(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) Nº288 Back From The Dead & Ready To Shred 🪦 🤙

The 4th annual Atlas Mountain Race is in full swing this week after a delayed start on Saturday. Follow the racers' dots, on insta & via the AMR podcast as well! Also worth a peek are part 1 & part 2 of Bikepacking.com's Rigs of The Race overviews! Torsten Frank also has some great commentary in his stories!

I completed the Atlas Mountain Race in its inaugural year back in 2020 and wrote about it here back in Nº187 and on The Radavist.

Perhaps inspired by my son's affinity for baggy pants (that I shared when I was his age), when I saw Limpies was making a comeback and featuring rhymes in their marketing, I was intrigued to learn more!

Turns out Limpies was started by the owner of Tracker Trucks, Larry Balma. Larry was also the original publisher of Transword Skateboard magazine (which grew to include Transworld Snowboarding, Transworld Surf, and Ride BMX) Limpies was a cult brand in the late 80's & early 90's. Their logo no doubt resembles the LD stems made famous by Ibis Cycles and Charlie Cunningham. 😆

I don't know who is behind the brand reboot, but nice to do some skateboarding history research for this week's intro, and I'm curious to see how it goes.

What cycling brand restarts come to mind? And with clever rhymes? ; )
We once worked with Spengle on their restart years ago. LeMond's ebikes are another great example in recent years. I tend to dislike movie remakes but somehow have a soft spot for brand reboots.

As always, thank you for reading,

Jon

Upcoming Events

February

🇪🇸 17th-23rd Murcia for a week of riding
🇳🇱 24th ‘Silk Road Cargo Race’ Ride & Screening
🇳🇱 29th Mechanics of Joy with Garry Pigot

March

🇳🇱 10th Pathfinder Giro
🇳🇱 15th Dox Under The Tracks
🇩🇪 15th-17th Cycling World
🇩🇪 22nd-24th Kolektief
🇳🇱 30th 12hr Alleycat

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Cycling

Wahu! Bringing Pedal Power to Ghana

This is a really inspiring story! Valerie Labi is the CEO of Accra-based Wahu! & they design, engineer, and manufacture all of their bikes in 🇬🇭 Ghana. Wahu! is making it possible for people who currently use petrol scooters for $120/month to instead spend $1/week on charging. Genuinely life-changing!

The Cargo Bike Festival's YouTube has talks from attendees from 🇮🇳 India, 🇲🇱 Mali, 🇧🇷 Brazil 🇩🇪 Germany, 🇫🇷 France, 🇬🇧 UK and 🇳🇱 the Netherlands. With more coming up from 🇺🇦 Ukraine, 🇩🇰 Denmark, 🇧🇪 Belgium, and 🇺🇸 the USA.

NS and TIER partner to offer e-bikes in NS App in The Netherlands

"Available to NS flex subscription holders and business travellers with an NS business card, TIER bicycles are strategically located in Utrecht, Bunnik, Odijk, Nieuwegein, Maarssen, Eindhoven and Veldhoven." Pretty big opportunity for TIER in the Netherlands!

Women In The Bike Industry Summit

Organized by Aoife Glass, Vedangi Kulkarni, Emily Stratton, and Colena Cotter,with the support of Developing MTB in Scotland and South of Scotland Enterprise, the Women in the Bike Industry Summit 2024 will take place on the 15th & 16th of March at Glentress in the Scottish Borders. More info here.

Ideas

‘Invisible Sportswomen’ - The Gender Data Gap in sport and exercise science research.

the period of the period. on X: "Privilege to contribute in a small way on this paper… “Invisible Sportswomen”: The Sex Data Gap in Sport & Exercise Science Research. Here's what we — Females remain significantly underrepresented within sport and exercise science research. Only 6% of research was exclusively carried out on females. 34% of participants were female. 86% of papers that include males only don’t state this in their title. 0.6% of male-only research investigated a male-specific topic (meaning that 99.4% could have included women!) Listen to an interview about the study here. Hat tip to Katy of Old Man Mountain & Robert Axle Project for sharing this!

Why Brand Comes First: How to build a brand-centric organization

*"There’s a gap in the short-term versus long-term thinking in brand-building."* I learned about Ana Andjelic's newsletter via a post from my friend Joachim Baan. This one is a bit of a more involved read but worth it! Click thru if this sounds interesting to you.

The Dutch turned the Netherlands into a bicycle utopia. Here’s how we can do the same in other countries

Think the Netherlands has just always been a bicycling nation? Only in the 1970s did it begin to shift away from car-centred design! James Howell-Jones penned an inspiring GCN article telling not only how it happened here but could be possible for others too!

Friends

The Women of The Atlas Mountain Race

An impressive field of women are competing in the 4th edition of the Atlas Mountain Race. Mel & Cynthia of the Detours Ultra-Cycling & Adventure Podcast were able to aggregate voice note interviews with all 18 of them! Listen here. Support them by buying a ☕

"These incredible individuals share what they’re most excited about and what challenges they are likely to face. Each of them has a unique story, and we hope by shining a spotlight on the women’s field, it will encourage more to line up next year or to take on their own challenge."

Mel & Cynthia put together a list of the women featured in the episode so you can track them on the map by cap number. They are organized here in the same order as they appear in the episode. Good luck to you all!