A young Canadian’s record-setting circumnavigation and the tradition of cycling around the globe
A young Canadian’s recordsetting circumnavigation and the tradition of cycling around the globe
Even more than 100 years after the first penny farthing circled the Earth, the trip is gruelling, only something for the most adventurous
B’yauling Toni was 70 km into the Gobi Desert when he realized that the family who had given him a place to stay the night before had also robbed him of all of his money. He thought briefly about going back. “But it wasn’t malicious,” he said. “They just looked at a kid, even a grungy kid, crossing the world on a bike and they assumed that he was rich.” Besides, when you’re already cycling more than 40,000 km around the world, you don’t want to add an unnecessary 140 km. He kept going.
In his next country, China, he was headed downhill in the dark, without lights (to save weight), on a section of road so dangerous that locals often drive their cars across the desert to avoid it. “I did 100 km after 8 p.m. that day and I was tired,” he said. “I was supposed to meet someone in the town who would give me a place to stay. A truck light blinded me while I was going 40 km/h. I didn’t realize it, but I drove across the road, hit some gravel and went over a 4-foot drop.” In the end, his handlebars got bent and he had some minor injuries, but he could have been killed. It was a painful lesson in how a fragile cyclist fits into different driving cultures around the world. “In Russia, people pass you a couple of centimetres away at 120 km/h and give you a thumbs up,” said Toni. “They don’t mean to kill you or anything. It’s just their style.” He was clipped by a car mirror in Russia, but the worst run-in with cars was in New Zealand, where he was deliberately struck from behind by an angry driver.
Toni’s love affair with long-distance cycling began with big dreams and small resources. His father bought him a $100 girl’s bike at Walmart when he was 12, which B’yauling rode with his father and siblings on a trip from their home in Saskatoon to Vancouver. “I grew up in a low-income home,” says Toni. “We never owned a motor vehicle. The most beautiful thing about cycling is that it doesn’t cost much money.”
Most kids would have classified that trip as a not-tobe-repeated childhood epic. Toni did it again solo at 14. At 16, he took on the 4,418-km Tour Divide route down the Continental Divide from Alberta to Mexico, solo and unsupported. The mostly gravel with some singletrack route offers a punishing 60,960 m of climbing. He was under-equipped, riding a 1989 26" Kona Lava Dome (that was available in an ’80s-rad paint scheme of red and black splattered on yellow) with four panniers; the whole rig weighed 100 lb. “I had to drag it through the mud in a rainstorm in New Mexico for 12 hours once,” says Toni. It was a night he will never forget.
When Toni arrived at the sign for the Mexican border in the middle of the night, he just lay down on the ground beneath it and slept. “The next day, as I was dividing up stuff to pack it in the bike box,” he recalls, “I broke down and bawled my eyes out. I told myself I never had to do that tour again.”
But as with all Type 2 fun, after the relief comes the desire for more. Sitting in high school classrooms, when he was supposed to be concentrating on the lessons, Toni daydreamed about doing something even harder. Then he found out that the world record for the youngest circumnavigation of the globe on a bicycle was held by British rider Tom Davies, who had circled the world at 19 in 2015. In 2018, at the age of 17, Toni still had time to become the youngest person ever to do the ride. If you go to the Guinness World Records site, however, you won’t see Toni or Davies’ names, but British rider Philip White, listed as the youngest cycling circumnavigator. After White, Guinness stopped recording the youngest circumnavigator with safety in mind: to discourage younger, inexperienced riders from undertaking the arduous feat.
The history of around-the-world riding is an eccentric, wild sideshow in the story of cycling. The first person to do it was British cyclist Thomas Stevens, concluding his trip near the end of 1886. His ride? A 50" Columbia Standard penny farthing. He carried socks, a raincoat and a revolver. On his adventure of almost three years, he was menaced by mountain lions, brigands and bears, bit by snakes and almost killed crossing a train trestle on his bike. The press loved him. “Instead of going round the world with a rifle, for the purpose of killing something – or with a bundle of tracts, in order to convert somebody,” wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a member of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club, “this bold youth simply went round the globe to see the people who were on it; and since he always had something to show them as interesting as anything that they could show him, he made his way among all nations.”
If Toni wanted to claim a record, he couldn’t just take his time and wander in the style of Stevens. It isn’t actually possible to ride a bicycle right around the world, given the numerous bodies of water dividing continents and islands. Guinness World Records has set rules for a valid circumnavigation. Toni had to ride 29,000 km in a single direction, (east to west or west to east). He had to cross two antipodal points, locations on the globe that are opposite, through the Earth’s centre. Only some points on the globe line up as antipodal: China and Argentina, Spain and New Zealand are examples, but most of North America, Australia, Europe and Africa only line up with open bodies of water. Toni was not allowed to veer more than five degrees off course. Any travel in an opposite direction would be subtracted from his total. The whole journey, including flights or boat trips, must be at least 40,075 km, and must start and finish in the same place. The clock used to be stopped when you took air or water transportation, but now the total travel time is included. The same bicycle must be used, unless it fails mechanically.
