The Tortour Cyclocross is a multi-day cyclocross gravel stage race with 3200 metres of ascent and a total 202km. As the official Tortour website claims it can be in challenging winter conditions. This year this was actually really the case. With snow, rain and only a few minutes of sunshine conditions were tough and maybe the organizer should have changed the title name to actually what it is: torture…

 

We were hoping to have 4 riders on our UP bikes. Seabase world most famous single speed athlete, Damien, bike shop owner, velosophe and world best beer brewer (velosophe beer) and Simon journalist of the biggest Swiss TV chain. Ok that's only 3 unfortunately Damien’s partner Amael could not make it to the start line so one UP less in the race.

 

For Simon and Damien things went pretty well. Damien landed in the team of 2 event on the podium and Simon finished top 10 in the single category despite having to carry quite a bit of equipment and doing interviews during the race.

If you want to see more of the race, there is almost a 10-minute footage of Simon riding the race on Swiss TV’s sport lounge:

http://tp.srgssr.ch/p/srf/portal?urn=urn:srf:ais:video:390ddba1-c61f-45d9-86c7-93f426af3e67&autoplay=true#32a92dd1-0a8b-492a-9d43-1fa781d5b52f

Once finished the race, for Simon the real race against time actually only started. When i tried to call him on Monday he was in the cutting room preparing the footage for the broadcast in the evening.



Seabase who did the race on a single speed had 3 flats on day two. Trying to find a bike dealer that sells him some spares and running quite a bit of the stage made him not only lose time but at the end having really pain in his legs and give up at the end of stage 2.