Drabir Alam rode a world-championship time trial on a broken arm, set a Guinness record, and finished an Ironman on two cramping feet. He still won't call himself a cyclist.
A month before the 2022 World Championships, Drabir broke his wrist and his collarbone. He was training in Khagrachhori, took a tumble on a ride, and got up with the kind of damage that ends most people's seasons. His orthopedic surgeon put him in a cast and, presumably, assumed that was that. It was not. Drabir cut the cast off and got on the plane to Wollongong.
On the start ramp of the 34.2-kilometre elite individual time trial, he had a fractured arm held together by not much more than stubbornness. Somewhere in the first part of the hour, he reached for his bottle and discovered the broken hand could not grip it. So, he made a decision that tells you everything: he rode the rest of the race without water. The full hour. He finished in 59:12, 48th in the world. “I just wanted to show my country exists,” he said.
That is the line he gave Cycling News, and it lands harder when you know what it cost to say it. There is no version of this where the broken arm is a metaphor. It was an actual fracture, and he raced on it because pulling out was never something he seriously considered. If you want to understand how a man arrives at that start ramp, you have to go back eleven years, to a doctor who told him to move.
Picture: Drabir Alam.
In 2011, it was not ambition that put Drabir on a bike. It was health problems and a doctor's blunt instruction to do something about them. He started running badly. A friend pulled him into a group ride. He expected to quit inside a week, the way most beginners do, and instead, he kept turning up. From 2011 to 2016, there were no medals and no plan—just the unremarkable accumulation of miles with the Bangladesh cycling community.
Then in 2016, a friend mentioned a race in Thailand and suggested he go and see what happened. He finished near the back. What he remembers is not the result but the field: amateurs who were genuinely fast and genuinely friendly. He came home with a different question than the one he left with. Not whether he could keep up, but how good he could get if he stopped treating this as exercise and started treating it as sport.
Taking it seriously means the mistakes start to count. At the Tour of Friendship in 2019, Drabir was inside the time trial of his life when he missed a turn and rode a full kilometer the wrong way before anyone flagged him back. He finished 9th. He had been two minutes off third place—off a podium at an international race—and the two minutes were entirely his own. In a time trial, there is no peloton to blame and no luck to curse. The clock just reads back exactly what you did.
When the pandemic shut the racing calendar down, his team, TeamBDC, went looking for something that did not need a start line. They found a Guinness World Record nobody had attempted: the greatest distance cycled in 48 hours by a relay team. The minimum bar was 1,500 kilometers. They set that as the target and trained for a year and a half on the strength of arithmetic done on paper.
Picture: Drabir Alam.
In December 2021, in the cold rain trailing Cyclone Jawad, four amateurs—Drabir Alam, Tanvir Ahmed, Mohammad Alauddin, and Rakibul Islam—rode in relay around a circuit in Purbachal, Dhaka, for two unbroken days. They did not just clear 1,600. They went faster than planned and finished on 1,670.334 kilometers. Drabir's own share was 418 of them. Guinness spent a month verifying the claim against footage from six cameras, thirteen witnesses, surveyor reports, and GPS data before it was made official. “I was fully confident we'd get it done. We had a lower target and just ended up going a lot faster than we thought,” Drabir explained.
Racing resumed in 2021, and the indoor months turned out to have sharpened rather than dulled him. At the Bangladesh Games in Hatirjheel, on roads he knew cold, his team rode the 22.5-kilometre team time trial in 38 minutes and took bronze—two minutes clear of the fourth-placed team. From there, the results stacked up: national bronzes, golds in other events, the kind of consistency that pulls a rider into the country's elite groups. Which is, eventually, how a man with a fractured arm ends up on a start ramp in Australia.
Then the part that does not make the highlight reel. After the record and the Worlds, Drabir stopped. Not injured—flat. By his own account, the two years that followed were bad: he didn't train, didn't feel much, couldn't find the thing that had carried him through a pandemic and a broken collarbone. What pulled him back was not another target but the company—trail running groups, easy rides, shared climbs. The low-stakes riding that had started all of it in 2011.
Picture: Drabir Alam.
From there, the competitive itch came back on saner terms. He did a full Ironman in Malaysia in Langkawi in 2023, the full distance: a 2:10 swim, seven and a half hours on the bike, and a marathon he was in no state to run. He was delirious by the end and got home only by grinding out the last eight kilometers on two cramping feet, ahead of the cutoff and not much else. Total time, 16:53. He has no complaints about any of it.
This year, he was back at the Tour of Friendship, the race that started everything, now staged in Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. On the 19.3-kilometre time trial of stage four, he stopped the clock at exactly 32 minutes, good for fifth on the stage and a prize—a small result on paper, but one he rode from balance rather than the old obsession. “Things happen, but we keep moving,” he said.
Ask him what the bike has given him, and the answer is unglamorous: it clears his head and keeps the stress down. He is also honest about the cost. Pushed far enough, the sport you fell for turns into data and timing and pressure—it becomes work, and the trick is finding your way back to the fun part. His only real advice is to start early. The sooner it gets hold of you, the longer it keeps you.
He started at twenty-seven, sent there by a doctor, with no obvious talent and no plan. What he had instead was an unwillingness to stop—through a wrong turn that cost a podium, through a cast he wasn't supposed to remove, through two years when nothing felt like anything. He still says he is not sure he'd call himself an accomplished cyclist. The record, the worlds, the Ironman, and fifteen years of not quitting suggest otherwise.
