BIKES

FITNESS
Pedalling to
prove a point
In 2009, young graduate Julian Sayarer broke the world record for
fastest circumnavigation of the world by bike. It wasn’t about the
record — he wanted to make a stand, as he explains in his new book
Words David Bradford Photos Julian Sayarer
J
ulian Sayarer is grinning
warmly as he finds me,
eventually, in the vast
meeting space upstairs in
London’s Southbank Centre. He
looks different from how I
remember him from our first
meeting back in 2011: somehow
less intense, less wary. He is a
changed man, he admits.
“I’m nearly 29 now, whereas
I’m a 23-year-old in the book. I
really like that young man, even if
he is an angry young man, but
he’s not who I am now.”
The book in question is
Life Cycles, a wonderful,
vivid account of his 2009
circumnavigation of the globe
(18,000 miles) in 169 days, setting
what was then a new record. The
angry young protagonist, Sayarer
at 23, didn’t particularly care
about the record; he was
pedalling to prove a point.
The point was that anyone
can (and should) ride a very long
106 CYCLING ACTIVE SEPTEMBER 2014
way without any need for
big-budget backing. He was
enraged by what he regarded as
the tainting of long-distance
cycling by the man who had set
the circumnavigation world
record in 2008, Mark Beaumont.
Sayarer hated that Beaumont’s
ride was backed by large
corporations, and detested
its portrayal in a BBC TV
documentary The Man who
Cycled the World as a gruelling
feat of heroic endurance.
Indignant blogger
The point he wanted to prove
was that riding 90 miles per day,
as Beaumont had, required
neither superhuman tenacity nor
the backing of big business and
did not warrant a media-spun
narrative of extreme hardship.
Sayarer set off on June 10, 2009,
averaged 110 miles a day, finished
on December 4, 2009, and beat
Beaumont’s record by 25 days.
For many people, his
record-setting ride was admirable
but his anger unseemly,
especially the blog he wrote in
December 2009, soon after
arriving back in the UK, in which
he made highly derogatory
remarks about Beaumont and
poured scorn on his “sell-out”
ride and corporate ambassador
status. Is the older, calmer
Sayarer inclined to distance
himself from those comments
made by his younger, hotterheaded
self?
“A big part of it was that we
[he and Beaumont] were similar
“I’m 23 in the book. I really like that angry
young man, but he’s not who I am now”
ages, both politics graduates,”
says Sayarer, “which meant
something to me, and we were
both into cycling long distances.”
He defends his comments on
grounds of their context: the
global economic crisis was biting
hard in 2009, and he was airing a
sense of injustice about corporate
corruption and the social ills he
had witnessed during his
upbringing “in a really crappy
town” — formative years from
which he inferred “the world is
not OK”.