IN BRIEF
Lachlan Morton sets off on Monday 5 October from St. Joseph, Missouri, to ride to Sacramento, California, along the route of the Pony Express, the horseback mail service of the American West. EF Pro Cycling says he aims to beat the riders’ record time of seven days and 17 hours, set in 1861 to carry Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address. Just as they changed mounts, he will switch from one Cannondale to another depending on the terrain (TopStone, SuperSix, Scalpel), followed by his brother Gus, who is filming the adventure. The Australian has also announced that he will leave the EF Education-EasyPost team after this season.
Lachlan Morton has found his next opponent: riders who have been dead for more than a century and a half. In an announcement published on Friday, the EF Education-EasyPost team says its ultra-distance rider will attempt, from Monday 5 October, to cover the Pony Express route faster than the young riders who carried the mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. He will also carry letters, from one private individual to another, which he will deliver between the former relay stations along the way.
Seven days and 17 hours: the time to beat
The Pony Express was born in 1860 with a promise: to cross the West on horseback with the mail in 10 days or less. EF’s page says the best time recorded on this 1,966-mile (3,164 km) route dates from 1861, when riders carried Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address in seven days and 17 hours. It adds that they changed horses every 10 miles (16 km) and riders every 75 to 100 miles (120 to 160 km).
The service lasted only 18 months: it ended in October 1861, made obsolete, EF says, by the first transcontinental telegraph line. The route Morton has drawn up to get close to it covers 1,900 miles of mixed terrain, which he hopes to complete in a little under eight days, Velo writes.
Three Cannondales as relay horses
No human relay this time, but mechanical ones. EF says Lachlan Morton will alternate between three Cannondale bikes, a TopStone, a SuperSix and a Scalpel, choosing the best suited to each section. “The idea is to mimic how they used to switch out horses,” he says in EF’s announcement. “I’ll be swapping between a gravel bike, a road bike, and a mountain bike depending on the terrain.”
A truck will follow him across the West with his brother Gus, a filmmaker, who will document the adventure for a film and carry the bikes not in use. The end of the route is familiar to him: he will cross the Sierra Nevada south of Lake Tahoe before descending towards Sacramento, a region he knows well, he says, since he now lives there.
Lachlan Morton turns the page on EF
The challenge comes as the Australian has announced another change of direction. He told Cycling Weekly, in remarks picked up by Escape Collective and Cyclingnews, that he would leave EF Education-EasyPost, his team since 2019, after this season. “Three Peaks was my last time pinning on a [race] number with EF,” he said, a few days after his win in this endurance cyclocross race in Yorkshire.
Morton has made a name for himself away from the peloton: EF’s page says he set the fastest time on the Tour Divide, from Banff, Alberta, to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, and broke the record for riding around Australia. At 34, he intends to continue his endurance adventures, Cyclingnews writes, and already has Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Ecuador in mind. The Pony Express, for its part, gets under way on Monday, on the backs of three bikes instead of dozens of horses.
The project is presented on the EF Pro Cycling website.
