Episode 104: Heinz Stücke / Robert Dudley / Saillink / Chris & Nicky Clark

The Cycling Europe Podcast

This episode of The Cycling Europe Podcast features a collection of diverse stories from the cycling community, ranging from tributes to legends

Key takeaways

• German cyclist Heinz Stucker, a world record holder for cycle touring, passed away in July 2026 at age 86.
• Robert Dudley advocates for the term 'touring on a bicycle' to emphasize the journey over the sport of cycling itself.

Main topics

• Tribute to Heinz Stucker
• Terminology of cycle touring

Notable quotes

I don't think of it as cycle touring because that implies that the emphasis is on the actual cycling.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a heartwarming celebration of how cycling facili

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Welcome to episode 104 of the Cycling Europe podcast. My name is Andrew Sykes. A little bit different in this episode because we're going to hear from lots of people. We're going to hear from Chris and Nicky Clark about touring on a tandem. We're going to hear from Andrew Simmons, who is one of the people behind Sail Link. And we're going to hear the thoughts of one of their customers, John Metcalf. We're going to hear from Stephen Phibes, talking about the German cyclist. Heinz Stucker and we're going to hear from Robert Dudley. Is it cycle touring or should it be touring on a bicycle? I think you're going to hear that bell quite a few times today. Anyway, first up is Robert Dudley. Robert Dudley, a few weeks ago, sent me this. I Speaker 3 (1:39) went out last night with a friend of mine who's a very keen mountain biker. And he said to me, oh, I've been listening to a podcast on the radio. And he said, I think you'd really enjoy it. You should have a listen. So I woke up this morning at God knows what hour, just as it was getting light. And I couldn't sleep too hot. So I listened to a couple of your programs. And I thought they were very good. Speaker 3 (2:05) But I appreciate you have 100 of them, and obviously I haven't listened to 100 of them, but the two I did listen to I thought were quite interesting, well, very interesting. But I thought I'd like to sort of put my side of it, which is not quite the same as possibly you do, as possibly other people that listen. Speaker 2 (2:27) Back to Robert in a few minutes. Now, you may have heard the sad news that Heinz Stucker, the German cyclist who holds the world record for cycle touring, died. He was 86, and in July of 2026, he died, sadly. Now, he cycled. I've just been looking up the statistics. He cycled for over 50 years, and he covered 600,000... kilometers, probably more than 600,000 kilometers. I never met him, but I did talk to somebody who did a few years ago. Back in 2020, I met up with Dr. Stephen Fabes, who himself was someone who'd been cycling around the world for many, many years and written a book about it. He actually did meet up with Heinz when he was traveling in Germany. And I dug out the bit of that interview where Stephen talks about his encounter with Heinz Stucker. So here's Dr. Stephen Forbes talking on episode 24 of the podcast back in September of 2020. Speaker 5 (3:39) You must have Speaker 2 (3:39) become a kind of a legendary figure during that six-year period. Were there people who met you and said, oh, you're Stephen, you're that guy who's cycling all the way around the world but taking such a long period of time to do it? What's mad is when you start these journeys, Speaker 6 (3:57) you meet people on longer trips. So you always like, I keep me, and I sometimes kind of chase these people down a little bit and find out what they're doing. But I'd hear rumors of other people who were cycling around the world for similar amounts of time to me, sometimes longer. There was a guy walking for 15 years around the world, ex-soldier, who was a really interesting character. But I think for me, the most interesting of all, was this guy Heinz Stucker, who people might know of, who's been cycling around the world for 51 years. I stayed with him in Germany two years after he got home. Fascinating, very complicated character. I've devoted quite a detailed character sketch of Heinz in the book, but just because he's such an interesting individual and we had a lot to talk about, we didn't always agree on things. And so I won't spoil that. But if you're interested in reading my book, then I think for me, that's one of my favorite parts is the sort of meeting Heinz and learning a bit about his adventures and trying to figure him out and his motivations and also using sometimes him and other adventurers or cycle tourists that I met as kind of reflection on, you know, trying to reflect on my own motivations and whether they still make sense anymore. Speaker 2 (5:13) Didn't they give him a house when he got back? The local council, I seem to remember. Speaker 6 (5:17) Yeah, that's right. In homage, they'd given him this bungalow and he's filled it with his memories from his tours. He's had thousands of slides and hundreds of journals. He's an obsessive guy who's a real collector and he's got 144 little bits of tyre that he's cut out of every tyre that he's ever used. He's got... a collection of hats from every country. He's just this eccentric individual, but fascinating and it was