Four riders whose lives have been transformed by e-road bikes
From BikeRadar.com
By John Whitney
E-road bikes are one of the newest bike genres on the block.
Electric road bikes have the geometry of your race or endurance road bikes, they’re light enough to match up well to at least a heavier standard road bike and have power boosts that can be as heavy or as light as you want.
On the strongest setting, you can fly up a hill like Marco Pantani in his pomp. On the lightest setting, you still put out the work that you do on your road bike, it’s just that you’re now up front chatting with your friends and in fine spirits, not out at the back, spluttering expletives under your breath.
Recently, Cycling Plus magazine put out a call to hear our readers’ experiences of using e-road bikes.
Several told us their stories of how the new electric bikes have renewed motivation to ride in later years, kept crucial riding friendships alive, fought back against the tide of ill health and, ultimately, restored the fun that should be at the heart of riding a bike once age has begun to take its toll.
Mike Baczkowski – Florida
Mike Baczkowski has ridden bikes seriously, and ridden serious bikes, since his late 20s. Now 80, he recalls over the phone from his winter home in Florida of his penchant for fixing up old and abandoned bikes.
Forgotten treasures, such as a 1986 Raleigh Touring 14 bike that he rescued from the garbage, restored and took over to Italy to ride the original L’Eroica vintage bike event in Tuscany.
There’s also a 1980 Colnago Super that he’d put in the miles around his home in Hamburg, New York, close to Niagara Falls and the Canadian border; and the steel Bianchi that he was on in 2005 when he got wiped out by a motorist at an intersection on, ironically, Cycle to Work day, an incident that left him with a broken neck vertebra and a long convalescence.
He later become a belated, but ultimately enthusiastic, adopter of carbon, buying a 2014 Guerciotti Eureka in the bright orange stylings of the CCC pro team at the time.
“My friends kept insisting I get a carbon bike,” he says. “They were faster up the hills on their carbon racers – that was partly a weight thing, but also an age thing, they’re all at least 10 years younger than me.
Image courtesy of Trek
