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Flight Time
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SEPTEMBER 2018
Wanderlust
at biking? I raised a
metaphorical eyebrow in
response to this invitation to
try out a new pursuit in South
Wales. I wondered whether
the “fat” bit applied to the bicycle itself, some
part of it or, heaven forbid, to the rider.
Somehow the advent of this new form of
off-road pedal adventure had passed me by.
But, while a few pedants have been rewriting
history to suggest that the “fat bike” has been
around for decades, it’s pretty clear that
it’s only really gained popularity relatively
recently, since the big mountain bike brands
starting making bikes with extra-wide tyres.
Yes, that’s what the “fat” actually stands for:
it’s a bike with big, fat, soft tyres, designed for
riding on surfaces that even the hardiest of
F
O F F - R O A D
both guided and self-guided trips for visitors.
Our own group, with Corum at its
head, would be destined for the sand dunes
of Merthyr Mawr – reputedly the second
highest in Europe and a location used in the
1962 classic,
Lawrence of Arabia
. I’ve learned
to take such superlatives with a pinch of salt
and so I quickly forgot about our ultimate
goal as we put the bikes through their paces
across the sands.
It was good to get off the tarmacked
coastal path, on which the deep tread of the
wide tyres pulled my carbon and metal steed
constantly to the left. Now my fat, spongy
wheels were devouring the rocky foreshore
with ease, bouncing over small boulders,
fording rock pools, then gliding across
the sticky sand at the high-water mark. It
mountain-bike riders might have baulked at.
And just as the bicycle begat the road
bike, the mountain bike and the hybrid, so
the fat bike is very much the child of the
genus mountain bike – conceived originally
for riding on snow, but equally at home on
a variety of other soft surfaces, like sand or
mud, or on bicycle-unfriendly terrain, like
rocky beaches or screes.
It was beneath a perfect blue sky,
alongside an equally serene turquoise
Atlantic Ocean that I got the chance to find
out what the fuss was about, courtesy of
a guy with the delightful name of Corum
Champion. A former business manager
with Vauxhall, Corum opened his cycle-
hire business in the South Wales resort of
Porthcawl a couple of years ago and offers