Well, you know when you see people doing the London marathon in a rhino outfit or with a washing machine on their head, I kind of thought, well I’m raising a lot of money for charity, not trying to prove anything, just to be different and be unique, so I thought if I want to raise as much money for Help for Heroes, I could do it on a road bike, and that’s great, that’s hard enough as it is, but a lot of people have done that already, so I thought what could I do it on? Could I do it on a BMX? A unicycle? And then I just thought, you know what, I’ll do it on the Raleigh Chopper. In reality, most days I might end up doing more kilometres than they do, because they go on a lot of main roads, almost motorways, and I want to avoid that, so I might end up doing longer anyway. The route is the same, the time trial, the mountains stages, all are the same, everything is done as close as I can do. My mate, Jonathan, is driving the motorhome. It’s a solo project, it’s just me, I am Team Chop. I’m trying to raise as much money as I can for Help for Heroes. : Can you tell me about your Chopper challenge and what it entails?ĭave Sims: The challenge is to ride the entire route of the Tour de France in advance, on a Raleigh Chopper. Keen to find out more, I set me phone to recording and threw a couple of questions at him.

I’ve been out in Majorca this week (press trip, yes it's a hard life etc) and was fortunate enough to not only seen the bizarre sight of a man descending Sa Colobra on a banana yellow Chopper, while I was sweatily grovelling up it in 24 degree heat, but catch up with him later that day. But that’s the sort of training that British cyclist Dave Sims hopes will prepare him for the 3,344km route of the Tour de France, which he plans to ride two days in advance of the professional race. How about riding up it three times on the same day? Sheer lunacy is probably your first thought.

Majorca’s Sa Calobra is a pretty tough climb on a 7kg carbon fibre road bike, let alone tackling the 9.4km road with its 7% average gradient on a 38lb Raleigh Chopper.

Sims 3 helicopter working