Norway-based Canadian develops bikes for every surface
Four days before Jeff Webb was in Toronto at the Blacksmith Cycle shop, he crashed during Dirty Kanza. “I was changing lanes on a rutted-out road, at 11 o’clock at night after 17 hours of riding,” he said. “The rut was hard and dry, like concrete. I came up on a guy really quickly, went to change lanes and the tires weren’t having any of it.” Webb got back on the bike with one of his eyes not looking forward. He finished the race, and then went to the hospital. Four days later, the only sign of the crash was a cut on his nose caused by his glasses digging in when he went down.
At Blacksmith Cycle, Webb was preparing for a ride shorter than Kanza’s 200 miles and a talk. The ceo of Fara Cycling was getting his bike, an F/gravel, built up. While he had come down from his hometown of Huntsville, Ont., Webb now lives in Oslo, Norway. He started the Fara Cycling company with some partners four years ago. (Brand
ambassador and 2010 road world champion Thor Hushovd became one of the company’s owners this past spring.) They wanted to produce welldesigned, good-looking bikes for big rides. Webb takes his bikes, either the gravel frame or one of the two road models, on what he calls fast bikepacking or light touring rides. Two weeks before Dirty Kanza, he rode from Oslo to Stockholm on a whim. Last fall, he pedalled from Oslo to Napoli on a two-week trek of roughly 2,500 km. It featured more gravel than he expected, which he managed on the road model.
Webb is looking to his local Oslo dirt as the company plans its next frame. Not far outside of Norway’s capital are acres of protected forest called Nordmarka. “Through that forest is a spiderweb network of gravel roads,” he said. The surfaces can include smooth gravel, doubletrack and singletrack. Many riders head through Nordmarka, and then take asphalt roads back home. “We’ve started on some frame designs specifically geared toward that type of riding.”