By Marco Milesi
Adventure cyclist and long-distance travel writer
At midnight, the leading triplet is showing us an unusual behavior: aero man (Florian) is standing still, while both Jens and Ralph are moving. They keep pedaling for two hours, then they decide to stop almost at the same time; probably they were watching each other on the tracking. They are now almost 500km in front of the fourth rider. They are cycling a race on their own.
At 5am Florian and Ralph start cycling, with a big difference in speed: Florian keeps an average of 23km/h while record man (Ralph) struggles to keep pedaling and is forced to stop a couple of times, not being able to overtake Jens, who wakes up at 8:30am and starts cycling as well.
At 10am Florian is north of Munich, while the other two are still in Czechia. During the day we receive another sad news from Lucky Szákó: he is forced to scratch due to physical problems. At 11:30am the veteran (Jens) crosses the border into Germany, followed by Ralph 6 hours later.
During the day, Benoit Merchez starts to move away from the rest of the trailing group, putting some km in his legs after having dropped his pair. At 10pm Ralph stops, while both aero man and the veteran continue their journey, with Florian reaching Bregenz (checkpoint 4) at roughly 10:30pm. So far, this is a new official record, as we didn’t have any checkpoint in 2018, when the record to Tarifa was set.
At midnight, Florian is already past Liechtenstein, followed by Jens at 250km of distance and Ralph further back (he is still standing still).
Florian is decelerating, and the sleep deprivation if compared to Jens must start making him pay its toll. Are we about to shine a light on Jens?