By Ellen Moses
Minus Eleven Days
The journey began at Floyd Bennett Field after the King’s County Race. Charlie Issendorf of Champion Systems approached the Comedy Central-Sid’s Bikes riders and offered us an all-expenses-paid trip to race in a UCI stage race in China. Three of us signed on. Time to make a packing list!
Departure
I met my Comedy Central teammates, Camie Kornley and Angela Johnson at JFK. We arrived very early, so they got pedicures while we were waiting. It was going to be Angela’s first time out of the country, so she was particularly excited.

We flew Air China to Beijing, which is place I never thought I’d visit. The jumbo plane was full with parents, infants, families, and Chinese-American school children going to China with their parents. Three middle-school boys talked the whole time about everything from iPods to schoolbooks. Camie said “I’m going to squash them if they don’t stop kicking the back of my seat.”
My flight plan involved sleep: eye shades, noise-canceling headphones, inflatable neck pillow. They showed four movies, I found out later, and I saw tiny glimpses of only two.
When we landed in Beijing, it was not yet dark. We could see looking at the tarmac that it had rained—not the flawless forecast we’d been seeing on Weather.com.
When we went through customs in Beijing, there was a magnificent mural of the Great Wall and I had to take a picture because it was the closest I would get to that wonder, which is—as all the “I Hiked the Great Wall” T-shirts in the shops indicated—the focal point of Chinese tourism.

By the time we flew into Shanghai, we had been in transit so long that we thought we’d get a rest, but we were met by a group of people, including an English teacher who served as an interpreter. They loaded us into a Shimano van, and we drove for over an hour on a vast multi-lane highway traveled by only a few random trucks. Next was an hour-and-a-half-long ferry ride. We admitted ourselves into the V.I.P section, stretched out on the U-shaped sofa, and fell asleep. That was about midnight local time. We didn’t get to the Tian He Hotel until 2 A.M.

At the hotel, Louis Shih and Tang Tak Sum, from Champion Systems, appeared immediately in the lobby, and it was upon meeting them that I became certain the trip would go well. The two of them put my nerves at ease. I had confidence in how easy-going and relaxed they were. It’s hard to explain, but this was my first glimmer of understanding China.
Louis let us know how the event would work and what was expected of us. I began to get a sense of the level of organization involved. He gave me a four-color bound-book that was the technical guide for the tour.
Day One: Getting Acclimated
The next morning was hard rain. A stretch of road was closed for two hours of team practice, but we decided not to go out then because it was raining too hard. At our team meeting, we met Fasi, a charming seventeen-year old cyclist from Hong Kong, who spoke fluent English. Champion Systems had brought him in as a team assistant, and he proved to be an invaluable resource. We also met Stephanie Bourbeau and Alison Testroete, from the Canadian pro team Expresscopy, for whom we were guest riders. They were cool and they both looked very fit, super-skinny, and tall. We ended up riding in the rain for two hours that afternoon, covering most of the time-trial course, through rural areas that were really quiet, really old looking. After the ride, I was so mud-covered that I showered with my clothes on. The shower was completely filled with dirt when I was done.
We had received our uniforms the night we arrived, and our numbers after the team meeting. The fit of the new yellow kit was great and it was fun to put on something a little different from my Comedy colors.
We were assigned an interpreter who went by the name of Frank. Alison told him that she wanted to go shopping, so he hooked us up with his sixteen-year-old niece. When we went to meet her, there were five people to take us shopping. They all study English, so were very interested in having exposure to English-speaking people.

As we strolled, I saw that the streets were very clean. I saw no garbage at all. Here and there, people were cleaning the streets manually with old, bamboo-handled brooms. At the Bayi Road walking mall, there were no cars, only bikes and scooters moving barely above a walking pace and in no discernible order. People were getting around in a gentle, easy way.

The welcome party that night was incredibly formal with many speeches and a great M.C. named Selena who presented in both Chinese and English. The non-English- and non-Chinese-speaking people in the race missed a lot. Though it was a multilingual audience, the speakers communicated only in Chinese and English, which some of the Dutch, Belgian, Mongolian, Vietnamese, and Thai riders didn’t understand.
Check back Monday for Part 2 – racing begins!