The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Veteran cyclist excels at extremes

October 7th, 2008

Endowment Fund Business Listings ONLINE Reservations Classifieds Subscriptions

Hotel Prague Centre

Prague Real Estate

Veteran cyclist excels at extremes

Jan Kopka overcame fear and frostbite to win biking's Iditarod race

August 8th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Despite wearing special gloves, Kopka ended the 1,050-mile race with six frostbitten fingers, cheeks and nose. enlarge

COURTESY PHOTO

Riders faced days of solitude, having with them only what they were able to carry through dangerous conditions on unmarked, icy trails. enlarge

Jan Kopka

Race highlights
1996: Dolomitenmann, Austria, a steep terrain in a team relay race; finished in 11th place
2000: Crocodile Trophy, Australia, a 2120-kilometer, 14-day race through deserts, bush, and rain-forests; finished in fourth place
2001: Transalp Challenge, Germany to Italy, a two-person team race reaching vertical distances of 22,000 meters; partner injured during race
2003: Iditarod Trail Invitational, Alaska, U.S.A.; did not finish due to weather
2004: Great Divide Race, Canada to Mexico; a 4,000-kilometer race through the Rocky Mountains; finished in third place
2007: Iditarod Trail Invitational, Alaska, U.S.A, wins what he calls the "roughest bike race on Earth"

enlarge

Nestled on the edge of a peninsula jutting into the Bering Sea, the sleepy hamlet of Nome, Alaska, wakes up each spring to the sound of dogs and sleds scraping on ice. Here, where daytime temperatures in March average below zero, riders in the Iditarod dog sled race celebrate the end of arduous journeys begun more than 1,000 miles away.

The Iditarod race has become synonymous with humankind’s triumph over the harshest blows nature can deal. Yet an even more extreme form of the race takes place just weeks later, away from photographers’ flash bulbs.

The Iditarod Trail Invitational, not to be confused with the sled race, pits lone cyclists and walkers against Alaska’s harshest conditions.

Jablonec-based Jan Kopka won the long-distance bike race in April, which covers snowy terrain starting in Anchorage and ending in Nome.

When Kopka finished, his body bore the marks of those 1,050 miles (1,690 kilometers) and 23 days.

“I had six frostbitten fingers, cheeks and nose,” he says. “I count myself lucky as I did not have black frostbite. You can’t cure it; it is just dead meat.”

While luck is no doubt a part of any race, Kopka’s self-sacrificial drive has helped keep him in one piece after years of biking in extreme conditions. Since his birth in Most, north Bohemia, in 1963, Kopka has worked as a gas-boiler designer, hostel owner, sales manager and auto parts salesman. His love for biking trumped all of these roles for nearly a decade.

“When I turned 18, I started to focus more on biking. It was already very late for me, but I guess I am really gifted in biking. So, very fast, my performances became more than mediocre,” Kopka says.

This gift allowed him to be a professional road cyclist before he turned 28 years old. After his professional biking career ended, Kopka worked as a sales representative until last November, when he quit to devote himself to training for the Iditarod.

Now 43, Kopka’s view extends far beyond the paved roads of Central Europe.

“I realized I needed something different … some kind of adventure connected with it, so gradually I started to participate in those races which offered something like that.”

In 2000, Kopka became the first Czech participant in Australia’s 2,120-kilometer Crocodile Trophy race, according to Kamil Hofman, publisher of Velo cycling magazine. Several years later, Kopka finished third in the 4,000-kilometer Great Divide Race 2004, in which riders bike from Canada down through the Rocky Mountains to Mexico. But this April’s Iditarod adventure constituted the most extreme challenge yet.

“To participate in this race means big pressure,” he says. “You really feel there the power of nature — that nature decides about you and can destroy you any minute.”

So far, Hofman says, nobody has died on the trail. But “it’s just a question of time.” Patches of ice, layers of snow, dangerous wildlife, limited food and little outside support make up a constellation of factors that leave little room for error.

“It’s so strange for people to understand why he went to Alaska to do such a thing, that he can lose his life in Alaska,” Hofman says. “I think for normal people in the Czech Republic, and even bike fans, he’s a strange guy.”

Unlike in some other mountain bike races, organizers of the Iditarod do not provide a gear list for participants. Cyclists must evaluate on their own what they’ll need for the harsh conditions, says Colorado’s Mike Curiak, who won the long race in 2002 and spent time on the trail with Kopka during the Great Divide Race.

Essential to the competition is an extremely warm sleeping bag and a pad to insulate cyclists from the snow, Curiak says. Most carry a can of white gas, or simply cotton balls soaked in Vaseline, to start fires with wet wood. Those inexperienced with arctic weather sometimes bring tents, a mistake in those conditions, according to him. A sleeper’s breath will condense, causing snow to fall inside the tent itself.

