From the Editor

Over the past year we’ve been running the Adventure Bike Rider Photo of the Year competition. We’ve had some fantastic entries, so a huge thank you goes out to everyone who submitted pictures from their travels. The intention was to display the winning image at the 2020 ABR Festival, but a pandemic got in the way of that, so we extended the competition and changed the prize a bit.

For this year’s Photo of the Year competition, we decided we wanted to run the winning image on the front cover of the November/December issue of the magazine, and that’s exactly what we did.

Flip back to the front cover for a second and bask in the glory of this fantastic photograph that was shot by adventure biker Martin Litschauer. It shows his wife, Verena Kaiser-Litschauer, riding on Switzerland’s Susten Pass and it was pretty much a unanimous decision in the office to choose this particular shot as our Photo of the Year. It perfectly symbolises the pursuit of freedom and that’s exactly what adventure biking is all about in my book.

The photo was taken on a tour the couple rode this year, where they decided to stay closer to home (they’re from Austria) due to the coronavirus restrictions of coronavirus. They rode nearly 2,000 miles in three weeks and the Susten Pass is, according to Martin, a road they will always remember. There’s no doubt that they’re lucky living so close to the Alps (compared to us in the UK), but seeing Martin’s photo was a great reminder that, even when restrictions are in place, it’s still possible to have an adventure.

Martin and Verena win a digital subscription, an ABR calendar, some ABR stickers, ABR T-Shirts, two tickets to the ABR Festival and the prestige of being crowned winners. I highly recommend you follow them on social media on either Instagram (@worldspinsasfastasweride) or Facebook (/worldspinsasfastasweride), or visit www.worldspinsasfastasweride.com, to enjoy their two-wheeled adventures.

Martin’s photo and 11 of our favourite entries into this year’s Photo of the Year competition will be immortalised in the 2021 Adventure Bike Rider Calendar, which will be launched at the end of November. Make sure you head to www.adventurebikerider.com/2021calendar where you can enter a pre-launch competition to win yours.

Think you can take a better shot than this? Then why don’t you send it to [email protected]. With the Photo of the Year 2020 coming to an end, it means that we’ll now start taking entries for the Adventure Bike Rider Photo of the Year 2021, where we will display the winning shot at the 2021 ABR Festival.

Anyway, Photo of the Year aside, this issue of ABR has been quite an exciting one as it’s the first time in a while that we’ve been able to go on a new bike launch! While there has been a lot of restrictions on travel, KTM managed to organise a cracking launch in Greece for the new KTM 890 Adventure. You can read all about the bike on page 86 of this issue.

Enjoy the mag
Bryn