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0:01 Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Slowtwitch podcast.

0:05 My name is Kevin McKinnon. I’m here with Eric Wynn from Slowtwitch and we have a very special guest today from Poland, Bartosz Kasprzyk.

0:15 I have, I’m sure I butchered that last name, but Bartosz is such a nice guy. He just goes with everything and just keeps saying, yeah, you got it, Kevin, got it.

0:24 Bartosz, it’s so nice to have you with us.

0:28 Thank you for inviting me here. It’s an honor to be here with the Slowtwitch Society, which I know a bit because I used your forum years ago and I found it very, very interesting and helpful. So it’s a very high pleasure for me to be here.

0:50 When I thought about the invitation I thought it’s a situation for me — if I would be a movie fan, I can compare it to the situation when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino will invite me for a podcast. This is this kind of pleasure for me.

1:04 Eric, are you Robert De Niro or Al Pacino?

1:07 I guess I take whichever one you don’t pick. We should have had Dan Enfield on the podcast. That would have been a true comparison since he was the one that started the whole thing.

1:21 So Bartosz, I know you and Eric met at a recent media event, riding bikes and all that kind of stuff, but for those who aren’t familiar with all you do, maybe you could just give us a little intro of what you do, who you are, and what inspired Eric to bring you on our podcast today.

1:45 Okay, so first of all, all the cycling stuff that I take care about is my side hustle. My main job is to be a sales manager for Swedish company Atlas Copco, which is a worldwide leader in compressors.

2:01 And after the eight hours of working for Atlas Copco, I take care about my bike related stuff. I own a YouTube channel which has close to 25,000 followers and 8 million views. I review bike stuff, give some advice related to bike sizing, bike fitting and so on.

2:22 I am also a director of Predator Gravel Series here in Poland. Together with my colleagues, we created gravel series races five years ago and we continue to develop it with the support of Acer Company, which is the main sponsor here.

2:43 I run also a bikeselection.pl service where I help people to determine which bike they need on an online meeting, what kind of bike, which brand, which size first and foremost.

3:04 And of course, I’m the boss of the cycling team RoadRacing.pl, which is a team in which there are really strong riders. Few of them push well above five watts per kilogram. We have a champion of Poland in TT in our squad.

3:27 We organize those Predator Gravel Series races to earn the money that we can run our cycling club. So we don’t want to have any donation from people, from whoever. We want to earn the money and have the money to spend on the cycling team.

4:25 So maybe you could tell us a little bit about the Predator Gravel series, because gravel is taking off and I’m guessing as popular in Poland as it seems to be all over the rest of the world.

4:44 Yeah, so the story looks like this. We were initially organizing road races, really huge road races. There were events for even 500 people. But it became tougher and tougher to make all the legal documents, all the allowance from police, from local authorities.

5:10 And then five years ago, I decided, okay, guys, we switch to gravel. It’s much easier. We have only one partner, the owner of the wood, let’s say. And we will start doing gravel. It would be much easier, much safer for us as an organization.

5:32 Then we started Predator Gravel Series. Of course, my inspiration were American races. So I tend to organize something which is close to the roots of the discipline, of Dirty Kanza. So not a technical gravel, not a gravel in mountains, a typical fire roads, high pace, very well constructed routes. And that’s what we do.

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