Don’t let its festive name confuse you if you’ve never heard of it. The Erzbergrodeo is the craziest idea of a group of people who only want to see how much suffering human beings are capable of going before realizing that enough is enough.
But that does not mean that year after year dozens of riders go to the most famous hard enduro quarries and their surroundings in the town of Eisenerz, in Austria. It is held there month after July and there have already been 30 editions, a test that only a handful of participants finish. And by a handful we mean that the figure is usually between 10 and 15, being generous.
So if it’s already difficult on its own, doing it with an electric motorcycle seems like an even more complex challenge. At least it would be for ordinary mortals, but not for a guy like Graham Jarvis who, before being a hard enduro genius, started with trial giving it his all and managing to win, for example, the Scottish Six Days Trial four times, the Scott Trial nine times and six British Trial Championships.
As trial became too small for him, Jarvis entered hard enduro to become master of the Erzbergrodeo
With that, anyone would have considered his career to be good, but then the achievements for which we know him began, when taking advantage of his expertise in trials he threw himself headlong into this barbarity of discipline that is hard enduro, and where he has won everything there was and ever was: Romaniacs, Sea To Sky, Hells Gate, Roof of Africa… and also the Erzbergrodeo itself on five occasions.
If all the difficulty of the Erzbergrodeo and doing it with an electric motorcycle were not enough, good old Graham took the plunge with his own motorcycle. No, it’s not that it was with a motorcycle that he owned, it’s that he has created his own electric motorcycle, the Formula Jarv-E Moto. So if we add to all this that he is already 51 years old, the approach was already epic.
The best of all? Jarvis pulled out all the stops and although it was uphill for him and never better said, especially in the prologue, he turned the situation around and not only was he one of the 14 drivers who managed to cross the finish line, but he also finished tenth. An interesting result that shows that an electric motorcycle can defend itself well in this area and is that, as we have said other times, electric motorcycles can be the future of offroad.
