High jinks over Sport Relief map of celebfest cycle
March 8, 2010 by Dave Hewitt · 13 Comments
Rannoch Moor. Picture: Pip Rolls
Here’s what it is. The start of March saw a seven-strong bunch of celebs cycle from John o’ Groats to Land’s End to raise money for Sport Relief. The seven were Fearne Cotton, David Walliams, Miranda Hart, Russell Howard, Patrick Kielty, Davina McCall and Jimmy Carr. You may have seen some of these people on your TV screens over the past few years, and you may have reached for the off button.
The boys and girls done well, however: they cycled the 1,000-mile route as a relay team, taking turn about, in 82 hours. They have already exceeded their fundraising target of £1 million, with money still coming in ahead of the main Sport Relief weekend, 19–21 March.
Good stuff, fine effort.
What interests me, however, is the before-the-start statistic that popped up in various places – I first saw it in the Metro newspaper, and it’s also on the BBC website: “The first 24 hours of the ride will see the celebrities take on an overall hill ascent of almost 29,000ft – the equivalent of Mount Everest.”
This bare, bold statement was backed up by a quote from Radio 1 DJ Fearne Cotton: “When I was told that we would be climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest on the first day alone, I thought it was a joke. But when you look at the route, it’s true – there’s almost 29,000ft for us to pedal up on the Scottish leg of the trip. And a lot of that is in the dark!”
Now, call me a sad old sceptic (an essential part of the journalistic temperament, I fear), but on reading this something inside me said: Hang on a minute…
At some intuitive level I find it hard to believe that cycling the length of Scotland by a mainly-in-glens route would involve anything like that amount of ascent. I could of course be wrong, and will happily stand corrected if so. But here’s what my rather sketchy back-of-a-Landranger-map calculations have come up with.
The first thing is to confirm the height of Chomolungma. The 29,000ft figure quoted is fine: the Encyclopaedia Britannica (never mind any of that new-fangled Wiki nonsense) gives Everest an imperial height of 29,035ft and a metric one of 8,850 metres.
Next, what route did the celeb JoGLE team take? This is surprisingly hard to ascertain, as despite the screeds of coverage, much has come in the form of Tweetese, eg “#SR_bike@thisisdavina makes it home and finds her husband and children waiting for her. Lots and lots and lots of tears”, or “#SR_bike@patrickielty has nailed his 2 hours. The boy has thighs like a grand national winner.”
From what I can tell, they used the A9 to Inverness, then headed along the Great Glen to Fort William, before crossing Rannoch Moor and so on down Loch Lomond. What they then did is a puzzle – if anyone knows, do please say – but I’ve assumed they sneaked round the west side of Glasgow and took the A76 through Sanquhar to Dumfries, then across through Annan to the border at Gretna. They could have taken some kind of A7 Borders route (obviously the M74 is off-limits to bicycles), but the overall ascent would be much the same.
Having done a little cycling in my time, I’m aware of just how many undulations there are in even a flat-looking stretch of road, and I’ve tried to err on the side of over-estimation. So from John o’ Groats (around 30 metres above sea level), down the Caithness and east Sutherland coast road and across the Dornoch and Cromarty causeways, I’ve estimated 1,500 metres total by Inverness.
Say another 400m along the Great Glen to Fort William, and a further 900m to the Stoneymollan roundabout at the foot of Loch Lomond.
Then comes the mystery stretch round Glasgow – I’ve allocated 300m to this – followed by 600m to Dumfries and a final 300m across to Gretna.
That tots up to 4,000m. I’m entirely willing to concede that something close to half as much again could be added on – taking it to 6,000m – but I don’t see where the remaining top chunk of Everest, almost another 3,000m, could come from.
So, if anyone can be bothered getting out the map and the magnifying glass and working out a really accurate version, please do. Alternatively, there is always the only really reliable method of checking this: cycling from John o’ Groats to Gretna with an altimeter logbook strapped to the handlebars.
It looks to be a good day out, and you could even do it for charity.
