Traveling to watch their team play at the World Cup took a little longer than usual for two French fans -- who decided the best way to travel from France to Qatar was by bicycle.
Mehdi Balamissa and Gabriel Martin decided the best way to travel from France to Qatar was on two wheels. The friends spent three months traveling 7,000 kilometers by bicycle to reach Qatar 2022 and watch their beloved France defend its title. “It was a crazy idea, but we’re the kind of people that have big ideas and don’t want to have any regrets,” Balamissa said, as both spoke to CNN Sport a day after arriving in the country.
The pair laugh as they recall the time they had to travel 15 hours to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in order to find a bike repair shop before traveling 15 hours back to the exact point that they had stopped. “We had many troubles, but we fixed them as we went,” Martin told CNN. “In this kind of trip, you have to be really flexible. In fact, the main part of the trip is to be flexible and to just adapt to every situation the best you can. I think we did well, actually.
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