Home of the Winter Cyclist
And Other Crazy People.
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Photos and Article outline by Grisha Strasnij - Moscow, Russia
My home city of Moscow (yes, the one in Russia) is a beautiful city. It's hot in summer and the winters are cold, perfect for ICEBIKING.
Winter cycling is very popular in Moscow. People cycle everywhere all winter long.
My friends and I are especially interested in recreational cycling in winter We enjoy the downhill parallel slalom racing where two cyclists descend parallel tracks slaloming between flags like skiers. Crashes are spectacular as some of these photos show.
Winter racing is certainly colder than summer racing, but winter is the season for "Real" bikers.
We also hold impromptu "Winter Trials" using anything we happen to find. These events work well for improving our bike handling skills. Anyone can jump onto pallets in the summer. The ice adds new challenges and requires new skills.
Some of the things I like best about winter cycling are as follows:
- Soft Falls. Snow makes for safe landings in some of our more adventurous downhill runs. As you can see from the pictures, we often need a soft landing. In the sequence at right, "Boriska" takes one on the nose. He wasn't hurt, due to soft snow landing.
- No Dirt, well, not much anyway.
- No puddles
- No Rain
- No Mosquitoes
- No Sharp Stones
- No broken bottles on the forest roads to ruin your tires
- The bears are asleep - forest roads are even safer ;-)
- No "wimps" on the trail - they're all watching TV at home
- The dogs are slower and don't bark as loudly
- If your V brakes work poorly you have a perfect excuse to upgrade to disk brakes - unless the wife decides she needs a new coat.
- No sheet of trees in your rear switch system - er, ah, in English I guess you would say no leaves to get caught in your rear derailleur
- When you crash in snow you don't get green stains on your clothes from the grass
- The skiers are slower
- The rivers are not barriers
- You can put up flags for parallel slalom quickly in the snow
- Easy to track down your friends by following their tracks in the snow
These are images that I transferred from my video camera. Sometimes I capture some great sequences, but the transfer process does not always render the sharpest images.
There is another site in Moscow which has some pretty good shots of Winter Bike Slalom runs. You can click on the small images and see a larger version.
In addition, winter cyclists from Moscow have an Internet Chat Board named VELOZONA, but in order to read that site you will need the Cyrillic fonts installed on your computer. (Oh, a working knowledge of the Russian language would be helpful too).
Grisha Strasnij Moscow, Russia