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Hmm, there’s a large inconsistency between the first 24 hours and the Scottish leg, since Scotland is a lot more than 24/82 of a JOGLE. Even if we allow them the whole of Scotland to climb 8000m, my rule of thumb in Scotland is 1% altitude gain on fairly hilly cycling routes, and never more than 2% on even the most extreme backroad routes, except maybe crossing to Applecross and turning back the same way.
The common mistake made by non-cyclist cyclists in such cases is to sum the altitudes of the passes crossed (height of Drumochter + height of Beattock + …) without regard for the fact that they hardly ever return remotely close to sea level at bottom. If you run into one of these people, feel free to explain it to them.
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“non-cyclist cyclists” – ha, good phrase.
Re summing the passes, that had crossed my mind as well. But even then it’s hard to see how to get near 8800m. Maybe sum every spot height en route.
Don’t think I’m likely to meet any of the cycle-celebs, apart from maybe Miranda Hart at a meeting of Giants Anonymous.
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Your assessment looks reasonable to me. I think their claim is the height of nonsense.
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Actually, you could have easily found out the route if you’d bothered to follow the GPS tracker on the Sport Relief website during the cycle. If you had, you’d know that they didn’t take the A9 to Inverness- if I remember correctly, they went along the north coast as far as Bettyhill and headed south from there. I hope this helps in your serious journalistic investigations. If, however, your main intention was to sneer at a bunch of well-meaning people who went way out of their comfort zone to raise a million quid for charity – mission accomplished!
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They certainly stopped in Strathaven last week, for breakfast and a shower. My guess from there would be Muirkirk which is the route favoured by the real cyclists, but I suspect the easy and direct route may have been the old A74, cycled pathed all the way towards the border and, apart from Beattock Summit, pretty much down hill.
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Well said Bel – the author of this article has not done his homework as it is full of inaccuracies. You would think that this would have been checked out – very easily via. the GPS tracking system used before trying to discredit this fantastic cycling effort!
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I don’t think I sneered at or discredited the overall cycle-ride – eg I said “Good stuff, fine effort.” However, I’m still very unconvinced that the Scottish leg of the trip involved anything close to 29,000ft of ascent. That was the gist of the piece, and it’s been a very widely publicised claim. Given the BBC’s well-documented problems with veracity over recent years (dodgy phone-in quizzes, the documentary re the Queen, the Blue Peter cats, Griff Rhys Jones’s “ascent” of Ben Nevis, etc), is this not a reasonable line of enquiry?
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Quite right H. A bit more journalistic research wouldn’t have gone amiss.Using Memory map software & the route they followed ,I got as far as Drumnadrochit (10920 ft of ascent)which is slightly more than Davie boy seems to be able to work out. Seeing as they then went along the Great Glen up over Spean Bridge through Glencoe and for some reason took a detour at Tyndrum to go down to Loch Fyne and over the Rest and Be Thankful 29000 ft in Scotland seems quite achievable. I got bored after that…Hair to wash…real work to do..etc
Dave.. Your article did come across as sneering. The underlying assertion being that they are trying to exaggerate their event albeit for a good cause.I have no great love for any of those celebs…but give credit where due.
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Put me in the cynics camp. A quick look at the videos on line suggests that they were just south of Glasgow at the end of the first day. Like Alan, I put some of the route into an electronic mapping system and this did give some very surprising figures. Height gained between JoG and Glasgow was about 6000m – albeit via Bellshill, Aviemore, & Perth – and still less than 9000m.
Even 6000m did seem a bit bizarre so I had a closer look at the figures. They showed 800m uphill and 1250m downhill between Drumochter and Perth. Anybody who has driven this road will know that this is nonsense – there are only a few uphill sections on what is a long downhill stretch.
I suspect the reason for this is that mapping software uses a landform model based on the contours whereas road engineers build bridges, cuttings, and embankments to give a straight alignment.
It’s also puzzling that they chose to bike along a very hilly coast road to Bellshill rather than down the flatter east coast. Why’s that then?
Having said all that, it is about 700km through Scotland so Alan Paxton’s 1% would give 7000m ascent. Not quite Everest and not in a day but good work if they did it.
