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news
Grand-Departs-c-Yorkshire-FPiano pull up Cragg Vale to celebrate Tour Grand Départ
The opening days of the Tour de France are called the Grand Départ, and as you know unless you’ve spent the last year under a rock, Yorkshire is hosting them this year. So, if you were going to celebrate the occasion by having a team of cyclists tow a large, horizontally stringed piano up England’s longest continuous climb, what would you call the event? The Grand Departs, of course.
On April 5, as a prologue to the Hebden Bridge Piano Festival (April 11-13), a team of Calderdale’s most resilient cyclists will pull a grand piano up Cragg Vale, the longest continuous ascent in England.
To haul the instrument, the riders will use a PianoPorté, a new invention by sculptor Andy Plant that has a 2CV gearbox as part of its gubbins. While they toil up the six-mile ascent, local and international pianists will play a specially composed musical work by the festival’s director David Nelson.
The piano-shifting team will set off from Mytholmroyd at noon on April 5, but aren’t guessing how long it’ll take to reach Blackstone Edge. It's a safe bet that that Richard Bideau’s and Vicky Clark’s Strava KOM and QOM of 16:26 and 19:03 respectively are in no danger.
However, Richard’s mark might be in trouble on July 6 when the second stage of the Tour heads up the Cragg Vale climb.
The Grand Departs is also an official part of Yorkshire Festival 2014, the first ever arts festival to precede the Tour’s Grand Départ in its 111 year history. It is also supported by Calderdale Council and Legacy Trust UK.
Want to take part? Drop the organisers a line at grand [at] imovearts.co.uk.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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14 comments
Let's be honest here, the event is about promoting the piano festival. The fact they're pulling the thing up a hill that the tour will ride up is incidental.
Hope they get better weather than when I battled up there on Sunday in the wind & hail.
You only had one job.
I'm sorry, I don't even know what you're trying to say.
Pitch perfect interval training?
They should play the Led Zep classic Steinway to Heaven...
Hopefully it won't break loose and run down the hill and crush any kids or you'll end up with a flat minor.
Hopefully no minor falls will accompany this major lift.
One thing's for sure - the pros won't be soft-pedalling.
When I saw the headline I thought it was going to be a Last of The Summer Wine bathtub-type jape...
That's quite a hill to scale.
Lots of hard work and training are the keys to this event
Pull a piano up Cragg? that'd be grand!
I'm no good at piano based punning - it's just not my forte.
King of the Mehlin&Sons!
(get my coat)