INTERVIEW

...why does he keep riding? And riding? And riding?

If he can tell how a bike will ride just by pushing it, why does he keep riding and testing?

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS

Whether you know Guy Kesteven through the thousands of bike and product tests he’s written over the last 25 years, his over-exaggerated ‘bike journo’ riding style, or the chest-cam YouTube persona of KesTV, you will have come across him many times, ‘Kes’ is simply too prolific for you not to have done. Whether it’s reviewing top flight carbon chi-chi bikes or agonising over whether laces are better than Velcro on a trail shoe, it appears that if it moves, Mr Kesteven has reviewed it for one of many, many publications over the years.

He has, if not filled, then certainly borrowed, the shoes of revered magazine bike tester Steve Worland as the most prolific mountain bike product tester in the UK (if not the world). Yet Guy knowingly walks the line between industry-respected reviewer and the self-parody of ‘peak bike journo’ because if you’ve written, as he reckons, around ten million words of reviews, you’re going to come up with some clichés now and again. He’s ridden probably every suspension design, suspension fork and ‘nextlevel shifting experience’ that you can buy. The guy, pardon the pun, is a testing machine driven to insane amounts of workaholism for reasons he’s still not sure about.

And yet he’s still not satisfied. Despite reckoning that he can tell the difference between the weight of different cassettes on near-identical bikes, he isn’t nearly done with bike testing yet. There’s just too much to do, in Guy’s opinion, for him to stop, or even slow down. Slowing down, he thinks, would be very dangerous for a highly strung, driven character like himself.

He hates sleep (“…think of all the things you could have been doing!”), hates being told to relax, and, in his own words “...is unbearable” to be around most of the time. He reckons he takes mountain biking too seriously to actually enjoy it. He’s intensely competitive, yet he’s unlikely to line up in fair competition to see who’s the fastest. Instead, he invariably sabotages any comparisons by means of fancy dress or unsuitable bike categories. His regular group ride isn’t called the ‘Monday night pub ride’ – no, it’s called ‘Fight Club’ and you will find no mercy there.

Even so, he’s a friendly, approachable chap in the real world, happy – delighted even – with where he is in life and very proud of what he’s achieved by effectively working three concurrent, badly paid jobs at once (all of them to do with writing about bikes). He’s happily married, lives in a lovely house in his home county of Yorkshire and has two “reasonably well-adjusted” college-age daughters and two grumpy old dogs.

He’s still happiest when he’s riding a review bike flatout, talking to his GoPro while also trying to work out how to write 500 words on a front tyre later while wearing two odd test shoes (saves time and helps with the comparisons).

Better than digging holes for a living

I first remember Guy racing a tandem in a NEMBA downhill race in the mid-90s. There was only him on the bike as his girlfriend refused to let him drive it if she was on it. In that small pre-internet world, it didn’t take long to get noticed and it wasn’t long before he was writing bike tests in the very earliest days of MBR magazine.