CONTEXT
I've noticed that many of my photos aren't particularly beautiful, and it's not clear why they're there. But I wanted to keep them so that I don't forget about the story behind them. I really do have a lot of them, so I'll probably add more from time to time as I come across them.
French version of this page here.
Old bike?
This photo was taken in Germany, during my summer trip 2022. This man was looking at our bikes, fully equipped with bikepacking gear.
I thought his bike looked funny too. When I looked at it more closely, I noticed that he had painted his E-(fat)bike completely as if it was very old and had been left to rot in a forest for many years. He even put fake rivets all over it, and painted his helmet the same way. I thought it was cool.
Spot the difference.
Here's something funny that I'm not even mad about.
It concerns a photo of my friend Loic Biteaud I took at the National Moutarde Crit 5 in 2017, can you guess which one is mine, and which one was randomly received a friend by email about an electric bikes sold on Alibaba? I can't either. What makes it even funnier is that the person who had to do this had to remove the track bike, and put their talent to the test by recreating the leg, and adjusting the arms to hold the bike properly! And they even made him more fat… You know you've made it when you get to this point.
It’s this way!
Here's a series of pictures that I like for their funny side. It is nothing very complex and it might happen quite often when bikepacking, but I like this souvenir I would have forgotten without them. This was during my very first bikepacking trip in 2020. We were following a route on our GPS, and it was saying the road is in this direction, and that we were right on it… It might have been a road at some point, but it wasn’t really one anymore when we were here. We didn’t know it we should look for alternatives, or if we should “follow it” anyway.
Bloody ball!
I've had several comments in the past about the mark on this ball, from the SSCXWC 2018 in Belgium.
So the answer is yes, this is blood. This was initially supposed to be a “funny competition”, wich really was, but there was a section of the track filled with huge inflatable gym balls, just to make thing a bit more funky and difficult. The public loved that, especially the kids, perhaps a little too much as they picked up the balls to throw them at the participants. And even if these were inflatable, they were still quite heavy and hard, which led to a few blood marks. After a few laps, people were all red in the face, the balls really acted like whips…
More balls.
Here's a series of photos that really don't make sense until you know the full context, and I really like it. They were taken at the SSCXWC in Belgium in 2018 (just after the story above). The main event was a CX race in a city park, but the Hodala team thought of something else: they decided to organise a basketball game, in the middle of the track, with one of the balls from the story above, while the race was going on at the same time. Everybody had to go through it at some point. Sometimes the basketball players ended up pedalling, and the riders with a ball in their hands, which made no sense to anyone, but it was a very funny moment.
Requesting backup.
I was in Paris, taking photos of these three bikes (my Parallax, Pauline's Vigorelli and Boris's Histogram), when these two cops walked into my frame, out of nowhere, and thought it would be a great spot to fix the bike they had just broken seconds earlier after throwing it at someone in the stairs right next to us to try and stop them getting away....
They bent the brake disc as a result, and struggled to make the bike usable again.
This wouldn't have happened if they had been riding brakeless track bikes.... Just saying.
Boken down?
Here is a slightly different picture from the others, with no bike in sight, taken at the top of the Col de l'Iseran during my car and bike trip with Sophie Potter in 2021. This was a trip where we often switched from her car (an vintage Renault 4) to our bikes, to cross a few famous Alpine passes. This time, we were using her car. When we decided to take a photo in front of the sign at the summit, a group of hikers were passing by and asked us if we wanted to pretend that our car had broken down, and that we had crossed the pass with their help. It was a little joke that I found very funny, but they weren't entirely wrong about the reliability of the car during this trip, which was particularly difficult for an old car and would have put more than one to the test (it would even have been challenging for a current car).
High-level security.
This photo with the truck is nothing special visually, but it's the perfect example of this “context” category, because it is simply a photo I like to remember the story behind, which I would probably have forgotten if I hadn't taken it. It was during my bikepacking trip across the Canary Islands with Sophie Potter in 2021. We wanted to go for a swim in the ocean, but as you can see, the beach was a bit difficult to access by bike. It was even difficult to go there by foot actually, but these two guys who had converted their truck into an apartment and had come to spend a relaxing day at the top of the cliff, offered to look after our bikes while we went for a swim. And when we came back, they even offered us a tea!
This place looks familiar…
These two photos of my bikes were taken three years apart. During my bikepacking trip in spring 2023 in the Morvan (rural France), I saw this barn door and these few houses that looked familiar, without really knowing why. When I went to take a closer look, I remembered that I had taken a picture of my Omnium CXC there, three years earlier, during my very first bikepacking trip. So I tried to reproduce it by taking a similar photo, but with my current bike.
