It is simple to construct an image of professional riders as über-beings who exist best to accomplish optimally in motorcycle races, so it used to be heartening to be told this week that even the WorldTour execs don’t seem to be proof against a little bit of geeky amusing at the motorcycle.
Tiling, it seems that, has hit the WorldTour, and unsurprisingly the WorldTour is lovely just right at it. Visma-Rent a Motorcycle stars Wout van Aert, Sepp Kuss and Tiesj Benoot, as an example, are proper up there at the global leaderboards.
For the uninitiated (and I’m going to pass over the jokes about toilet ornament – I have completed them too again and again), tiling in a cycling context is the number of mapping tiles. Each and every measures round a mile-square, and are accumulated as you consult with them on rides.
Talking to Het Nieuwsblad, Benoot stated: “It works like this: the world map is divided into squares of a mile by a mile. The goal is to claim as many squares as possible. You can do this by cycling, running, walking, swimming… basically anything as long as it is not motorised.”
“Wout van Aert has already got into it and Sepp Kuss is also on it,” he added. “Many French pros know it too, such as Arnaud Démare and Kévin Vauquelin.”
Benoot and his fellow pros are all signed up to the Squadrats platform he said, with Benoot currently placing 34th in the world standings for the number of tiles collected (in his case 42,152 tiles) – a fair few more than this correspondent’s own 3,652 but still lagging someway behind world leader, French adventurer Maximilian Schnell, with 103,733 tiles.
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Benoot is not the tiling leader among the big names – in front of him are Groupama-FDJ rider Quentin Pacher (9th), Thomas De Gendt (11th), Démare (18th) and Kuss (24th). Van Aert sits just behind them all in 43rd place. It’s quite the tussle.
Benoot is fairly new to tiling, he said, but the huge amount of racing he has done all over Europe (and the world – his heatmap shows forays in almost every continent) is already finding out that ingenuity and creativity are definitely watchwords in this game.
“Sometimes you have to do crazy things to claim a tile,” he said. “Wout [van Aert] rode through a hotel parking lot during his training camp in Mallorca just to get that square. Here in my neighbourhood there are also a few [tiles] that I don’t have yet, but they are on private property. I’ll have to come up with a plan to collect them.”
It does not sound like Benoot and co are somewhat on the degree of untamed swimming into the center of lakes or crawling thru marshes to bag further tiles but, however they will have to be warned – these items is addictive. Give it time.
