The rider’s ride
Wish One SUB, approx £3,000 frameset; complete bikes from approx £4,600, wishonecycles.com
I wasn’t meant to be on this bike. The Felt I was planning to ride suffered catastrophic damage during transit, but luckily for me, the people behind the Gravel Tour de Mont Blanc are also the owners of bike brand Wish One.
It isn’t a name many people outside of France will be familiar with, partly because it was only launched in 2018, and partly because it has a very local feel. The founders, Maxime Poisson and François-xavier Blanc, wanted to keep their environmental impact as low as possible, so the bikes are created in France using sustainable materials such as steel and alloy.
This SUB is the brand’s all-road/gravel bike, made from Columbus Spirit steel tubing. Its geometry is fairly road bike-ish, making it great for speed over rough ground, but requiring a little extra attention on more technical parts of the route. Maximum tyre clearance is 40mm for 700c, which proved sufficient most of the time, while the 1x Sram Force groupset with 11-42 cassette was all that I needed for the many steep ascents, and the whole package was a satisfying blend of comfort and performance. I will seriously consider steel when choosing my next gravel bike.
used to having to concentrate so vigilantly on the few metres ahead. It’s not, however, until we are back in France, just outside of Chamonix and practically on the run-in for home, that I hit the wall. It has come later than it might have, but still earlier than I’d have liked.
The catalyst is the sight of François and Nico powering their way up the penultimate gravel pass. ‘Mountain goat’ is a term bandied about all too readily in cycling circles, often erroneously attributed to anyone who can can ease their way up a 2km slope in the home counties, but it is certainly apt for these two Frenchmen. Both still in the saddle, they make a gravity-defying charge for the promised postcard summit of the Col de Voza, while I admit defeat and push my bike slowly after them. There’s not too much shame in stepping off, however, as up ahead I see Gaby whipping her leg over the top tube and kicking her soles crampon-like into the mountainside.
The last hurrah
After the hike to the summit there is still one more descent, a stretch of rolling off-road and then another road climb before we’re back in Megève – a fact that lands on my brain like a lump of Alpine rock.
The final 20km stretch is greener and less rocky than what has gone before, but in my deep-fried state they’re probably the least elegantly ridden kilometres of them all. The final obstacle is the road climb to St Nicolas de Veroce, almost back where we began the day before, and this proves to be the only point in the whole 37plus hours of our ride where I find myself wishing for narrower tyres. I can hear in the rumble of my 40mm knobblies the precious watts lost to friction.
Eventually we roll into town and across the empty mosaiced square, which feels like an apt finish line. A little bloodied, but not broken, I feel pretty good about completing the course. That is until François informs me that, when the Gravel Tour de Mont Blanc arrives in September, he expects the top riders to complete the entire route in something around 12 hours.
‘Yeehaw’ indeed.
Nick Christian is a freelance writer who thinks a bit more time on the turbo might be in order
The final 20km stretch is less rocky, but in my deep-fried state they’re probably the least elegantly ridden kilometres of them all