Two Legs Good, Four Legs Better
At a certain point in his cycling career, Velo Vietnam’s Ashley decided to use his powers of cycling for good instead of evil, and became a tandem pilot. This is his story.
This saga starts in Canberra in around 2008, not long after I began to get serious about training and racing. I happened to see an advertisement for a tandem “come and try” day at my local criterium track, and had the thought that piloting for someone who can’t ride a bike unassisted would be a cool thing to do. I could enjoy my passion and help someone living with a disability experience the joy of cycling at the same time. Win-win.
The first time I got onto one of these whale-like bikes was more hilarious than scary. I wobbled all over the place, but held it up, and after a lap or two of the crit circuit, I was having fun. Then the organisers told me it was time for me to take a “stoker” on the back. (Pilot? Stoker? Don’t ask me why, but for some reason when it comes to tandems, we are back in the Age of Steam.)
My new best buddy Len bravely signalled he was putting his faith in me by climbing on and giving me the thumbs up. Next thing I knew, the organisers were throwing me and the other prospective pilots into a challenge where you have to ride circles of increasingly small diameter while some gleeful bastard moves the safety cones closer and closer towards the centre. Despite my being understandably anxious about dropping the bike with Len on the back, we managed to be the last ones left in the game, outmaneuvering even the experienced pilots. I guess the mountain bike skills were coming in handy.
After this hopeful start, I found myself on the pilot roster of Fitability, the shambolic but amazing organisation behind the tandem scene in Canberra. Most weekends saw me racing my “single” bike on Saturdays, and piloting for a string of remarkable stokers on Sundays. My first customer was Jing, an amputee who at the time was just getting into cycling.
Our first cycling date started with Jing handing me her left pedal. I obediently kneeled down to screw it into the crank arm, then reached out and said “Give me your other pedal”. She just raised her eyebrows, and cast her gaze down at her missing right leg. Ah. Luckily, Jing was used to dealing with idiots, and once we started riding, we got on like a house on fire. Subsequently she went on to become a competitive solo rider in both Road and MTB, and even got close to selection for the Taiwan paralympic team.
Once I’d gotten a bit of a name for myself as a pilot, I got tapped on the shoulder to ride with multiple paralympic medallist Lindy Hou. Keen to prove myself worthy, I put myself quite far into the red on the first climb of our maiden ride. Hearing me puffing raggedly, Lindy laconically intoned “Don’t blow yourself up on the first hill mate. We’re out for a hundred K’s ya know”.
After I'd calmed myself down, I managed to put in a performance that met with Lindy's requirements for a training pilot, and we have been riding together on and off ever since. Now that she's retired, I'm apparently good enough to be a racing pilot - for local events, at least.
One day, on a Fitability tandem group ride, we were hailed down by a lady on the side of the road who all but threw herself in our path. Once we’d pulled over, she told us about her crazy boyfriend who was still obstinately riding his single bike despite beginning to lose his vision to retinitis pigmentosa. She wanted to know if someone could pilot for him.
That was how I met Don, with whom I went on to form a tandem partnership that pretty much amounts to a second marriage. Don hails from some godforsaken part of Canada, and has a background as an ultra distance rider, being a veteran of the TransRockies race. Once we realised we could ride quite fast together, and that Don wasn’t afraid of going downhill at 90km/h on the back of a bike over which he had no control, we started to make enquiries with the local cycling clubs about whether they could accommodate a tandem in their weekend racing. To their eternal credit, all three of our local clubs welcomed us with open arms, and after a trial period incorporated us into their regular grades.
Racing a tandem against “single” bikes turns out to be crazy fun. Tandems are at a pretty big disadvantage on climbs, but on the flat, and especially on descents, they dominate. Our presence adds an extra tactical dimension to a race, with the singles trying to drop us on climbs, and us using the descents and flats to try and power back on. On the right course, we’re annoyingly hard to get rid of. Don went on to win paracycling gold in both Road and Time Trial disciplines at the Australian National Championships with pilot Steve Crispin in 2018.
Once I got involved with David Lloyd and Velo Vietnam, it wasn’t long before my tandem friends were hitting me up to arrange tours in Vietnam for them. I piloted Don on the first iteration of our popular Sapa to Hanoi tour, which was an experience, to say the least. We must have heard about a thousand Hmong, Dao and Tai kids yell “xe đôi” (tandem) in delight and wonderment on that ride. In late 2018 I took the whole Fitability gang, including Jing on her own bike and Lindy on the back of the tandem, on that same route. That time we had both a one-legged rider and a tandem, which caused extra amazement.
A dream of mine in the post-Covid future is to start making connections between Fitability and some Blind Associations in Vietnam, to see if we can’t get a cycling for VI riders program going. The philanthropic, community spirit is so strong among Vietnamese cyclists that I don’t anticipate we’d have any shortage of pilots or supporters. One day ...
To read about another journey to Vietnam, this time via France, check out our Q and A with Claude Perzo here
