After riding 18,125 miles and enduring 630,000ft of climbing, endurance cyclist Lael Wilcox has set a new official women’s world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the world by bicycle with a time of 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes.
The American departed Millennium Park in Chicago at 7am on 26th May and finished at Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain on 11th September at 6:14pm.
Related questions you can explore with Ask Cyclist, our new AI search engine.
Her journey took her through 21 countries over four continents. She rode east from Chicago to New Jersey, then from Portugal up to the Netherlands before going south through Germany and Switzerland into northern Italy. From there she continued east via Turkey to Tbilisi in Georgia. After that she went south to ride across Australia from Perth to Brisbane along the south coast and then hopped across to ride the length of New Zealand from Invercargill to Auckland. From there Wilcox headed home to Alaska, starting in Anchorage and heading south all the way to Los Angeles before the final leg east back to Chicago.
All flights and public transit taken are included in the time taken, and are within the Guinness rules so long as the journey is continuous in one direction – in this case west to east – with a minimum total distance ridden of 29,000km and total distance travelled of 40,100km.
Wilcox beats the previous record set by Scotland’s Jenny Graham in 2018 of 124 days, 10 hours and 50 minutes. The BBC reported that Graham cheered Wilcox on, saying, ‘It’s the most amazing thing to see women out there pushing their sport the way they want to. I’m just a massive fan.’
The achievement is another in a long line for Wilcox, who broke the women’s record for the Tour Divide in 2015 and a year later became the first American and the first woman to win the Trans Am Bike Race across the United States in 18 days.
