FanShot

Life after the clanger

19

I've not yet watched this as it was on after my bedtime last night. But since it's now available on the web I'm guessing it's worth posting. My personal interest in the story is that I rode the NZCC race earlier this year and purely by chance, ended up riding up to the hill top finish with Reon. I had absolutely no idea of who he was or his background, but at the time he seemed like a very interesting guy. Instantly likable, extremely funny, but he also had something different about him. Not something I could put my finger on but it was like he'd 'lived'. To explain that a little more he overtook me fairly close to the bottom (the races leaders was very spread out with the good guys over a minute up the road - ie, we most certainly weren't in the hunt!!!) so I rode his tempo as it suited me nicely, but he was 'just another rider'. Early on he said - shall we ride to the top together, I readily agreed, yet he asked that question twice more on the way up which I found unusual. To me, if I've agreed to ride up the hill with you, then I'm riding up the hill with you. Otherwise I wouldn't agree in the first place. At one stage I stated to get ahead of him a little and he was calling out 'slow down, you're dropping me', of course I slowed down as I had no intention of doing that. So we rode to the top together and crossed the line about 8mins down from memory, he was over the moon with enthusiasm about crossing and we held hands and raised our arms together. Not something I would have even thought of doing but as I say, this guy had something extra about him. Which was very infectious in a good way. When he was asking the 2nd and 3rd time if I'd ride to the top I just agreed with him again and didn't think much of it, and it wasn't until after reading a bit more of his story that I realised he'd seen some different stuff to the average person and I could see that he's probably faced more distrust than most of us who read this added together and multiplied by a factor of 10, so it kind of started to make sense. The old saying of 'once bitten, twice shy' seemed close to his heart. Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to watching it tonight.