Peter Grandiek toasted his 95th birthday this week by shattering the Hour Record in his 95-99 age category.
The Dutchman, who has lived most of his life in New Zealand, completed more than 91 laps of his home velodrome in Invercargill on Wednesday for a distance of 22.948km. He beat the previous benchmark – 20.151km, set by New Zealander Reg Rye in 2019 – by almost 3km.
“I was expecting to do a little bit more,” Grandiek told Cycling Weekly. “Something went wrong with my seat, because I was sitting far too far forward. I thought I was going to slip off. It’s never happened before, but these things happen sometimes.
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“What helped me was that they put the lap recorder on, so I could see how many laps I was getting. The previous record, the guy rode 80 laps. I probably gave a sigh of relief when I got to the 80 laps and still had about 10 minutes to go. That was pretty good. You just concentrate on going forward.”
Grandiek once held the 80-84 record 11 years ago, but was bettered three weeks later by then 81-year-old Briton Walter Fowler.
Asked what motivated him to attempt the Hour Record again in his mid-90s, he said he simply “thought it might be something I might be capable of”.
“I’m twice a week at the velodrome, and I don’t always really push myself. But I seemed to be quite comfortable being able to do over 20[kph], so I thought, ‘Well, why not have a go?’,” he said.
“I talk to people who are probably 40 years younger than me, and they think they’re old, and they say, ‘Oh, I can’t do this. I can’t do that.’ It’s a matter sometimes of mind over matter. You’ve got to challenge yourself.”
In order for his record to be official with the UCI, Grandiek had to undergo anti-doping testing following his effort. He said he drank three large bottles of water “to help things come along”, but found his celebrations thwarted as the process drew on longer than the record itself.
“I got into the doping control room, and it took ages,” he laughed. “They’ve got to have a certain volume [of urine], and it took hours. We finished [the record] just after 7pm, and I didn’t get home until quarter past 10.”
Born and raised in a province north of Amsterdam, Grandiek emigrated to New Zealand on a six-week passenger ship in the early 1950s, when he was 22. He worked on the railways in the South Island, before becoming a house painter and later ran a deer farm.
It was only in 2007, then in his mid-70s, that he took up cycling. “That’s after I finished all my sporting activities, because I played rugby, I was running, ran some half marathons, and that got too hard on the bones,” he said.
When he was 78, he had a sudden heart attack, and had to have triple bypass surgery. Almost two decades on, he says, he continues to do “contrary things to what the cardiologist would tell you – I’ve basically always ignored their advice and did what I wanted to do.”
It’s in that vein that Grandiek plans to keep challenging himself on the bike. Typically he has spent his birthday doing charity rides; his Hour Record was in support of a local hospice, Hospice South.
The benchmark in the next age category, 100-104, is 26.925km, held since 2014 by Frenchman Robert Marchand. Might Grandiek now target that? “You can only do these things if you’re capable,” he said.
“There’s no doubt that as you get older, you slow down. I’ve lost speed compared to 10 years ago. You can’t help that. It’s a natural thing,” he continued.
“As soon as I got off the bike on Wednesday night, people said, ‘What are you going to do next year?’ and I said, ‘I’ll come up with something.’ I’ve done it for the last 10 years.”
Grandiek’s 95-99 Hour Record is still subject to ratification by the UCI.
Donations can be made directly to Hospice South via the charity’s website.
