Ep. 184 ~ Ulrich "Uba" Bartholmoes, Tour Divide 2024
Bikes or Death
Patrick Farnsworth
4.8 • 563 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2024
⏱️ 117 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last year Ulrich Bartholmoes, aka Uba, won the Tour Divide on his first attempt. This year he came back to do it again, but with a larger goal of completing the Bikepacking Triple Crown. We will be following Uba's Triple Crown attempt at each stage along the way. This is the second episode in the series, you can listen to our first chat we recorded just days before the Tour Divide Grand Depart on episode 182 of this podcast.
This was a record setting year on the Tour Divide and one that will go down in the history books. For the past 8 years the late Mike Hall's record has stood up against hundreds of others who have tried to beat his dot to the border of Mexico in Antelope Wells. This year Justinas Leveika set a new FKT (fastest known time) besting Mike Hall's time by over 20 hours! I'll be releasing an episode with Justinas about his recorded breaking ride in the coming days, but today we turn our attention to Uba who put on brilliant ride and also came in ahead of Mike Hall's time.
The friendly competition between Uba and Justinas is a fun one for fans of the sport. Last year Uba won the Tour Divide with Justinas coming in second and they've had other similar epic battles in races like Atlas Mountain Race.
This year on Tour Divide Justinas got a small gap early in the race and Uba was hot on his heals with sometimes only a few miles between them. Weather played a big factor in the ultimate outcome, but you have to admire and appreciate the epic battle to the finish line from both of these amazing competitors. On today's episode we hear about the race from Uba's perspective and next up we get to hear from Justinas.
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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, |
| 0:05.9 | and I am your host. And it is Tour Divide Week here at Bikes for Death headquarters. |
| 0:12.9 | Today, I am chatting with Uba, who came in second place at this year's Tour Divide. He was last year's |
| 0:20.1 | winner, and you will probably be aware of |
| 0:24.0 | by now that we are following Uba as he takes on the triple crown of bike packing. So we've already |
| 0:31.5 | recorded episode one as Uba was preparing to take on the tour divide. Now we're catching up with him after the Tour Divide, |
| 0:40.0 | and we will continue to follow him as he attempts to complete the Triple Crown, |
| 0:46.2 | which is exciting. |
| 0:48.0 | So this was an amazing year on the Tour Divide. |
| 0:52.3 | Uba and Justinas put on a phenomenal race. Their dots |
| 0:58.1 | almost seemed inseparable. They were like glued together and you had to zoom in quite a way |
| 1:04.2 | just to even see that there was some separation if you were following along on track leaders. |
| 1:09.3 | And so it was a very exciting race. Obviously, |
| 1:12.6 | a record-breaking year, as this was the year that Justinas was able to beat Mike Hall's record. |
| 1:21.1 | And notably, Uba also came in ahead of Mike Hall's record setting time. So anyway, you slice it. This was an exciting year |
| 1:29.8 | on the Tour Divide, and we're going to be hearing Uba's side of his experience on this year's |
| 1:36.0 | tour divide. And we actually have a double header for you this week. I just got done recording |
| 1:42.2 | an episode also with Justinus, and that episode will come out |
| 1:46.9 | either tomorrow or Friday, but I'm going to try to get that one out to you very soon. So you |
| 1:53.3 | have a tour-divide double header this week, and both were great conversations. And one thing that's really interesting is how different these two competitors are. |
| 2:05.6 | They both have very different approaches to bike pack racing, but they are often in the leaderboard or winning these races. |
| 2:16.7 | So it's just interesting to see the two different approaches to these ultra-endurance bikepack |
... |
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