(Zürich, 26 jul 1999) • This years Cycle Messenger World Championships (CMWC) were held last weekend in the Swiss town of Zurich. Over 800 messengers from all over the industrialised world gathered to attended the event organised by the local messengers. (big thanks for this wonderful event to everyone who was involved and specially to Markus, Mara, Victor, Muth... - the editor). Prologue The city of Zurich proved to be an ideal place for this event: The general public proved to be well informed and very interested, as a lot of people were seen carrying messenger-style bags with the name Freitag written on them. Freitag in Swiss means Friday in English and that translates into the Danish name Fryday. A blue guy with this name should later win both the gold sprint contest and the main race). The local messengers and their friends were even more supportive of those who had come from far to compete. Not only did they offer lots of couches to those who found time to sleep, some of them even made messenger dreams come true (ask those people from London and Berlin). And then there was the lucky7 bar (see picture), opened just days before the championships, (probably with the intention to keep the immense amounts of money spend on beer inside the family) which quickly became the most popular place to prepare for the races to come. Friday The different races were clearly dominated by messengers from Amsterdam. In Fridays first event - the pedal-boat race - the team from Amsterdam easily beat the crews from Berlin and London in the preliminaries. During the semi-finals the boat from Amsterdam was in the lead, when for reasons that are not known yet (there were rumours about some of the other teams using torpedo's) the crew lost control over the vessel and ran against a pillar of the bridge. In this situation the boat from Freiburg managed to win and thereby advanced to the finals (were they should later become the winning team.) The evening brought the preliminaries for the main messenger race and with this event came even more success for the team from Amsterdam: With the exemption of Danny who punctured twice and forgot his chip when he changed to somebody else's bike everybody from Amsterdam made it to the finish line! Nobody - including Mookie who came in last in his heat - got disqualified or lost! In the light of this enormous success it didn't matter anymore that almost no-one from Amsterdam should make it to the semi-finals.