Fun Facts Friday: Cycling

It's time to kick off Summer Season here at TNT and that includes one of our favorite events, America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride in Lake Tahoe. Our amazing cyclists will ride up to 100 miles on event day which means they will log many miles of training over the next few months.

How much do you know about the popular sport of cycling? Here are a few fun facts about this fascinating sport.

1. Cylcing was one of the 9 original sports in the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.
2. 28 years before the first Olympics, the first recorded bicycle race happened in Paris, France.
3. The Tour de France was established in 1903.
4. Before Babe Ruth joined the Yankees, cyclists were the highest paid athletes.
5. On average, a professional cyclist rides 25,000 miles per year. That's the equivalent of riding from L.A. to New York 10 times.
6. Shaving legs is not done to look good (although it does help show off those great cycling muscles). Scraping gravel off your injuries is much easier with shaved legs. It's easier to apply ointments and get those frequent massages.
7. Spandex is also not for looking good. There are plenty of jokes out there about cyclists in their spandex, but the truth is there is a legitimate reason for it: chafing! If you ever spend several hours on a bike, you definitely don't want your clothes moving.
8. The fastest speed a person has ever gone on a bike is 167.043 miles per hour.
9. The longest tandem bike ever built was 67 feet and could seat 35 people.
10. It is estimated that there are over one billion bicycles in the world.
11. Half a billion of those bikes are in China.
12. In 1935, a cyclist named Fred Birchmore rode his bike around the globe. While the entire trip covered 40,000 miles, he padaled 25,000 miles. The rest was traveled by boat. He wore out seven sets of tires.
13. Famous engineers including Henry Ford and the Wright brothers kicked off their careers by producing bicycles.
14. The most expensive bike ever was auctioned for $500,000.
15. A 2000 survey by the communters in Copenhagen, Denmark concluded that people who commute by bicycle are so healthy that they are 39% less likely to die of any cause than those who don't ride bicycles.