Great Athletes Ride Trek

Eurobike. 

The annual pilgrimage to Freidrichshafen Germany.  Yep, that is right.  The famous little town on some obscure little lake on the border of Germany and Switzerland for the biggest bike show in the world.  Everyone knows Freidrichshafen and plans to go there for their next vacation, right?  Not. 

Who knows why it is there.  It just is.  We all go there every year.  Plane to Detroit, to Amsterdam, to Zurich, get on a train, take the ferry, take a taxi.  All in all it is about 24 hours of travel that feels more like 27.5 hours.  Just kidding, but it does feel like it takes forever.  (#trekworld is exactly 14.2X better than traveling to Eurobike and 7.69X better than the show is itself).  Whatever Joe, right?  Get over yourself.

I'm here, again.  I think this is about the 93rd time that I have been to this show.  It is 10+ halls of thumping techno music, wall to wall people, bad coffee, cigarettes, body painting in someone booth, free tattoo's etc...  But, mixed in there is piles and piles of sweet bike stuff.  You do have to wade through all the junk to get to it.  But for a bike knob, it is paradise.  I love it. 

This year, we are carrying over our Great Athletes Ride Trek theme to Eurobike.  In the past, we have just shown off bikes and accessories.  But, since Andy and Frank and Jens are such good sports they allowed humored us and said they would come to the show for a day and meet some dealers.  Great!

We opened up the booth for the night, and had a cocktail party while John Burke interviewed the guys and they told stories.  Jens told the story of shut up legs again.  Found out that Jens very first bike was a Diamant, which is a brand that Trek owns in Europe and still sells.  He was pretty psyched by that.

John Burke interviewing the boys on stage.

Unfortunately, Andy did not make it because he ended up having to have mouth surgery with a tooth abscess.  That was too bad, but Frank filled in nicely for him. 

Jens said 2 things during the night that were absolutely hilarious. 

First, when asked what wheels he likes best, his answer was the taller ones because he has to pull for 3 hours to get Frank to the bottom of the hill, where Frank goes hard for 20 minutes and then just raises his arms at the finish.  (He said all that like "How hard is that?") Classic.

Second, he said he hates flying to Luxembourg because the country is so small, the front of the plane is in France, the middle in Luxembourg and the rear still in Germany.  He doesn't know what paperwork to fill out. 

There are plenty of places to see the stuff at Eurobike.  Just do a google search on Eurobike 2011.  My time there this year was not so bad, mostly because Great Athletes Ride Trek.

Thanks guys.

 

 

 

 

Hasta la vista, baby. 

Comments

[Larry Cheung]

Many of us Trek fans love the new video and are wondering the song title to the track. I also love Trek's short 'Driven' series. You and everyone else at Trek have great jobs. You love what you do and you get paid for it.