Riders carry their own food, which becomes especially important later in the journey, when towns become increasingly scarce. Bush pilots drop small packages prepared by riders every several hundred miles along the way.

“You are so out there, and so on your own, and what you have with you is what you have. You’re not going to find anything out there except maybe snow and some wood,” says Curiak.

Cyclists would call the organizers at certain checkpoints, but were responsible for finding lodging and provisions on their own. Riders spent most nights wrapped in sleeping bags, but occasionally were taken in by Native American families.

Kopka was not immune to the pressure involved in living from moment to moment under these conditions.

“There were several times I said to myself that it is not possible to make it,” he recalls. Though equipped with a GPS system to navigate the unmarked path, the uniformity of the snow would leave him feeling lost.

“You have food only for three or four days, and after that you have to find the village. And so you say to yourself, when I find the village, I will give up on this, I have had enough,” he says. “But then you rest in the village, and you say, ‘OK, let’s try another part of the race.’ You don’t think about the actual end of the race because you would go crazy.”

At one point in the ride, Kopka stepped on thin ice and plunged into subzero waters, describes Hofman. “In these kinds of temperatures, you have just a few minutes to change your clothes to survive. So you have to be prepared for a very dangerous situation,” he says.

Kopka was better prepared than some, having raced through the Austrian Alps. “Without the first experience, Jan would not [have been] able to survive.”

The question of survival arose time and time again.

“I try to imagine how he felt when he took to his sleeping bag and would think about if he will wake up the next morning,” Hofman says. “You never know, and not just because of the weather or the temperature. There’s also the risk of animals.”

Many riders begin the race aiming to finish the long-distance race, but stop at the short-race mark of 350 miles. Just three people continued beyond that point in 2007, with only Jan Kopka and American Joseph Dundee completing the stretch, Hofman says.

“I think other guys realized they had no morale, no strength to continue,” Hofman speculates. “Jan was also afraid. But he is such a strong person — he had his goal and he would like to continue.”

Kopka spent months training for the ordeal, but the Czech terrain and climate could not fully prepare him for conditions in Alaska.

“The problem was that the winter was not cold at all this year, so I couldn’t get used to lower temperatures. You need to visit the gym, because half the time there, you don’t bike, because the snow is so high; you actually carry the bike,” Kopka says.

He flew to Alaska 10 days before the start of the race to acclimatize. “When I got there, my body simply stopped working.”

Beer and bikes

Hofman describes Kopka as a “pioneer” in extreme mountain biking in the Czech Republic. “He’s known for it among the whole mountain biking community.”

Beyond his reputation as an athlete, however, Kopka is known for a quirky amicability atypical of a champion cyclist.

“In my career as a sports journalist, I meet a lot of champions,” Hofman says. “He’s completely different, because he doesn’t want to talk about his performance, his achievement. He only spoke about the people in Alaska. … He was impressed by how they live there.”

Curiak, meanwhile, says he was struck by the unusual way Kopka sustained himself on the Great Divide Race trail.

“The thing that strikes most people is that beer seems to be his primary fuel,” Curiak says, laughing. “Most Americans would consider that there’s something wrong or it’s a huge problem” for an athlete. “He fills his water bottles with beer; he fills his CamelBak with beer.”

Curiak describes rolling into a checkpoint, where riders scour shop shelves to stock up on food and drink before getting back on the road before other riders can spot them. Kopka arrived on his heels.

“I grabbed a Gatorade, some food … and ran back out on the sidewalk and was just inhaling as fast as I could,” Curiak says. “Jan came sauntering on, very leisurely paced, he had a piece of chicken, four beers and I don’t think anything else.”

Kopka put a beer in front of Curiak, who told him he didn’t drink beer.

“He got this perplexed look on his face like I said something totally wrong,” Curiak recalls. “I’ll never forget what he said next: ‘How are you so good without beer?’ ”

Besides a preference for Gambrinus over Gatorade, Kopka has clearly forged his own path in the extreme mountain biking community. Having tackled the Iditarod, he is spending time relaxing and daydreaming of future adventures.

“Now I get my chance to live an ordinary life for a while,” he says.

Next, Kopka is considering entering a race that leads riders through the humid jungles of Costa Rica. For now, he appears satisfied with what he has accomplished so far.

“I am actually happy that I have reached the highest level of extremism when I took part in that Alaska race,” he says.

— Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Be the first to add a comment!

Most e-mailed articles
A commitment to quality Panel promotes foreign adoption Bollywood hits and misses

Related articles
Theater with an edge Two against the world Race card Chánov, a place broken and bored

Most visited in Business Listings

The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.