LEFT TURNS is where we go off script. Things no one asked for. Things that needed to be said as soon as we think of them. Still GH. Just further out. Off the dome.
You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.
Montreal loves a sporting event. I think this city loves any event, really. Hockey games? Electric! Music festivals? Wild! Formula One? What a party! This city loves anything that gets people out of the house to cheer and celebrate someone doing something cool. So when I found out we were hosting the World Championships, the excitement hit differently. We are already pretty lucky to have a UCI race here every year, but Worlds felt like something else entirely. It meant the greatest riders on the planet would be in the city for a week. It meant countries would be represented and celebrated. It meant that you might ride with some pros if you got lucky enough to find them (felt like I was hunting Pokemon all week). It meant Montreal would turn into a cycling haven. And at a time when the average citizen of this city is constantly hating on cyclists, this event felt important. Especially with our (newish) mayor going on record warning that the traffic alone was going to be hell (not that she was wrong, but she didn’t need to pour gas on the fire).
And boy, did we deliver. Give yourselves a standing ovation. Montreal is awesome.
We did get lucky, the weather cooperated. Having 7 days of sun in late September is a rarity. It’s usually cold and rainy this time of year. And I’m pretty sure that played an important role in the success of this event. Not because good weather equates to better racing (obviously it does), but because we know winter is about to start and we’ll all be hibernating in no time. I don’t even want to think about setting up my bike on the indoor trainer. So it’s safe to say this weather motivated everyone, cyclist or not, to be outside and just enjoy the party.
THE GOOD
Even before Worlds week officially started, the group rides were running at 100%. Pick a day, pick a time, pick a type of ride, and you’d probably find one. People from all over were in town and everyone brought their bikes. Some rides were chaotic (it’s hard to organize 400 people on a Thursday night to ride 2x2 safely when the sun sets early and we gotta ride fast to grab a beer at the end of it) but they were still quite fun. I mean, bike racing in general is chaotic so why not add that to group rides. It’s fitting for the event. This was probably my favourite part of the week. I got to meet some dope ass people and nerd out about bikes and kit while riding. In my 6ish years of “serious” riding in this city, I have never witnessed such organization from individuals to link up and ride. It was dope.
The racing lived up to the hype as well. It might have been some of the best Worlds races, men’s and women’s, in recent memory (ever, in my opinion). It’s worth watching the highlights if you haven’t caught up yet. Smaller nations were animating breaks and “threatening” results. It felt Olympic, in a sense, ‘cause the crowds were rooting for every rider and booing the broom wagon. The crowds were electric. I have never seen so many people on the streets for a cycling event. The women’s race might have even been better than the men’s. It was magic. The last 10 k’s had so much drama that I don’t think anybody could have written a better script. Demi vs Kasia vs Longo Borghini? Straight in my veins, please. I’d love to see Montreal be awarded its own standalone UCI date on the calendar just for the Femmes. They deserve it. WE deserve it.
I watched the men’s race from Chemin de la Polytechnique, one of three climbs on the circuit. The atmosphere was electric. Who was bbq’ing. Who was dj’ing. It was a wild scene. I lost my voice completely cheering on Wout and Ciccone. The gap at the front shrunk from close to a minute down to under fifteen seconds in what felt like no time at all, and every fan on the side of the circuit was losing its mind. It’s so crazy to watch the best riders in the world repeat climbs and descents I do every week. Seeing them struggle made me feel kinda good in a way, because I knew exactly what they were going through. It made me realize that they are also human, and not “alien”, like we would like to believe.
(I would love to credit this pic but I don’t know who took it)
Another amazing part of this week was the human ingredient of it all. Meeting people. Connecting. I think this is what it’s all about at the end of the day. I had the chance to meet so many people I’ve been interacting with online for the last few months and ended up feeling like I’d known them forever, which is incredible and hardly spoken about enough. Some would say that’s just business, or networking, but it didn’t feel that way at all. It really felt like we were all together for the love of cycling.
