Video: World Cycle Race grand depart + progress update

You may remember that we reported at the start of March that 11 riders set out from Greenwich on the World Cycle Race, attempting to break the circumnavigation record for unsupported riders. They've been out there for almost a month now so now's as good a time as any to catch up with their progress and have a look at this nice video by Ian Homer of the Grand Depart.

Kyle Hewitt, the first rider interviewed, never made it out of the country, citing personal reasons and a change in circumstances for his decision to cancel his challenge. Stephen Phillips is also down on the tracking website as scratched, leaving eight men standing. So who's in the lead?

Well, some are going west and some east, so it's not immediately clear from the map. But helpfully the race website has a handy ready reckoner of who's travelled how far, and from the last update on 14 March we can see that it's Mike Hall, heading east, who's leading the pack. He's managed to cover an impressive 6,012km thus far, followed by Martin Walker who's about 1,000km behind right now. It's 700km back to third placed Simon Hutchinson. Mike's currently in India (as is Simon) whilst Martin's heading the other way round the world and is currently in the deep south of the USA.

Assuming that Mike Hall can keep up the pace he's currently setting, he looks on course to beat Vin Cox's unsupported and ratified time of 163 days, 6 hours and 58 minutes by almost a month. That's not currently the record, though; Alan Bate is the incumbent with a time of just 106 days. Bate's record, however, was set with the help of a support team, leading for calls for the record to be split into separate standards for supported and unsupported riders. All of the World Cycle Race participants are unsupported on their attempts.