His job at the end of a run is to stop the contraption he does this by performing a kind of straddling bear hug before it comes to a stop and falls over. A genial old man and classically trained sculptor, he's the best in the world at making fast, human-powered tubes. Outside the tube, Whittingham's friend Georgi Georgiev watches in horror. And with that the sliding begins, first on the asphalt, then into the sagebrush and tumbleweeds. He stays airborne for what seems like miles but is in reality about the length of a football field, the silence pierced only by the concussive burst of his expletives. As Whittingham flies three feet above the road, he's thinking about the top half of the faring, attached to the bottom with Velcro and hockey tape. The contraption turns sideways in the air, 90˚ to the right, so that his hunched shoulders are perpendicular to the asphalt. He has to be helped into the bike, then balanced, then pushed to get started, then helped out when he's finished.īut now, nothing means he's helpless, out of control, hands attached to handlebars and feet clipped into the pedals, yelling, "Oh s-! Oh s-! Oh s-!" Lorne Bridgman He can't put his feet down because he's enveloped by the faring. Even when everything works right, he's at the mercy of the machine. Nothing means Whittingham is airborne and gliding at 80-plus mph. Nothing means silence, which means the thin tires are no longer in contact with the road. He's been building speed for about five miles down a desolate stretch of Nevada highway, nearing top speed, when a tire blows, then … nothing. And Whittingham feels it coming: He has enough experience, more than a decade's worth, to know when conditions, bike and state of mind are in record-breaking alignment. He's traveling more than twice as fast as Lance Armstrong ever pedaled a bike without the help of gravity or drafting. The noise inside the Kevlar/carbon-fiber drum is jet-engine loud, but nothing matters except flying through the 200-meter speed trap in 5.456 seconds to hit 82 mph, which would break the human-powered vehicle record of 81 mph he set one year earlier. Whittingham is the engine, and right now, on this afternoon, he's powering this rolling tube called Varna Diablo II at just more than 80 mph.
The only parts of his body that can move are his legs, which madly pump the pedals to propel this thing as fast as humanly possible. He's lying back on a recumbent frame inside the eight-foot-long sculpted faring, squeezed so tightly into place that he can't move his head his position resembles that of someone hiding in a pipe. Sam Whittingham, a national team track cyclist from Canada, is inside this contraption that he and his buddy insist on calling a bicycle even though it looks more like a homemade cruise missile with two tires peeking out from underneath.
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