ON THE ROAD
Decades before Mark Beaumont rode around the world (in under 80 days), Nick Sanders had beaten him to it. This, among many other feats of endurance, made him a celebrity in ’80s. He was a hero of our writer Trevor Ward, who went to meet Nick for a ride in Snowdonia.
The Vimto cycling jersey my companion is wearing today dates back to 1983. That was the year he persuaded the chairman of the soft drinks company to cough up £1,500 to fund a bicycle ride to the source of the White Nile. It’s ingrained with sand, sweat and tears from a journey that took eight weeks and saw him threatened at gunpoint by soldiers in war-torn Uganda.
Today’s ride around the southern fringes of the Snowdonia National Park in Wales will seem distinctly tame in comparison, though Nick Sanders isn’t complaining.
“I’ve neglected the cycling recently, so this will do me good,” he says, though all his strength and resourcefulness are called in to play at our café stop in Dolgellau when they run out of cheesecake. “I’ll have the meringue then,” says Nick, displaying the diplomacy, patience and natural Northern charmthat helped him get out of countless sticky situations encountered during the record-breaking bike rides that made him the most famous cyclist in Britain during the early 1980s.
Arguably he was more famous than Mark Beaumont is today. Not only did Nick also ride around the world in 79 days – the rules back then stipulated the mileage only had to be 13,000 (as opposed to 18,000 now) – but he did it on a bike that looks prehistoric compared to today’s computer-designed, aerodynamic machines.
The Harry Hall frame still hangs on his wall, complete with its original toeclips, downtube shifters and Campagnolo groupset (featuring a six-speed cassette and a smallest gear of 42-24). For navigation Nick had a world atlas; for communication he used public payphones or Poste Restante; and instead of a support team and vehicle he had a pair of front panniers containing “a sleeping bag, three spanners and one spare T-shirt and shorts”.
During his journey he was interviewed regularly on the BBC’s Saturday morning kids’ TV shows, and on his return home was given a TV series of his own in which he
Nick Sanders’ globetrotting cycling adventures in the !"8#s made him a household name. Trevor Ward coaxes his hero out of retirement for a ride in Snowdonia
interviewed the likes of Victoria Wood and David Bellamy while piloting a hot-air balloon over the British countryside.
He instantly became a hero of mine when, during one of his TV appearances, he showed his passport. Under occupation, it simply said: ‘Explorer’.
My girlfriend and I decided we wanted to be explorers, too. Inspired by Nick, we loaded our bikes and spent 10 weeks cycling to the Algerian Sahara where I promptly caught amoebic dysentery and had to convalesce in our tent for a fortnight before we could start cycling home.
Nick seems genuinely flattered when I relate this story to him. Though my journey was a tiny fraction of his, we compare notes about cycling in North Africa and the loneliness of travelling in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone age.
“I was alone, but I was never lonely,” he says. “For the around the world record, I’d be cycling 171 miles a day, and then I’d spend another hour looking for a hotel or place to sleep and finding a restaurant for some food so I was always too busy to feel lonely.”
Higher, faster, further
Today we are riding a route that starts and finishes at Nick’s home near the picturesque market town of Machynlleth. As we pedal down its bustling high street, Nick gives a cheery wave to various locals, including a bin man in high-viz. “That’s our town mayor,” he says.
Nick is better known in these parts for his motorcycling exploits than his cycling ones. He moved here to open the Nick Sanders Expedition Centre, from where he organises trans-continental motorbike journeys for paying customers.
He has also, unsurprisingly, completed seven trips around the world on various high-powered machines, including a recordbreaking 19-day journey on a Yamaha YZF-R1.
Explaining the switch from pedal to horsepower, he says: “By the early ’90s I was in my 30s and decided I’d had enough of cycling. Creatively, there was nothing more I could do.”
By that stage, his list of accomplishments included the fastest circumnavigation of the world; cycling 4,164 miles around the coast of Britain in a record-breaking 22 days; riding a Bickerton folding bike the length of Indonesia; and riding a Raleigh bike to the summit of one of the highest active volcanoes on Earth.
“I needed £5,000 to buy a hot-air balloon for my BBC TV series, so I went to Raleigh and suggested I ride one of their bikes higher than any
bike had been before,” he tells me. “They agreed and I ended up riding up a volcano called the Ojos del Salado in the Andes, which is over 22,000 feet high. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really done my research, and I ended up carrying my bike and tent most of the way. I got to within 1,000 feet of the summit and was a complete mess.
“I thought I’d camp there for the night and then leg it up to the summit with the bike, camera and a flag in the morning. But I hadn’t acclimatised properly and I was making the wrong decisions. I couldn’t find my way back to the tent, and I ended up losing it, the bike, everything. I had to find my way back down off the volcano in just shorts and T-shirt.
“But I got my £5,000 and Raleigh were able to say one of their bikes had made it to 22,000 feet.”
