Section editor John Whitney headed to the Big Apple to join nearly 4000 riders for the mass start from the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee on rare closed New York City streets for this year’s Gran Fondo New York
GFNY bills itself as the planet’s most international cycling event, and this year 4000 riders from 93 countries were let loose in New York City for its gran fondo
New York City, famously, never sleeps. Still, it’s no less discombobulating to roll out of your hotel before 5am to the start line of a race with the city, if no longer in full swing, still not quite ready to call it a night. I had to get from my hotel on Times Square to the start line on George Washington Bridge – way in the distance of uptown Manhattan – for the seventh edition of GFNY, or the Campagnolo Gran Fondo New York, to give it its full title.
Any bleariness was blasted away by stepping onto the sidewalk of one of the most distinctive streets on the planet, a familiar albeit still imposing neon cityscape made even more arresting with sunrise still an hour away. I’ve rolled out for sportives at the summit of the Passo dello Stelvio, the foot of Alpe d’Huez and London’s Olympic Park, and this is right up there with the best.
With the start eight miles away, the subway looked to be the best option, judging by the hordes of riders wearing the mandatory fluoro green GFNY-branded jerseys streaming down the steps on 50th and Broadway. Just as I was about to step on to the train I realised that somewhere between my hotel and the subway, I’d lost the carrier bag containing my breakfast and race nutrition. Scurrying back up the road I found it, still intact, in the middle of Seventh Avenue, but not before I’d mistakenly picked up a similar looking bag of discarded takeaway. Ready to go, I jumped on the last train capable of getting me to the start on time.
George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey (at Fort Lee, and the finish line for today’s race) and Manhattan (at Washington Heights), is a double-decker
monster of a suspension bridge that, with 103 million vehicles covering its 1.45km each year, is the busiest in the world. The lower deck is closed for the race, but with the upper deck still running, even at 5.30am on a Sunday morning, it makes for a noisy, shaky experience – my legs don’t usually feel this wobbly until after a 100-mile sportive.
Star struck
As the race got underway, with the obligatory rendition of The StarSpangled Banner still ringing in my ears, we left a road littered with space blankets and old jumpers that folk were happy to sacrifice in search of warmth on a fresh George Washington Bridge.
The opening few kilometres of this 160km marathon settled nerves, both in my capacity – and my bike’s – to finish this thing. I was more than happy to skulk around towards the back than get involved in the racing in common with all gran fondo events. These mass starts can be fraught affairs, with an every-man/woman-forthemselves attitude increasing your chances of ending up unceremoniously dumped in a ditch. My hydraulic disc brakes had also sprung a leak after complications from transit over to the US. Despite having them bled the day before they weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders, though they came good after seeing a bit of action. In NYC, disc brake spares were harder to come by than rim brake ones – perhaps the maintenance of road discs hasn’t caught up with the industry’s push to sell the bikes.
What’s startling here is how quickly you feel removed from one of the world’s great metropolises. As we rose up and descended through the steep cliffs of The Palisades, the Manhattan skyline is reduced to a pimple on the horizon.
With arm warmers removed after that chilly start, I could no longer disguise the ugly bruise on my arm that I’d got from a reaction to an injection before I’d left home. Anyone spotting it might have come to the conclusion that foul play was involved but my plodding performance on the road told everything they needed to know.
This race has been dogged by doping controversy in recent years; in 2015, the winner, Colombian Oscar Tovar, was banned for two years after testing positive for synthetic testosterone. In 2012, local rider David Anthony and Gabriele Guarini from Italy tested positive for EPO after winning their respective age groups. This year, Mexican Manuel Serrano Plowells tested positive for EPO in an out-ofcompetition test, making it the fifth bust since the race started. Gran
Granfondosareinfamously filthy, so credit to the race organisers for introducing doping controls
fondos are infamously filthy, so credit to the race organisers for introducing doping controls – both in and out of competition – because they don’t come cheap.
Another in vogue cheating problem, so-called ‘motorised doping’, was also in the spotlight at this year’s GFNY, with competitors’ bikes tested at the start and finish. Some might see it as overkill for an amateur race – there were no positive results. But, like David Anthony, a category three weekend warrior in search of relevance, there are idiots out there who’ll be ready and willing to cheat, whether it’s by sticking a needle in their flesh or a motor in their seat-tube.
