Day 4 on the Alps Divide and I’m in Briancon to give an update on the race
In September of 2025 I was part of the media team covering the Alps Divide Ultra Cycling event. A 1000km off-road ultra bike packing event from Menton on the Mediterranean coast of France to Thonon-Les-Bains on the shores of Lac Leman. This is a series of interviews, footage and race commentary that originally went live on both my Instagram and the DotWatcher.cc Instagram to provide ongoing insight into the race.
Good evening everybody and welcome to the ancient walled city of Brians, the highest city in France. The Voban forts here really are spectacular and it is a beautiful city for our riders. This represents a key resupply point coming after the arduous hiker bike of the cold desire. There are plentiful shops and restaurants here where they can get lots of food, get lots of water, and uh really prepare themselves for the next section to Bardineia and the infamous colder sleier. Right, let’s check in with our lead riders and see how they’ve been getting on. Starting with the women’s field. Our leader, Julie von Grenigan, continues to impress and has built what at this stage seems to be an unassalable lead of 130 km. It’s really hard to see, barring any problems or disasters for her, it’s hard to see that lead being eaten into too much. So, uh, good luck to Julie and hopefully she can bring this one home. Second place, Megie Bishard has probably enjoyed a lot of descents today. Uh, we saw yesterday following down the descent to CP1 how much she likes going downhill. And third place is Simon Eda, but she is not too far behind. So I think uh for second place, third place, there is still all to play for here. With the men, our two leaders, Ziggy and Josh, are now through CP2. Ziggy got there at 16:20 today, had some food and left around 5:00 p.m. Josh arrived not long after and got some food and he was in great spirits. Uh really looking forward to it. uh really enjoyed some of the single track today and he left just after 6 PM. Now Josh did say he didn’t know whether Ziggy was going to push through the night. He suspects Ziggy is going to push through the night, but that’s not Josh’s strategy. He’s planning on getting some sleep so he can ride faster the next day. So that’s where our lead riders are. CP1 closed today and I’m pleased to report that everybody who’s not yet scratched made CP1 before the time cut. They’ve now got till 10 p.m. on Friday to make CP2. Now, it’s still quite a distance from CP1 to CP2, so I think no one can take their foot off the accelerator at the moment. But great to see everybody through. And the race seems to be settling into a pattern. There are clumps of riders which you normally get. Not that they’re riding together, but you get people moving at a similar pace. Now, that makes things interesting for us as the media crew. We’re trying to align ourselves with clumps of riders so we can talk to them, get some good interviews, and get some good content. Uh we’re going to be staying here in Brians tonight and then hopefully tomorrow heading up to the second hiker bike section, which is the new section towards the top of the Clare Valley. Now, I’ve ridden this before on TCR number seven on a road bike and uh I don’t wish to do that again. Uh, but it is an incredible piece of trail and some great riding there and some very interesting hiker bikes. So hopefully we’ll give you a shout from there tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for watching and I will catch you all