Battle Mountain, Nevada
Nevada
The fastest a human has ever pedaled a bicycle happened on a flat stretch of highway outside Battle Mountain: just under ninety miles an hour.
Every year, teams from around the world haul strange machines to a long, straight, flat piece of Highway 305 outside Battle Mountain. The bikes are fully enclosed, streamlined shells with a rider lying inside. The event is called the World Human Powered Speed Challenge, and the goal is simple. Pedal faster than anyone ever has. In September of 2016, Todd Reichert got a five mile run-up and hit eighty nine and a half miles an hour over a two hundred meter stretch. That made him the fastest man alive under his own power. He set five records that week. A few years earlier, Sam Whittingham had taken a prize for cracking one tenth the speed of sound. In 2019, a French rider named Ilona Peltier set the women's record at just under seventy nine miles an hour. The same road hosts an open road race from Battle Mountain to Austin and back, a hundred and thirty miles of muscle cars and modern sports cars.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
On September 16, 2016, Todd Reichert became "the fastest man alive" by pedaling a streamlined bicycle at 89.59 mph (144.18 km/h) over a 200-metre (660 ft) distance at the end of a 5-mile (8.0 km) run.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Reese River 13.4 mi The Reese River is called a tributary of the Humboldt, but in most years it never gets there.
- Beowawe, Nevada 25.1 mi North America's second largest geyser field, after Yellowstone, was drilled out of existence here in a single year.
- Palisade, Nevada 39.6 mi A Nevada railroad town staged fake gunfights for arriving trains, and nobody outside the town knew it was theater.
- Winnemucca, Nevada 46.9 mi The first autobiography ever written by a Native American woman came from the daughter of the chief this Nevada town is named for.
- Carlin Tunnel 49.7 mi A passenger train derailed at the bridges here in 1939, killing twenty-four people, and investigators ruled it deliberate sabotage that was never solved.