Cycling with president of Font Romeu Cycling club Philippe Port

Philippe Port, president of FONT ROMEU, Occitania, France, Pyrenees, CYCLING club:

“I started cycling at the age of 41 (it’s a good age!). With my children Benjamin and Grégory, we participated in local races, regional races and shortly afterwards, as well as cross country races in France.

The club FONT ROMEU CYCLING has been existed for 20 years. I was the treasurer for 16 years and for the last 4 years I have been its’ president following after Eric Lafitte, who is the Professor of Physics at the Andorran hight scool and Sébastien Duc, who is a professor at STAPS in Reims (after the STAPS of Font-Romeu).

The club has organized mountain bike races, as well as 2 major races in France (Cross Country Trial Downhill and Dual) in which there were 1500 participants.

For the last 4 years, we have organized a cyclo with 350 participants and regional races FFC 1st 2nd and 3rd categories.

In addition, the club organizes internship of 4 to 7 days of road cycling with sometimes an additional mountain-biking day trail in the mountains or swimming in the sea.

We go to half board hotels with reasonable rates between 25 and 40 euros per day. We have already done the high Pyrenees, Gorges du Verdon in Provence, Corsica, Sardinia, Baleares, Canary, several times Costa Brava, Alicante (Spain) …

And from October 20th to 27th we are going to the island of Madeira in Portugal. When you cover between 8 to 10000 kms per year you have to vary the course to keep it motivating.

We have organized mountain bike races for children too in the past, but not this year.

I used to participate in 20 races a year (mountain biking, cyclocross, road cycling, the 3 stages of the Tour de France in cyclo and I did the Barcelona (Catalonia) – Arcalis (in Andorra (Pyrenees)) stage of the Tour of Spain which was 213 KM with 4200 meters of elevation). But now I prefer to do 4 or 5 races per year.

I like training home around Font-Romeu and in Andorra where there are more difficult roads.

My best results are:

  • 1st in Canigou mountain general mountain bike race (25 km with 1800 positive height difference in 1h52 mn)
  • 1st general in “individual time trial” road bike in teams of 2 runners (25 km with 800 meters of positive difference) (Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, saint Marsal)
  • 1st general road bike in a 2-stage race (an online race and a individual time trial between Ur and Angoustrine)

And then some good places and a lot of category wins in mountain biking and road cycling.

Talking about bike brands, there are many of them. What is important is the quality of the equipment of the bike, the wheels … Personally, I ride with the brands ORBEA, MASSI, SCOTT, TREK and BMC. The SCOTT I used was great for the mountain (6.2KG with ZIPP 303 wheels).

In 2019 we have a new project – we will design new sport clothes for our club members (a little bit different for women and men). And we will try to found new sponsors. Moreover, we are going to buy new bikes for our club – we need to decide which brand and model.

And well… if you are not our club member you are welcome to participate in all our events, join us and enjoy cycling with us :-)”.

Full blog is available here

Read more: All Andorra news ...