That is as far as the Guinness standards go. Circumnavigators themselves, however, divide the attempts into two categories: supported, meaning accompanied by a
vehicle with assistants and supplies, and unsupported, meaning going alone and using only what supplies and equipment you can carry or buy on the way. British rider Mark Beaumont holds the record for a supported circumnavigation: 78 days 14 hours, and 40 minutes. Toni was going to go for an unsupported age record. The speed record for the unsupported circumnavigation is held by Scottish rider Jenny Graham.
Graham started cycling when she was raising a little boy and needed some exercise to keep up her fitness. She described herself as “someone who wasn’t in the cycling club at school, someone who wasn’t sporty, someone who was basically a normal working-class person with no cash.” Races were not her strength, but she discovered that she had superb fitness for long distances. After her first 100-mile ride, she was so excited at this discovery that in her words, she “had a good diesel engine,” and just kept at it, taking on longer and longer rides.
In 2018, Graham was at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, setting out on the adventure of a lifetime, an unsupported circumnavigation of the globe, carrying all of her camping gear on her steel-frame hand-built bike, built for the long haul. She had a phone, a Spot tracker and two bike computers in the cockpit, which she recharged with a dynamo in the front wheel hub. In bear country in North America, she added bells. There were drop bars and time trial bars to allow her to change positions, essential on days in which she spent more than 300 km on the bike. Experiments with saddles had revealed the best model for her comfort, but she soon had saddle sores anyway.
In Eastbound, the film about her circumnavigation, you can see her exhaustion and fear as she deals with traffic. Like Toni, she found Russian traffic a terrifying challenge. “The trickiest section was the Trans-siberian Highway,” she said, “So many trucks, it was crazy, and there was no room for cyclists.” She decided to cycle at night and sleep during the day. With the Russian highway traffic zooming by, Graham’s harsh daylight bivouacs were sometimes in the open and sometimes in construction drainpipes. Getting food and supplies without leaving her route for a bike shop or grocery store was a challenge. She learned that cheese puffs of one kind or another are available everywhere in the world. She also figured out how to oil her chain with the oil from a can of sardines.
On Oct. 18, 2018, Graham rode back beneath the Brandenburg Gate i n Berlin. She had completed an unsupported circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle in 124 days, 10 hours and 50 minutes and smashed the
“With the Russian highway traffic zooming by, the harsh daylight bivouacs were sometimes in the open and sometimes in construction drainpipes.”
previous record, which belonged to Italian rider, Paola Gianotti, by 19 days.
Toni’s goal was more modest. “The record didn’t matter to me,” he says, “as much as the adventure and seeing the world.” He has another reason, however, to be proud of his ride. He used it to raise funds for the Outdoor School in Saskatoon, which offers high school students an outdoor-based semester. He made a video of himself in the Mongolian desert in front of a herd of sheep to talk about his passion for outdoor education. “Say one of these sheep does not like the grass here. The grass here does not make this sheep strong or happy.
Say there’s another pasture and herd of sheep, and there the grass would make the sheep strong, but the shepherd cannot take him there because of money. Education should be made for the children, not what is profitable or affordable. There should be options.”
When Toni finally got back to Canada, he had ridden from his hometown of Saskatoon to Halifax and across Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
“A truck light blinded me while I was going 40 km/h. I didn’t realize it, but I drove across the road, hit some gravel and went over a 4-foot drop.”
Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia, Mongolia, China, Australia and New Zealand. It was late December and the snowy, frigid, highaltitude, icy Rockies still lay between him and Saskatoon.
He picked up some winter gear in Vancouver and headed off. “It was tough for sure,” he says. “You had to be constantly on. There was no time to let my mind drift. I slept in snow trenches. The temperature dropped to minus 30; you do one wrong move and you will suffer for that later.”
He stopped 30 km from Saskatoon, built a quinzhee and, after 204 days of constant exertion and stress, prepared himself mentally to go home. “As you’re doing it, you can’t believe you’re doing it,” Toni says. “It’s incomprehensible, day by day by day, grinding, then you’re sitting in your house wondering what just happened. I mentally struggled for the first few months.”
Toni had just broken a world record and become the youngest person ever to circumnavigate the world by bicycle. He had begun when he was 17-years-old, and finished at 18, still a year younger from the previous youngest person to ride around the globe.
Since then, Toni has taken on a few big rides, but nothing quite as big as his round the world trip. He rode his bike to Ecuador, met his maternal family there, and went on to Thailand, where he rode throughout Thailand and Vietnam and planned to ride 2,270 km to Nepal. The covid-19 lockdown caught up with him on the way, and instead of going to Nepal, he spent a month in a Buddhist monastery before he returned home.
Since then, Toni was accepted into the engineering program at University of Saskatchewan, where he started studying this past fall. He hopes to one day work in the outdoor industry, designing gear, where he has plenty of experience as a user.
This past summer, he was still involved with bikes. He was training for mountain biking races seven days a week with the provincial team. His heart is still in the adventure of long-distance riding, however. “I would probably do it again,” he says about riding his bike around the world again. “I did a trip about half the distance, riding down to South America.” Whatever he does in the future, it’s sure to represent a rare love of being in the saddle and a sense of what an enriching adventure it can be.
“I had to drag it through the mud in a rainstorm in
New Mexico for 12 hours once.”