Amateur vs pro descending challenge: Can an everyday cyclist match a WorldTour pro on a descent?

Professional cyclists descend at hair-raising speeds. This often exceeds 100kph and there have been rare incidents where it has topped 130kph – that far exceeds the maximum limit in most countries.

Simply reaching these speeds is unfathomable, but it’s even harder to comprehend when you consider that all that’s keeping a rider up right is a pair of tyres only a few centimetres wide. It takes a lot of confidence and courage to put all of your faith into a small strip of rubber, especially when all the majority of your body can rely on for protection is some flimsy lycra.

It’s seriously impressive which got us thinking: how much faster on descents are the pros than everyday cyclists? Are they super talented or does riding in a peloton give them a natural edge?

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To find out, we decided to pit a pro against an amateur, with GCN’s own Ollie Bridgewood thrown into the mix for fun too – at this point we’re not sure we can classify him as an amateur, so we’ll go give him an ‘intermediate’ tag instead.

For the pro role we recruited former WorldTour star turned gravel-specialist Alexys Brunel, while Joe stepped in as our amateur. Joe has been cycling for 10 years and has taken on many sportives and dabbled in some local races during that time, but coming up against the might of Ollie would be his biggest cycling challenge to date.

The setting for this epic showdown was a 5km selection of the Els Àngels climb near Girona, which averages 6.1km of smooth tarmac and fast, sweeping bends.

To ensure that the experiment would be fair, all three riders used Shimano’s top-tier Dura-Ace and mid-tier 105 groupsets, which gave us a chance to compare how they perform.

Could our amateur and Ollie challenge Brunel or would the former WorldTour pro score an easy descending victory? Watch the full video at the top of this page to find out.

For more challenges like this, head over to the ‘Lifestyle’ section on the GCN website.