THE BAD
Everything off the bike didn’t live up to my expectations. The city was packed with brand events all week, which usually sounds like a good thing, but I was left a little disappointed by all of it. It felt like these brand activations were all designed the same way. Bike brand selling bikes in a space where a local artist is painting. Clothing brand selling clothes in a space with a DJ. Lather, rinse, repeat. It felt more like marketing than community. Which I guess it is, at the end of the day, but it shouldn’t be.
What I saw online that week and what I saw walking around the city were two different events entirely. These brands are good at marketing themselves online. The reels looked incredible. But you should never believe what you see online, brands are great at making stuff look better than it is. Nowhere was that gap clearer than the fan village. Tens of thousands of people passed through that space every single day of the week, and almost no cycling brand thought to be there. PNS and Rapha did pop-ups at some stores in the city, and Castelli had a showcase at a very small café that I’d actually never heard of before (they didn’t even sell anything but they did showcase some vintage Italy kit, and that was dope) but none of them thought to sell where the masses actually were. During F1, the fan village is incredible. There’s games, there’s merch, there’s food, there’s drinks. The fan village for Worlds had one Santini-licensed store selling UCI gear, and a few spots to grab beers and a bite. That’s it. There might have also been a Shimano booth, I can’t recall. For such a food-centric city, there should have been food trucks everywhere, all week. I don’t want to be that negative though. The fan sector might not have been designed to sell gear or be a promotional area. It felt like you were at a festival. Large screens to watch the race, speakers to hear the commentators. It was well done in that sense, I just feel like it could have been more. It should have been more.
With the cycling atmosphere being relatively small in terms of global sales (most brands are currently struggling, see Rapha), you’d think every brand, or most brands, would gather and organize themselves properly in one space and do something cool. But nope, not the case. And really that’s OK. At the end of it all, everything was still awesome. I just feel like there was a missed opportunity. It felt like the “cool” brands focused on throwing events with their influencers and forgot how everyone else who enjoys this sport is also important. The fan village was that one opportunity to market to the masses.
Some companies did figure it out. Le Club, Montreal’s self-proclaimed cycling café, hosted a vintage market with Distilled Statements, a vintage tee dealer out of Montreal, selling vintage cycling tees. The curation was perfect and that event felt different, which was refreshing. Etape22 came down from Toronto and set up a similar pop-up with over two hundred vintage tees. But other than that, nothing really stood out to me.
Images are from Le Clubs Instagram, showcasing Distilled Statement tees.
THE SURREAL
The best thing I did all week (I’m biased but hey it’s my newsletter) was the gathering of minds I helped curate alongside CAC. Commercial Athletics Club is a small brand out of Vancouver I met through Instagram. They initially started out as a group ride (self-proclaimed hardest group ride in Canada) and slowly evolved to making cool ass kits (go buy their stuff!). They wanted to throw a party for Worlds and I helped them pull it together. We called it A BLOC (the art of going all in), and we threw it at my friend’s café in the heart of Mile End, Café Fame. A lo-fi spot with great furniture, good coffee and an even better sound system. We had two DJs (Francis Le Disko & Francis Zella) going back-to-back like they were working together in the peloton. The music was very GRAVITYHILL (some form of house music, obviously). Honestly, I thought maybe fifty people would show up but it ended up being close to 200. It got wild. Vancouver showed up.
It was less a cycling event and more just a reason to get people in a room together, and somehow that worked better than anything else I saw all week and I’m not just saying that ‘cause I was a part of it. I’m saying it because it was about the people. And it seems like the mainstream brands forget that part. It’s people first, product second, not the other way around.
I’ve been doing this GRAVITYHILL thing in the shadows for a while now. A BLOC was the first time that changed. I put myself out there. We had actual people who read the newsletter, follow the account or just heard about the event from a friend of a friend, standing in an actual room talking about the same things I’ve been writing about. I felt the support for not only my vision, but also a super small brand I respect.
I also had the opportunity to meet real people in the industry this week, people I’d only known from a screen up to that point. Hopefully some of that turns into something cool. Putting yourself out there, IRL, still matters more than anything you can do from behind a phone or a computer. And it’s important to remember that.
Long live Worlds.
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