3,500 women, 6 continents and a year of riding high
The night Hayley Bell threw a leg over her KTM motorcycle and pointed the front tire toward Scotland, it was pitch black and sleeting — exactly the sort of miserable weather most bikers would avoid. But she isn’t like most bikers. Bell, a 28-year-old from Northern England, was on a mission.
It was Feb. 26, 2019, and she was wheeling through the dark for eight hours straight, hauling a few weeks’ worth of clothes and a wooden baton that has become a kind of talisman for the yearlong event she pioneered to bring attention to female motorcyclists: the Women Riders World Relay. It’s exactly as it sounds. More than 3,500 women from 79 countries have spent a year circumnavigating the globe on two wheels, logging some 63,000 miles. Some of them rode a few hours, others spent days or months, and a lot of them didn’t even speak the same language. But together, they broke new ground and forged personal connections as the baton was passed from rider to rider on a journey that spanned six continents.
The women were most recently in Dubai as the event was wrapping up. A final celebration is set for Saturday in London.
“There was no ‘Shall we do a little trip ’round the U.K.?’ ” said Bell, who was inspired by an a±iction common to adventurous women with office jobs: boredom. Forget that, they said. “Let’s just do a world relay.”
“I was at work one day, and I just wanted to travel with women who enjoyed motorbiking and not shopping,” she added. “I wanted that adrenaline excursion with females.”
Bell had been riding for five years, but she struggled to find other women as passionate about motorcycling as she is. So she posted her bold idea on Facebook.
“I sort of got dragged into this thing,” Liza Miller said. “It’s one of these things that you don’t really realize how much time you’re committing, but once you’re in, you’re glad to be there.”
Miller, a native of Santa Cruz, Calif., offered to help organize the U.S. leg when the relay was just a tantalizing question mark thrown into the vast expanse of the web four days earlier.
“There was no structure. There was no plan,” Miller said. But the audacity of the idea drew her in.
“Also, that women riders are overlooked, but not just that,” she said. “Women riders don’t have the same confidence that male riders do. I thought this would really inspire and encourage women to show themselves and each other what they are capable of.”
Miller, who said she “lives, eats, sleeps and breathes motorcycles,” runs the Re-Cycle Garage in Santa Cruz and hosts the Motorcycles and Misfits podcast. But for the past 18 months, she has been using Google Translate to communicate with other female riders all over the world, and Google Street View to help plot the routes, from Albania to Indonesia to Zimbabwe.
“The big secret is that we’re still building the world right ahead of everybody as they’re riding around the world,” she said. “We are staying one step ahead of them.”