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Interesting comments all round, from both camps if I can call them that. It’s a pity that the Sport Relief GPS tracker isn’t still online – http://www.sportrelief.com/whats-on/challenges/cycle/live-tracker defaults to the more general http://www.sportrelief.com/whats-on/challenges/cycle page. However, in the interests of research(!), I went in search of a similar cycle effort starting from JoG and using a GPS tracker.
I found this, http://jogle.aboutlucy.com/updates.html, which records a JoGLE cycle ride in August and September of last year by three women who each did the whole thing (not as a relay). They didn’t go exactly the same way as the Sport Relief team, but they did use the Great Glen / Coe route and overall the route is similar.
Their daily links lead to maps and stats, and the first eight days cover Scotland (day 8 ends at Brampton in Cumbria). If you click on each day-link, and then on each end-marker, a set of stats pops up. These give “Elevation Gain”, and if the eight relevant EGs are added together it comes to 10,485m, higher than Everest. The daily EG breakdown, in metres, is 366 + 631 + 777 + 1154 + 1571 + 1783 + 2322 + 1881 = 10485.
However, there’s something really odd about this. Take the Day 4 stats, for instance. These suggest that getting from Beauly to Spean Bridge via some initial tracks and back-roads (hilly but not getting above 350m) and then along the Great Glen (pretty flat) produced an ascent of 1,154m. That seems high to me, but what’s odder is the “Min Elevation” figure of -108m. Eh?
The “Max Elevation” for this day is given as 309m, which could well be right, but Max Elevation for day 6 (the Tyndrum / Loch Lomond day) is given as 2,319m – almost 1,000m higher than Ben Nevis.
Several other days have Min Elevations well below sea level, and there are other oddities, eg the stretch from Paisley to Sanquhar allegedly involved 2,322m of ascent – done, apparently, at an average speed of 15.8mph.
I phoned a friend (well, emailed him, to be honest) who knows far more about GPSs than I do, and asked what he made of this. He pointed out that “If you zoom in on the Google map of Day 4 [of the 2009 effort], there are intermittent random scribbles along the route, where the GPS has clearly lost clear signal. We can expect the corresponding vertical scribble to be as bad. It only takes a few of those zig-zag artefacts in the vertical plane to pile on the apparent ascent. Likewise the horizontal distance is exaggerated by each scribble, and I notice from the text that the Day 4 GPS distance was longer than their reference distance from the map.” He suggested that the below-sea-level readings were also indications of the vertical “scribble” produced by the GPS.
So, assuming that the Sport Relief team used similar gizmos and encountered similar signal blackspots, their tracking software would similarly add substantially to the real-world ascent.
What I’m basically saying is that just because a GPS tracker says a cyclist or walker has done X amount of ascent, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have actually done that. Or, in other words – don’t believe everything you read, just because it comes courtesy of a scientific gadget.
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They appear to have gone along the North coast through Bettyhill presumably as far as Tongue and then down the A836. I suspect they then might have gone South from Lairg on the A836 and could have gone over the top to Alness.
The mention of the Drumnadrochit suggests they went on the A833 to there and avoided Inverness.
Mention of Loch Awe makes it look as if they went down to Dalmally perhaps through Glen Orchy then over to Inverary.
Certainly a very strange route!
They must have been trying to avoid some of the busier roads and I also wonder if they were trying to increase the mileage to some figure.
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I’m planning to return to the subject, although nailing down the route taken by the cyclists is proving hard. Two requests to the BBC press office (on 11 March and again yesterday) have thus far gone unanswered. I’ve asked if they can (a) tell me the route and (b) point me towards the GPS tracker logs which have been removed from the Sport Relief site. Next plan is to ask the GPS company direct – will do that in the next day or two.
The story – for me at least – is to do with the reliability or otherwise of GPS trackers (which seem to add distance and ascent whenever the signal is lost) and of mapping software (which appears to struggle to cope with certain situations, eg where roads are tight in beneath steep slopes). Also, people often seem to believe something is very accurate simply because a high level of accuracy is claimed.
I’m not for a minute suggesting that the Sport Relief cyclists in any way intended to mislead, but I do wonder if a certain amount of numerical and technological gullibility is in play here.
Anyway, more in due course, presuming I can flush out the tracker logs.
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