Ups and downs
I’m concerned today’s ride will seem mundane in comparison to his past adventures, but Nick seems as impressed by the scenery as I am. We have used a network of undulating, single-lane tracks to avoid the A road out of Machynlleth and are now twisting down a valley past a huge lake in the direction of the coast. Here, fields divided by dry stone walls tumble down to the Irish Sea and the sands of Barmouth beach shimmer in the distance.
Nick points to the white buildings of Fairbourne below us. “That’s a doomed village,” he says. “It’s gradually being evacuated because of coastal erosion.”
Our conversation is abruptly interrupted by the first challenge of the day: a narrow country lane that tilts up without warning to a double-digit gradient. According to Strava, we gain 800 feet of elevation in less than two miles. The segment is called, fittingly enough, ‘Massive Hill’.
As well as the gradient, we also have to unclip several times to open a succession of gates, which seem to be the local farmers’ preferred choice to cattle grids.
The views across the River Mawddach to the distant peaks of Snowdonia alleviate our suffering slightly, though the descent down the other side sends my heart rate through the roof when the narrow,
Dry stone walls tumbledown to the Irish Sea, and the sands of Bar mouth beach shimmer in the distance
twisting, 25 per cent slope ends without warning around a blind bend at a ‘Give Way’ sign.
From here we cross the estuary via the shared cycle-footpath that goes over the 700-metre long Barmouth viaduct, one of the oldest working, wooden railway bridges in Britain.
Surprisingly for a global adventurer, Nick has forgotten to stick bottle cages on his frame, so we stop in Barmouth for some liquid refreshment, before continuing along the banks of the Mawddach to the handsome former mill town of Dolgellau and a stop for lunch.
Here, once Nick has graciously settled for meringue instead of cheesecake, I learn more about the adventurer’s pedigree. He was a successful junior racer and member of Hyde Olympic CC who competed alongside local rivals and future Tour de France veterans Graham Jones and Paul Sherwen. Aged 18, he travelled from his home in Manchester to France by train with two bikes and enjoyed modest success at amateur level, including a top-20 finish in Paris-Roubaix.
“I was a rouleur, and I remember one race in France when Graham was alongside me,” he says. “Suddenly, he switched up a gear and was gone. I had to switch down. That was the difference between us, and I knew from that point I was never going to set the professional cycling world alight.”
We climb out of Dolgellau via a forgotten thread of tarmac where the only other traffic is sheep and the views down to the river Mawddach merit several photo stops. Then things get serious with a three-kilometre ramp that kicks off with a 10 per cent gradient before settling down to seven.
This delivers us to the centuriesold community of Llanfachreth and its medley of antiquities including a standing stone, a hillside churchyard full of tilting tombstones and an archway made from blocks of granite that wouldn’t look out of place next to the Pyramids.
Hanging by a thread
Halfway down the descent, an unexpected dead-end forces us to improvise around the route Strava had plotted for us. “This wouldn’t have happened with a map,” laughs Nick.
Our enforced detour finally delivers us back on route at the foot of the climb to the Bwlch Oerddrws pass that, at 362m, will be the highest point of today’s ride. It’s a three-kilometre drag up to a car park popular with plane spotters – the valleys in this area form the
We cross the estuary via the shared cycle-foot path that goes over the!""-metre long Bar mouth via duct
‘Mach Loop’ where RAF pilots regularly practise low-level flying.
As we get our breath back at the top, Nick recounts an episode from his own low-level flying career, when he carried VIPs and journalists in his hot-air balloon for the supermarket chain SPAR, who had sponsored his round the world bicycle ride.
“I had two journalists on board, one of whom was the editor of The Grocer, an influential trade magazine,” he says. “Well, they certainly got their story because we ended up crashing into power lines and hanging literally by a thread. My SPAR sweatshirt went up in smoke from the sparks. We got the journalists down safely, though. When my sponsorship with SPAR came to end, I thought it was probably best for me to move on.”
“Moving on” has been the defining characteristic of Nick’s life. There’s always been another “mad idea” gnawing at him. After three years and 2,500 hours of flying time in his hot-air balloon, he turned to motorbikes.
“And after riding an R1 around the world in 19 days – the bike goes from 0-60 in two seconds – I decided to go to the other extreme and travel at four miles per hour. So I bought a canal barge and sailed it to the Black Sea,” he says.
In 2019, he will be back on his motorbike in an attempt to ride the 7,000 miles from London to Vladivostok on the east coast of Russia in a week. And he hasn’t ruled out a cycling comeback, either. At the age of 60, he shows no signs of wanting to retire from being an explorer.
Yet it’s reassuring to learn that the man who inspired me to embark on my own cycling adventures all those years ago is just as human as any other bike rider.
As we climb back on our bikes for the fast descent and final push to the finish, he reveals: “My bum’s killing me. I told you it’s been ages since I’ve done any cycling.”