Showing posts with label Francois Gissy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francois Gissy. Show all posts

05 December 2014

A Rocket In His Pocket

We've all heard the declaration, "I know it when I see it".  Most of us have probably used it, or some expression that means more or less the same thing.  Nobody knows who first uttered it, but it's most often attributed to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in an obscenity case.  He admitted he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. I'd love to know how he, or anyone else knows!;-)

(By the way:  He decided that the work in question wasn't pornography.)

I think most people would respond in the same way as Justice Stewart if asked to define a "bicycle".  Just about everybody agrees that it has two wheels.  (That, after all, is the literal definition of the word.)  I think most would also say that it has pedals, or is powered by human energy in some way or another.

Very few people, I believe, would define anything with a motor on it as a bicycle.  Even fewer, I think, would say that a bicycle is powered by a rocket.

 

That makes the record held by Francois Gissy questionable, to say the least.  His 263KPH (163MPH) ride is listed as the land speed record for a bicycle.  At least one rider has reached 260 KPH with his own feet:  He was paced by a racing car, but pedaled to his record nonetheless.

25 May 2013

Record Holder Is Gissy, Not Evel

The next time you're sideswiped by some guy delivering Chinese food on a motorized bike,  call him the  slowpoke he really is.  After all, he can't hold a candle (especially a Roman one) to this courer:





On a track neaer Mulhouse, in eastern France, Francois Gissy rode a rocket-powered mountain bike in the slipstream of a dragster.   In the process, he set a new speed record for mountain bikes--163 mph--which fell just short of the overall record of 167mph.  

With his bike and white suit, he reminds me, in a way, of Evel Knievel.  Evel couldn't jump the Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle that looked more like, well, a rocket.  What if he'd had a mountain bike--with rockets--instead?  And what if Gissy had Evel's motorcycle?

A French Evel Knievel?  What an idea!