The upcoming UCI Road World Championships in Kigali, Rwanda may have made headlines for having some of the toughest routes in history, but they pale in comparison to a new event taking place 3,000 miles away this weekend: the inaugural Everesting World Championships.
This Saturday, on the Italian island of Sicily, around 100 intrepid cyclists will take part in the first edition of the event, climbing 8,848m on their bikes – the height of Mount Everest. For the setting, the organisers have chosen another iconic mountain, the active volcano Mount Etna, which participants will have to scale seven times; at 23km long, that’s 161km of climbing alone, plus 138km of descents – almost 300km in total.
