White sands, Sinatra and side winds. Welcome to the 10th birthday of GFNY Cozumel. But just what makes GFNY stand out from the gran fondo crowd? We venture to Mexico to find out…
Words Matt Baird Images GFNY Cozumel
The demon barbers and singing founding fathers might be absent, but race director Shaun Gad’s claim that GFNY is ‘the Broadway of cycling events’ is ringing true as I trundle my bike to the start line of GFNY Cozumel at 5am on a moonlit Mexican morning. The bright lights and booming sounds of the pre-race festivities have acted as a beacon to the race HQ, where the most committed racers are already occupying the corrals in a bid to get the best spot before the 7am starting horn. Given GFNY’s New York heritage, Big Applethemed songs from Jay-Z and Sinatra fill the airways instead of the latest Latino pop, the pre-event build-up unlike any cycling event I’ve experienced and closer to the razzmatazz of an Ironman triathlon… minus the compression wear.
The NYC soundtrack is replaced by AC/DC as 7am nears, Brian Johnson’s howling surely catapulting anyone within a 10-block radius out of their Sunday morning slumber. Facing me and 3,200 other racers is 80 or 160km of cycling over a two-lap course on the tropical Mexican island. The Caribbean sun supplants the vast artificial lights focused on the corrals. Cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno… vamos, vamos!
My only previous venture to Mexico was a day in Tijuana, a parade of pharmacies and seedy bars across the border from San Diego, which ended with an hour-long grilling at US customs under a vast George W. Bush portrait as I’d forgotten part of my visa. It’s taken me 15 years to come back, my weekly ‘Mexican’ theme nights of fajitas and arthouse wrestling documentary Nacho Libre with the kids being my closest brush with the land of mariachi, mole and Mayan temples.
A direct 10hr British Airways flight takes me from Gatwick to Cancun airport, where buses depart for the Playa del Carmen ferry stop on the Riviera Maya. The colour-burst of dense jungle, vibrant homestead exteriors and the turquoise Caribbean Sea make the dark and dank UK November days a swiftly diminished memory.
A 19km ferry journey from the Mexican mainland takes me to the island of Cozumel, Mexico’s largest inhabited island, but one that largely consists of untouched mangrove forests and swamps. It’s a tropical haven of wildlife, white sands and coral reefs, the crystalline water producing one of the world’s great diving locations while its deep-water harbour makes it a major cr
