A team of four Taiwanese cyclists on Saturday joined competitors from around the world in the Race Across America team event, a strenuous US bike ride covering 4,830km from California to Maryland.
The four cyclists are doctor Hsiao Yi-ting (蕭依婷), software engineer Juan Chien-yeh (阮建瞱), and sales managers Huang Yi-kuang (黃儀光) and Lu Hsuan-chiu (盧玄梂).
“The four of us are not the kind of people who give up easily. We joined this event to challenge ourselves,” team captain Juan said before they set off.
Over the coming week or so, the group of four are to ride 4,830km in a relay format from Oceanside, California, to Annapolis, Maryland, in the annual race, one of the world’s toughest and most grueling bicycle events.
“The route passes through deserts and the Rocky Mountains, so temperature variances could reach 50°C,” Juan said.
The bikers are scheduled to travel through 12 states and reach altitudes of more than 51,000m. Teams have nine days to complete the event, while solo riders must complete the race in no more than 12 days.
“Although none of us have ever participated in a 5,000km bike event before, we hope to finish the race in seven-and-a-half days,” Juan said, adding that all four cyclists have participated in 1,200km bike rides before.
He said the four cyclists are divided into two groups that are to be on the move around the clock. Each group takes a turn pedaling between 180km and 200km at a time, while the other group rests in a support vehicle.
“I have not participated in a long-distance biking event for a long time,” said Hsiao Yi-ting, the only woman in the group.
Hsiao said deciding whether to compete was a tough decision.
In the run-up to the event, the team trained by spending their weekends cycling around Taiwan.
During the event, they are to wear clothes emblazoned with Taiwan’s national flag and the word “TAIWAN,” to give Taiwan exposure in the US, they said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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