a real privilege to meet him. Speaker 2 (5:49) So as I said, that was episode 24 of the podcast. We're back in September of 2020. If you want to read about what Stephen wrote about Heinz Stucka in his book, then his book is called Signs of Life, and you can pick it up in most bookshops or online. Right, we're going to go back to Robert Dudley. He whetted our appetite a few minutes ago by suggesting that his take on cycle touring is a little bit different to many of the people who appear on this podcast. Speaker 3 (6:20) My name is Robert Dudley and I listen to your podcast and you describe what you do as cycle touring. I don't think of it as cycle touring because that implies that the emphasis is on the actual cycling. Well, when I go out anywhere, I sort of tour, which is the emphasis, but I happen to be doing it on a bike. I'm 68 years old and I'm an old fart. OK, I was born in London. I used to cycle a lot in London because it was relatively flat when I was 20-something years old. And then in the early 80s, I moved to the Welsh Borders, which is, by definition, hills and hard work. And my old doors that I used to ride in London went in the shed, and it's still there after 40-something years. I just never got it out again. Before COVID, I was coming through the village, doing a bit of work for somebody. And I saw a bloke on an electric bike and chatted him up a bit. And he said, well, have a go, have a ride around. So got on his bike and went up the hill. And I was really impressed. I thought, this is brilliant, cycling uphill. I haven't got to kill myself. So I went straight back, saw the wife. And I said, right, I've seen this bloke with an electric bike. And I said, I think this is the way to go. But we've got to make an effort to use it. we've got a plan to do trips and we've got to basically get our money back because it's not going to be a cheap thing to buy but if we enjoy it and it works i don't think it'd be a problem i think it'd be an investment so we found a local bloke and uh he gives sort of service you know he will service the bike knows what he's doing knows about range and all this sort of thing i wanted a good bike but i didn't want to be silly i've got a mate who's got two batteries it looks like a motorbike and uh to be honest he looks a bit of an idiot riding around on this thing we will take the mick out of him so i bought a thing again don't know what comment what it is german thing but it's got bosch battery and a bosch motor and it's been very good the plan was as i said to spread the money out over the years so if we got a few trips out of it we get our money back and to do that we really had to plan the routes i quite like planning trips and things like that so You know, we had discussions who was interested. Some of our friends bought some bikes at the same sort of time. And more importantly, I managed to persuade the wife into cycling. And to buy it, we bought her a bike as well. Because I figure if she can come with us, we're more likely to be able to go. Which has actually over the years has proved right. When we first started, which is about, I don't know, a bit before COVID, cyclists... most conventional cyclists non-electric cyclists not very keen on e-bikes used to turn their nose up at adam and say stop public cycling all this sort of thing but they seem to have got better and now i found that as they get older they get keener on bikes a lot of people who don't understand think that the bike you get on the bike and you just ride around and you don't do any work truth is as you know i'm sure that You ride the bike, and we ride the bike as a sort of conventional bike, but when it gets to a hill or we're getting tired at the end of the day and we're thinking, oh, God, this is killing us, this is not fun anymore, you turn the battery up and you use the battery to help you up the hills and it just takes the grind out of travelling. And I think it's ideal for touring purposes because you go to a place where we live, we can cycle the hay up the Golden Valley, up over the hills on the edges of the Golden Valley. And we don't have any problems with that because the bikes will do it. And it works very well. As I say, I mostly cycle with the wife or with friends. We don't wear Lycra. I think there's nothing worse than seeing some 70-year-old bloke with a few beers under his belt, wearing a pair of sort of lycra shorts and all the gear that goes with it. I don't do that. In fact, my mate who's 74 years old, who's quite happy to do 400 or 500 miles on a trip, he won't wear lycra or anything like that, except all he will wear is a Hawaiian shirt. normal trousers and things, but he does like riding in a Hawaiian shirt. We're not marathon runners. We're not doing this necessarily to keep fit. It does keep you fit, but, you know, we're not timing ourselves and trying to go as fast as possible. I don't like busy roads. I think nothing more depressing than trying to cycle up an A road or something where the traffic's thundering past you. And we're not what I call... head down, stare at the tarmac people, you know, the people that do the cycling and want to get the last sort of that bit faster and beat the other person. That's not really what we do, which is why I'm sort of describing it as touring on a bike. It's just something different. We