Brookes boys cycled to Paris in under 24 hours for Sarcoma UK

They decided do it in a post-fuzzies DMC

8 years ago

Over the Easter Holidays, five Brookes students set themselves the challenge of cycling from London to Paris in under 24 hours to raise money and awareness for Sarcoma UK.

This came after their friend from Brookes was diagnosed with the rare type of cancer. But after forgotten passports and punctures, the boys managed to do the cycle in just 23 hours and have raised £1383 for the charity so far.

They spoke to The Tab about their mad adventure:

What made you want to do the cycle?

We all had three days off over Easter and wanted to do a challenge that we would remember. We knew we wanted to cycle, but just didn’t know where, then one of us came up with the idea of London to Paris in 24 hours in a post-fuzz DMC.

From left to right: Stephen Johnson, Patrick Tawns, Harry Hogan, James Powell and Harry Vardigans

Why did you want to raise money and awareness for Sarcoma UK?

A friend of ours was unfortunately diagnosed with Sarcoma last year and we really felt we had a duty to do our bit. Sarcoma UK is a relatively small charity but does a lot of important work as the only cancer charity in the UK focusing on all types of sarcoma. Their mission is to increase knowledge and awareness of sarcoma through ground-breaking programmes that inspire involvement and transform the landscape for everyone affected by sarcoma. By doing this ride all the money raised will be donated to Sarcoma UK to aid this vital research.

pre-cycle vibes

What kind of support have you had from friends and people at Brookes?

A really welcoming support. Everyone has been really generous with their donations and support and we cannot thank them enough. We’ve raised £1200 so far.

The boys in Paris, post cycle

Tell us what happened on the journey

There were three hiccups. The first was that Harry had forgotten his passport, so he had to go back to oxford and get it, which delayed our set off time. This was cause of the second problem. We had a set time for the ferry at 11pm (the next one after that was 10am so we had to make it) and where we were delayed by the passport incident we had to cycle pretty hard from London to Newhaven. We were on track to JUST about make it but then one of the guys got a puncture. We did the quickest puncture repair of our lives! And then we had to practically sprint the last 30 minutes.

It was like something from the movies, the women on the gate said ‘you have two minutes for your friends to get here’. I knew they were further than 2 minutes. 5 minutes went by and just as she was telling us she wouldn’t let us on, they came round the corner. Then on the ferry there was nowhere to sleep, so we crashed out on the floor for an hour. By the time we got to France, we were fucked knowing we had 190k to go.

So the whole way from Dieppe to Paris was a headwind and A LOT of hills. We were running out of food and water, but we had nowhere to fill up for the first 7 hours on the french side as nowhere was open. So that was pretty shit. But we worked really hard from Dieppe and we all trusted each other to get it done

We got 20k from Paris, we were at the top of this hill and could see the Eiffel tower in the distance, moral was so high. But the GPS rerouted us. Of course we don’t know Paris, so we just followed it. It took us round the whole of Paris. Literally and extra 40k on our journey. Everyone goes on about how beautiful Paris is. But we went through bits that looked worse than Cowley.

It was so demanding, but we made it.

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