'Sometimes you have to do crazy things': niche cycling craze hits the WorldTour

It's easy to build a picture of pro riders as über-beings who exist only to perform optimally in bike races, so it was heartening to learn this week that even the WorldTour pros are not immune to a bit of geeky fun on the bike.

Tiling, it appears, has hit the WorldTour, and unsurprisingly the WorldTour is pretty good at it. Visma-Lease a Bike stars Wout van Aert, Sepp Kuss and Tiesj Benoot, for example, are right up there on the world leaderboards.

For the uninitiated (and I'll leave out the jokes about bathroom decoration – I've done them too many times), tiling in a biking context is the collection of mapping tiles. Each measures around a mile-square, and are amassed as you visit them on rides.

Speaking to Het Nieuwsblad, Benoot said: “It works like this: the world map is divided into squares of a mile by a mile. The goal is to claim as many squares as possible. You can do this by cycling, running, walking, swimming… basically anything as long as it is not motorised.”

"Wout van Aert has already got into it and Sepp Kuss is also on it," he added. "Many French pros know it too, such as Arnaud Démare and Kévin Vauquelin.”

There are a few web platforms, including the popular VeloViewer that many readers will already be signed up to, that can be linked with Strava and show your tiling heatmap. You can read more about it all in our 'Life in Squares' feature.

Benoot and his fellow pros are all signed up to the Squadrats platform he said, with Benoot currently placing 34th in the world standings for the number of tiles collected (in his case 42,152 tiles) – a fair few more than this correspondent's own 3,652 but still lagging someway behind world leader, French adventurer Maximilian Schnell, with 103,733 tiles.

Benoot is not the tiling leader among the big names – in front of him are Groupama-FDJ rider Quentin Pacher (9th), Thomas De Gendt (11th), Démare (18th) and Kuss (24th). Van Aert sits just behind them all in 43rd place. It's quite the tussle.

Benoot is fairly new to tiling, he said, but the huge amount of racing he has done all over Europe (and the world – his heatmap shows forays in almost every continent) is already finding out that ingenuity and creativity are definitely watchwords in this game.

“Sometimes you have to do crazy things to claim a tile," he said. "Wout [van Aert] rode through a hotel parking lot during his training camp in Mallorca just to get that square. Here in my neighbourhood there are also a few [tiles] that I don’t have yet, but they are on private property. I’ll have to come up with a plan to collect them.”

It doesn't sound like Benoot and co are quite at the stage of wild swimming into the middle of lakes or crawling through marshes to bag extra tiles yet, but they should be warned – this stuff is addictive. Give it time.