Ep. 120 ~ Sofiane Sehili, A Promise to Keep
Bikes or Death
Patrick Farnsworth
4.8 • 563 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2022
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This past weekend Sofiane Sehili became the 2022 Tour Divide winner with a time of 14d 16h 36. This concluded a journey that started 8 years ago when Sofiane toured the Tour Divide for the first time. He would return in 2016 to race it for the first time and claim a very respectable 3rd place, while Mike Hall would go on to win and set a new course record in the process. A record that stands to this day. In 2019 Sofiane came back to try again. Everything was looking promising as he was leading the race and contending with Mike Hall's record until a massive snow storm stopped him in his track, forcing his return to Brush Mountain Lodge and taking him out of the race.
Please visit BikesorDeath.com for a full writeup and gallery of images from patricks time at the end of the Tour Divide.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bikes for Death podcast. As always, my name is Patrick, |
| 0:05.2 | and I'm your host, and I am very excited about today's episode, and I hope that you are too. |
| 0:12.3 | No guessing here. My guest today is the 22 Tour-Dibide winner, Sophia on Sahili. |
| 0:30.5 | And this conversation takes place the morning after winning the Tour-Divide at Jeff Sharp's house, just there in Hachita, New Mexico, at what is lovingly called the Bike ranch. There's a lot to unpack here with this |
| 0:40.6 | episode and the ones forthcoming. Let me take a moment to set the stage real quick. I have been |
| 0:47.7 | teasing for years on this podcast that I have a dream of being at the finish line for the tour divide and being able to meet |
| 0:56.8 | and interview whoever happens to be there. I made that a priority this year, but my schedule |
| 1:04.6 | is kind of fixed. And so I had a window that I could make it. And I didn't know who I'd be able to chat with, |
| 1:12.5 | who was going to be there, who would finish in time and all that jazz. |
| 1:15.9 | And so I spent the last part of the Tourdivide, at least Sofion's Tourdivide, |
| 1:22.7 | just really dot watching, trying to time when he'd be finishing. |
| 1:30.7 | And so I could leave Texas and make the 13-hour drive to the border of America and Mexico in Antelope Wells, New Mexico. So I watched |
| 1:38.3 | the dots studiously, and when I thought it was appropriate, and I had plenty of time, I set my car in a westerly |
| 1:48.2 | direction and I made it to the finish line to meet up with Sophie on, but I was like 15 minutes |
| 1:56.0 | late because the last day he averaged about 17 miles an hour and, yeah, just was riding like a |
| 2:03.8 | banshee. So I kind of missed him actually finishing, but I got there right at the end. And it was |
| 2:09.9 | incredible to be there. And, you know, for people who've never been to the end of tour divide, it is |
| 2:17.0 | remote. You know, after turning off the never been to the end of the tour divide, it is remote. |
| 2:17.6 | You know, after turning off the main highway of I-10, it's a good hour and a half drive on a very remote road that meanders through very sparsely populated areas. |
| 2:32.0 | And I mean very sparsely populated. |
| 2:36.9 | The most populated area is a hachita, and there's a food mart there. And that's about 45 minutes from the border by car, |
| 2:44.7 | and it is populated with only 40 people. So we were talking very remote. |
... |
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