BOTM: Cycling Roses WI.DE.

Custom painted WIDE to ride from Alaska to Patagonia

You can read all about the Cycling Roses project in the previous blog, about how Victoire and Eleonore are riding 25,000 km and interviewing a dozen women about how they used sports to recover from cancer treatments.

Here it's all about the bikes they will use to do it.

The basics

The goal for this bike was to make it as rugged and durable as possible. We did decide for SRAM AXS electronic shifting as the parts are bulletproof and as long as you can charge the parts every now and then, you're golden. As an extra precaution, it's easy to carry a spare battery, they are so small and light that you won't notice it.

The rear derailleur is an X1 Eagle AXS, allowing a bigger range than XPLR. You can combine it with an 11-50T or even a 10-52T cassette. And thanks to AXS, all these parts can "talk" to each other even if they don't belong to the same group or don't even have the same intended use.

For the wheels, I've been riding HED carbon wheels for as long as I can remember and never had a problem. So that was a no-brainer, and in this case we went for the brand-new Lancaster G25, a very wide but shallow rim. That makes the wheels comfortable and durable, plus the rim width provides good stability to the wide tires.

The bag system is from Tailfin, which allows you go tailor to your needs by combining the top bag with small, medium or large pannier bags. As you will see in the photos, the bags were still half-empty during the photoshoot.

Last but not least, I really want to draw your attention to the custom paint itself. With very little time and a very simple brief, Arnaud Teston from Carte Blanche Custom put together this amazing design and executed it to perfection. The hand-painted rose pattern is really stunning. If you would like a very special custom paint from Carte Blanche, you can contact Arnaud anytime.