Gareth Rees Gives Us the Lowdown on the HotCillee London-Paris Event
The HotChillee London to Paris is a 3-stage endurance event with full support and rolling road closures, with 400 riders across 6 seeded groups. Each stage includes a GC section (for the yellow jersey and team classifications), a KOM section for the KOM jersey and a sprint section for the green jersey, with Pro and Amateur versions of each jersey up for grabs.
Our team, Bulk Hardware, consisted of myself, Roy Slide (both VC Walcot members), Paul Daniels and Simon Nicoll. We were seeded in group 2, but after the first stage our team was in 3rd place overall, with the 2 teams ahead of us both seeded in group 1.
On day 2, our group was joined by Stephen Roche and it was a real treat to ride alongside a legend of the sport, who incidentally is still VERY quick!. Unfortunately, Paul Daniels suffered a crash during the GC section while pushing hard, so overnight we dropped 2 minutes behind Team Skoda into 4th place.
For day 3 the organisers promoted us to group 1, the fastest group, which gave us a better chance of getting back in to 3rd place. The 4 of us gave it absolutely everything we had but the gap was just too big and we had to settle for 4th place.
Our focus going in to the event had been the team event and consequently we didn’t pay any attention to the individual GC, so we didn’t realise until it was all over that I had managed 14th place overall, Roy 17th place and Simon 28th, which we were absolutely delighted with and not a little surprised by! The overall winner of the GC was pro Dean Downing and second was fellow pro Greg Mansell.
The whole event was fantastic and riding more than 300 miles from London to Paris, with rolling road closures, alongside the likes of Stephen Roche and Dean Downing and racing on the way (no, we couldn’t get anywhere near the pros in the race sections!) is an experience I will never forget.