I think we can all agree that the Tour de France is essentially stupid, whichever way you look at it. 150 blokes racing bikes around a country for 21 days, clocking up miles that would look decent on the résumé of a long-distance lorry driver. Even with the mediocre hotels and interminable bus transfers between stages, riding 3,000 kilometres over three weeks, and not just surviving but excelling at the upper echelons of human endurance throughout, is a concept that few can stomach.
Now remove all the excess. The hotels, the buses, the team cars bringing you water and snacks and spare wheels. What you’re left with is cycling in its most basic form. What you’re left with is Lachlan Morton.
And Lachlan Morton has done some truly stupid things on a bicycle.
During the Covid-affected World Tour season in 2021, the Australian pro, contracted with Team EF-Education Easypost, rode the entire distance of the Tour de France, some 5,500 kilometres with stage transfers included, in just 18 days, beating his teammates in the peloton (who started before him) to Paris by a staggering four days. It’s an endeavour which makes the actual Tour look sensible. This Alt Tour on its own would be a feat on which most ‘normal’ people would dine out for a lifetime, retelling its increasingly outlandish narrative in pubs the world over. But that’s not really Lachlan’s style.
After all, this is a man who rode the 720 kilometres of the Badlands Cycling Classic through the Spanish desert for 43 uninterrupted, and unsupported, hours. By the end, he was hallucinating. This is a man who, last year, unofficially broke the record for the Tour Divide, a 2,671-mile bikepacking route that bisects the contiguous United States from Canada to Mexico. The Aussie completed the mountain-bike route, on which a 100-mile gap between rest stops is considered a short hop, in just over 12 days, a large portion of which he managed with just one working gear. If the line between bravery and stupidity is a thin one, then I doubt Lachlan Morton noticed it when he crossed it a long time ago.
And yet, just as Evel Knievel just had to jump over one more bus, Morton’s current escapade makes those that came before seem insignificant by comparison, as if they were mere training rides. Following in the footsteps of the Overlanders, cycling’s original ultra-endurance hipsters from the turn of the century, at 4am on the morning of September 5th, he set out from his hometown of Port Macquarie in New South Wales to begin The Lap of Australia. That’s a not-so-cool distance of 14,201 kilometres. To break the record, set by David Alley in 2011 at 37 days 20 hours and 45 minutes, the Giro d’Italia veteran must average a colossal 400 kilometres a day, a number he appears to be surpassing with unnerving regularity if his Strava posts are to be believed.
And they are.
It is sometimes difficult to put Lachlan’s exploits into perspective. According to former teammate and fellow professional Michael Woods, “I don’t think people realise…that Lachy rides a s**t ton, like, more than the average pro. By a lot.” He has been the perfect protagonist for EF Education’s Alternative Calendar, an initiative they’ve been running since 2019 aiming to transform the traditional elitist perception of road cycling. Cycling’s image is still one of a sport with a high barrier to entry, both physical and financial, with incredibly slim people on incredibly slim bicycles doing impossible things in impossible places (often with one or two suspicious substances lying around). Yet Morton’s challenges give voice to a world of riding bikes that is centred around people and events lying outside of cycling’s accepted canon that encapsulate what cycling should be all about.
The former Tour of Utah winner has grown a lot since his early days in the pro peloton. “In my early career as a professional rider, I definitely struggled a bit with the purpose of (professional sport) beyond just trying to achieve something for yourself.” In reality, the ultra-endurance records that he sets out to break are of secondary importance to what he really accomplishes through his feats of strength and stamina. In Rapha’s A Love Letter to Cycling, he opines that results “are very much ego things, selfish things. But if you can put something into the sport that hopefully lives a little longer, I take a lot of satisfaction from that.”
It’s nice to know that all his odysseys have a positive impact. The Lap has so far raised almost $60,000AUD for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, which helps provide books and education to children in remote parts of Australia with a focus on indigenous storytelling and languages, of which Australia has over 250. Meanwhile, The Alt Tour in 2021 saw donations of more than £500,000 for World Bicycle Relief. Even when the charitable aspects of the riding are removed, Morton’s openness about his own mental and physical health is testament to the changing landscape around the male identity that he has helped, in his own small way, to bring about.
Lachlan Morton is by no means alone in cycling’s madcap ultra-endurance avant-garde. Lael Wilcox has been blazing her own trail for years, seemingly powered solely by top-tube bags of loose McDonalds fries and unadulterated joie-de-vivre. Just over a week ago, she became the fastest woman to circumnavigate the world by bike. Hers is a story that deserves more focus and justice than I can give it now. Riders like these, and the countless others who populate the start lines at community-led endurance events, most of whom have regular old nine-to-fives off the bike, are the true legacy of those early Tour de France legends like Ottavio Bottechia and the Pélessier brothers.
On the ninth day of The Lap, Lachlan Morton woke up drenched in sweat as his body attempted to recover from the 3,690 kilometres he had already ridden. Unable to keep down any solid food all morning, he proceeded to ride 500 kilometres through Australia’s desolate Northern Territories. Ask anyone, they’d tell you that’s a stupid thing to do. But therein lies the beauty of what “Lachy” does every time he sets out on another one of his grand adventures. Despite the hardships and the pain and the slow descents into madness (all documented on his Instagram page), he inspires you to do stupid things. Not stupid in terms of danger or risk, but stupid in terms of going out and pushing yourself purely for the experience of having done it without first knowing that you can do it.
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