Portland’s annual love affair with cyling sans clothing once again swept through the city tonight as thousands of people took part in the tenth World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR). (more…)
1) It’s not about sex. The WNBR is about loving your body, loving low-car or car-free life, demonstrating the power of bikes in mass motion, metaphorically conveying the vulnerability of people on bikes, experiencing the city in a new way and loving the friends and new friends you’ll see before, during and after. And although all of those things are almost certainly good for your sex life, you’ll be surprised how much fun nudity (or near-nudity) is without sex.
2) Nobody cares that your body is not perfect. Nobody’s body is perfect, so for one night, everybody’s body gets to be perfect.
The video created by Stay Wild Magazine and Alin Draguilin for this Saturday’s World Naked Bike Ride is terrific. It’s also slightly (though not extremely) unsafe for the workplace.
As for this year’s ride itself, here’s what you need to know:
Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-will bike ride of the year, which also happens to be the largest clothing-optional bike ride in the world, will start rolling June 7 at 8 p.m.
The 2014 edition of Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride will begin in a new location: Normandale Park on NE Halsey between 55th & 57th Avenues. It’s a few blocks northwest of the 60th Avenue Green/Red/Blue MAX stop.
The official count is in: Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride broke a record this year with an estimated 8,150 participants.
The last two years, ride organizers put the number of riders at 4,500 and 4,200 people respectively — so this is a substantial increase. The count was performed by volunteers who sat down tonight and watched video taken of the ride last Saturday. Ride organizers installed an overhead video camera on SW Jefferson just past the starting point of the route specifically to document the turnout (there has been a bit of controversy in the past about inaccurate counts, especially the inflated numbers that were originally reported for the 2010 edition).
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Something new this year: we’re using Storify, an embeddable social media aggregator, to round up some of our favorite social media chatter about Saturday’s naked ride — including a few from other WNBRS around the world.
Check below the fold for a selection of tweets, videos and photos from the event.
In the future, the 2013 World Naked Bike Ride will be remembered as the year things got sophisticated.
Thanks to a permit to gather in the South Park Blocks and a deal with the Portland Art Museum to allow entrance to their bike-design exhibit Cyclepedia for the unique fee of $1 per piece of clothing, this year’s WNBR started with a stiff dose of urban energy and culture.
Check out lots of photos by our photographer Alex Milan Tracy after the jump.
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It’s safe to say Portland’s never seen a World Naked Bike Ride quite like this.
The ride started in the South Park Blocks, surrounded by Portland’s civic institutions, and it totally transformed the atmosphere before the ride, both for eager riders and curious onlookers. Unlike in past years, when the ride’s begun on the Central Eastside industrial district, the energy was arriving from all directions. Happy people in various states of undress swarmed through the trees of the park blocks and swamped the surrounding streets.
The fact that onlookers knew just where the ride began seemed to slow things down. The first couple of turns for riders became bottlenecks when mostly-well-meaning pedestrians left the curbs to offer high fives.
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1) It’s not about sex. The WNBR is about loving your body, loving low-car or car-free life, demonstrating the power of bikes in mass motion, metaphorically conveying the vulnerability of people on bikes, experiencing the city in a new way and loving the friends and new friends you’ll see before, during and after. And although all of those things are almost certainly good for your sex life, you’ll be surprised how much fun nudity (or near-nudity) is without sex.
2) Nobody cares that your body is not perfect. Nobody’s body is perfect, so for one night, everybody’s body gets to be perfect.
3) Read the fine print. We did a post on Thursday with all the details. I really liked the Mercury’s brief Naked Biking 101 article, too — look for it in their PedalPalooza calendar.
4) It’s okay not to be into naked bike riding. WNBR is not everybody’s thing and you should not feel bad if it’s not your thing. But you definitely shouldn’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
5) This thing is going to be off the chain. The World Naked Bike Ride hasn’t seen this beautiful of weather in years. The crowd is going to be a sight to see.
Have fun, everybody. BikePortland’s coverage begins very early tomorrow morning.
At least five thousand people are expected to hit the streets on bikes Saturday night in Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-wish bike ride of the year.
And maybe you’ve heard: Most of us will be mostly naked.
Naked biking and Pedalpalooza have gone together since 2002, when a group of visiting Canadians spliced the bare-as-you-dare tradition into Portland’s DNA. It’s since evolved into the World Naked Bike Ride, one of many happening around the world on Saturday.
This year’s WNBR (which is, for the record, 100 percent legal) will begin on the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland. No registration is required. The pre-ride is being hosted by the Portland Art Museum, which is offering ride participants a truly memorable deal: admission to their bike-design exhibit Cyclepedia for only $1 per article of clothing.
“The barer you are, the cheaper it is,” says ride organizer Meghan Sinnott.
As of Thursday morning, the weather forecast for Saturday night is 68 degrees with zero chance of rain.
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