Pro experience
GFNY’s tagline is ‘Be a pro for a day’, which is true, to an extent. For those much closer to the front than me, those elements are evident: the motorbike outriders; the right of way at junctions; the lack of vehicles in your path and press motos keenly following the leaders.
From my perspective, closer to the tail end of the near 4000-strong field, it felt like any other mass participation cycling event. Granted, I got right of way at the crucial junctions but you still had to treat it as if you were on open roads.
At the second feed station, 60km in, a local rider warned me that the course was about to really heat up as we headed into Bear Mountain National Park. He wasn’t wrong. The preceding few clicks to the station had kicked me while I was down, with the front of the race already passing me on the other side of the road, having reached the longest climb (the 6km Bear Mountain), climbed it, come back down the same way and caned it another 10 or so kilometres back towards me. That all added up to about 32km, which made them well over an hour further up the road.
On Bear Mountain I witnessed a rather heated row between a man who’d had a mechanical and another still riding, willing him forward. “Go, go, go,” said riding man.
“I can’t go, go, go, my derailleur hanger has snapped,” insisted standing man.
“Okay, stop yellin’,” replied riding man. It seems like a typical New York encounter, one that occurs hundreds of times each day in the city.
Reaching the summit of the 1200ft Bear Mountain, to the appropriate sound of Sting’s Englishman in New York blaring over the PA system, I stretched out on the grass and admired the stunning view, deep into the park, from one of the most popular destinations within it. For a tenth of the riders – those doing the 80km ‘Bear’ course – the end was nigh, with just a short downhill to take them to their shuttle bus back to Fort Lee. For the rest of us, this thing was only just getting started, with the harsher weather and harder climbs ahead, in a Great White shark’s gob of a course profile that read like New York’s response to Liège– Bastogne–Liège.
Who knew you could get Alpine-grade climbing within spitting distance of New York City?
Music, man
The trouble with riding such savage gran fondos is that there’s plenty of free space for things to become wedged in your mind. Songs, in particular. I’ve nothing especially against Englishman in New York, but under no circumstances do I want it on a permanent loop in my brain. To an even greater degree that applies to Daniel Bedingfield’s Gotta Get Thru This, which, while a very apt refrain, was not a good earworm to have on a day like this. I disliked the song when it was released and haven’t deemed it necessary to reappraise in the intervening years.
Given this was such an international field, the variety of music blaring out of riders’ jersey pockets was an eclectic collection of dross, and from what I can remember, the soundtrack to my ride including appropriate, if naff, early noughties hits such as Blu Cantrell’s Breathe (I was, heavily) and Nelly’s Hot in Herre (yes, increasingly). This was positively Lennon and McCartney compared to the bad euro pop that blasted from of a rider I’d yo-yo with all day. When I rode past him I never failed to get a second wind. When he rode past me, I sat up. It was the first time I’ve cursed a smartphone battery for lasting too long.
By the final feed station at 80 miles in, at West Nyack, my legs were feeling like jelly, likely a consequence of the volume of Clif Bar Blocks I’d consumed. I was fantasising about some of that lovely NYC pizza, so it felt like something of a desert mirage that after seven hours of sugary gels, jellies and bars, there sat pile after pile, stacked as high as the people serving, of delicious margherita pizza.
After jutting inland, for the final 10 miles the course returned to the Hudson and the road the race initially headed out on. Compared to the chaos earlier in the morning, you could hear a pin drop, such were the gaps that had opened up.
Content to roll steadily towards the finish line and join the 2006 out of 2704 that had already made it, I reflected on a day that would live long in the memory. I might not have had the legs to get the most out of the race but it’s a once in a lifetime treat to start a bike race in Manhattan.
The course was a pleasant surprise: who knew you could get Alpine-grade climbing within spitting distance of New York City? Uli and Lidia Fluhme, the race organisers and heart and soul of GFNY, have pulled it out of the bag with this event, creating a calibre of race that hooks in riders from over 93 countries. When you’ve convinced half of the planet, you know you’re onto a good thing.