.”
Sadly, not any more, but you can hear him and Sherwen at the TDU all week.
Originally published as The Coffee Ride: Olympic cycling coach Tim Decker covers 812km in 24-hour ride for charity