bought these bikes. We were doing sort of day trips about, we were quite pleased, we were doing 17 miles. We were well impressed with this. And then we thought, well, You know, we need to plan for some trips. So we sort of organise sort of visits to places. We picked the places we wanted to go. We spent a lot of time on Sustrans, reading the cycle routes. Because to be honest, the cycle routes is a good way to go as far as we're concerned. It keeps us off the main roads. It's got plenty of signs. We know what we're getting into. And I do find the Sustrans routes very good because they link up places of interest. So you go from one place to another. It works very well. So we started off, Peak District was very good because of the railway lines up there. Stayed in one place, went out on different rides every day, but staying in one place. We did Yorkshire Coast, South Downs along the south coast. We've done the seven down Bristol. Another excellent one through from the Thames, right out at sort of Rochford, the other side of Gravesend, and cycled back and then came back on the... bought the car back from Maidenhead that worked really well had some really good trips on that at railway lines as I said really good like those dead flat I know you got a bit bored on your one in France and in France they are very long and I can understand that but it's quite nice to be up on the embankment looking down and to the farmland or just going past houses and things across a viaduct or something like that you get really good views plus There are not too many killing hills because you're, by definition, by railway line, you're reasonable gradients and all this sort of stuff. Canals, I quite like canals, although, again, canals are not much good if you want to do the mileage and if you want to do the speed because you tend to find pedestrians and things walking out on a busy sunny Sunday. It can be quite slow. But there's plenty to see. Cafes on the route, pubs on the route. What's not to like? I enjoy going through cities. With the time we did the Thames Path, riding through the centre of London was fantastic. All round the tourist sites, along the river, down Chelsea and these sorts of places. Brilliant. You do definitely get a sort of feeling that the cars are not wanted, but the bikes are. And it's so nice to be able to go places that the cars can't. That suits me down to the ground. We had a bit of a decision. We thought I got it a bit in my head. how it's cool and it feels quite cool even now it feels cool as you as you did to get on the ferry and go across to france we tend to drive down to plymouth or to portsmouth park the car in the car park push the bikes onto the ferry sleep on the ferry roll off about seven o'clock in the morning onto the french cycle routes french cycle routes i think are absolutely fantastic they are best best i think they're better than the uk ones you have really good sign signing you have good quality paths as we said before it's really interesting and the one weird thing we noticed is that uh we obviously got yellow jackets like you tend to do stop is getting run over And the French are very friendly. If you walk into a cafe and you've got your cycling jacket on, the people in the cafe, very nice, you know, wish you a good journey. And I'm not being funny, but they seem more welcoming when you've got the cycling gear on than when you're actually as a visitor. And I was told by somebody that the French... Think of the cyclists a bit like the English. Think about footballers. They're very keen and they're very helpful if you've got a bike. That's actually quite a bonus, really. In fact, one place we stopped at this little cafe and had a bit of lunch. And there were some builders there, French builders, and they went a bit before us. So we finished, cycled off up the road. And as we're cycling up the road, these builders that had gone along the road a bit got out of their van. And as we're going past, they did the classic Tour de France thing where they were cheering and clapping and, you know, like we were in the Tour de France. And it was really funny, actually. They thought it was funny. We thought it was funny. So it was good. I enjoyed it. It's, you know, the French, they do have a sense of humour. When we first started, we... We tended to keep luggage to a minimum. We still try and keep luggage to a minimum. In fact, we've only just invested in some good panniers. Whereas before, we had this relatively small bag which used to sit on the top. And it was a bit tight for getting everything in it. But now we've got these decent panniers, it's a bit different. We tend to do, and only because it just seems like the easiest thing to do, we do a couple of days travelling. So we'll stay the night, cycle for the day, stay the night again. cycle for the following day then on the third day third night we will stay an extra day so we will have a day where as we'll keep it as a central place so we could take it easy or we can do a bit of cycling around that particular area then another couple of days traveling and then one day staying in that particular area and that works quite well because we find if you cycle every day it just gets a bit gutsy gets a bit hard work and also you do get a feeling as you're going along you think Oh, if I'd had a bit more time,