On June 12, 2009 the Tour Divide kicked off in Banff, Alberta (Canada) with an international field of 42 riders. The completely self-supported race from Banff to Antelope Wells, NM at the Mexican border is roughly 2,500 miles long, making it the world’s longest MTB race.

This year all the competitors are using Spot GPS devices, providing real time location updates to an online leaderboard (using software powered by none other than TopoFusion). At last check the front runners had entered the state of Colorado which is a bit over the halfway mark. Not bad for just 11 days on the trail Matthew Lee has a pretty good lead at the moment but anything can happen when you’re racing your mountain bike 2,500 miles!

So far competitors have encountered icy trails, wild animals, broken equipment, rain + hail - pretty much anything you can imagine and more. You can track competitors and read more updates on the TourDivide.org website.

Related posts:

1. Longest jump on a mountain bike & other MTB world records
2. Best Mountain Bike Event in the World: World Cup @ Ft. William
3. Great Divide Mountain Bike Route Turns 10
4. World Mountain Biking Bog Snorkelling Championship
5. MTB raffle to benefit Great Divide racer

Tags: GPS for MTB, race, spot messenger, tour divide

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm and is filed under MTB Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response by logging in and using the form at the bottom of this post, or trackback from your own site.