CMWC Zurich, Switzerland 1999

Cycle Messenger World Championships, Part 2

The first event the next day was the pedal boat race. On my way to said event, at the American Express office, I ran into someone who was obviously an international bike courier, and asked them about the boat races. They told me that they had done quite well, owing to the fact that they had let the other 2 boats in the heat fight amongst eachother, allowing his boat to glide easily to victory. Sounded like a decent strategy.

As I rode to the staging area, I came upon that nasty traffic situation you find all over europe, where you don't know if you or the car has the right of way. We both decided that we did, and he bonked my bike. There was a scraping sound, and a snapping sound, and then something fell to the ground. His license plate! He honked and sped off, not wanting to face the prospect of being charged with hitting a bicycle, and I waited till no-one was looking before I snapped up my souvenir. My big nasty metal fender had netted me the coolest souvenir of the trip - a swiss license plate! I never bitched about the fender again.

The boats were nothing like the plastic Ontario Place paddle driven jobbies. They were make of sheet metal, and had some kind of propeller that you could really crank on. The seats and steering wheel were adjustable. The races were of 3 boats each, with two riders in each boat. The object was to pedal upstream to a bridge, circle around one of the supports, and then double back to the finish line.

I teamed up with Seamster Boy from the Bike Ranch, and we raced against some hardcore germans and danes. But of course, they were busy ramming eachother into the bridge supports, we just breezed around and advanced to the quarter finals. There was no one to race against us in the quarter finals, so we advanced to the semifinals. In the semifinals, we were smoked by some aggressive team that managed to ram us into one of the bridge supports and leave us stranded. Oh, well. What a gas. Bike Ranch Queen and UberChik mopped up in the womens category.

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The next day was the cargo race and the hill climb. I did quite well on the cargo race, carrying lots of big-point items like tables and palettes. Steve, who I had met on the train, was the world messenger cargo champion, riding with a huge black swiss trailer retrofitted with a shopping cart in place of the BOB he had broken. He came in second, though, to a fellow who had a three-wheel cargo bike and an even bigger trailer, essentially a 5 wheeled articulating vehicle with center wheel drive. I wish I had seen him go down the steep off-road section of the course on that thing, but of course I was to busy carrying around whiskey barrels and tires and stuff. Mind you, Steve shuttled two groupies from Freiburg back and forth to the race site on his trailer, securing him first place in the gentleman's category.

              

The hill climb was quite a different experience than that in Freiburg, largely because there was shade. Also, it wound through a part of suburban Zurich, so the course was lined with bewildered spectators. As they only had time for the first 600 registered participants, some of us had to do the course of our own volition with no chance of officially winning. Some of us still had our trailers from the cargo race, and so did the course with crap in tow. At least one competitor rode up the hill so enthusiastically, that an ambulance had to be called to the top to assist him.

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On the final day we were treated to a number of alternative events that actually involved bicycles. There was a standard bunny-hop competition, complete with a high-jump bar. There was a fixie competition, with different events like a sprint, a skid length competition, and a track stand competion.

The evening wound up with an awards ceremony where goodies and cool custom trophies were bestowed upon the successful. The Green Team and The Blue Team filed onto (separate) luxury busses and were off on an 18 hour drive back to their homeland. Rumour has it that the Blue team bus arrived first, by about 5 minutes, causing the green team to invest all of thier race winnings in a faster bus.

So it was all over. And there we were with our bikes in Switzerland. A large group armed only with bananas and kryptonite locks went out on a guided tour of some extreme Alps. I headed off in their footsteps, towing a hundred pounds of crap, planning to do about a day of their riding every 3 days. I kept running into Steve from DC for about a week after the races. He no longer had a trailer of any sort, just the matching red Ortlieb baggage he had won for coming in second in the cargo race. We rode over some extreme mountain passes, and bought lots of cheese way way up in the mountains where the cows still go with their bells a-ringing. We finally stopped running into eachother when I headed off to do some missionary work in the north islands of Russia, and he to continue riding for months around Europe.