There's not much on a bike that Christopher Blevins can't do. The 20-year-old from Durango, Colorado, spent the past two seasons on the road with Hagens Berman Axeon and won stage 2 at the Tour of the Gila in April. He's also the reigning US under-23 cyclo-cross champion and elite short-track mountain bike champion, most recently winning a silver medal in the under-23 cross-country race at the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Switzerland.
He's been busy on the bike but not too busy to continue his post-secondary education at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo, California, where he studies business administration with a focus on entrepreneurship. He also volunteers teaching creative writing at a local juvenile hall. As with his bike skills, Blevins excels at language, diving into the world of rap music and spoken-word poetry and producing a compilation of his own work.
"I had always written rap just for fun, and then in freshman year of high school I had a poetry study in English and I just loved it," Blevins told Cyclingnews earlier this year. "I had a poetry slam that fall, and I've just gotten into that a lot.
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"Now that I'm in college, I volunteer with the spoken-word poetry club on campus. I also volunteer at the local juvenile hall just teaching kids writing there, so I'm just trying to expand it. It's such a great outlet, especially with cycling. It's very different, and that's important to me."
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"Life's a game and I have tried controlling every dice's roll
I only have a single hand of cards that I can show
Detective on the microphone
'cause when I write a poem
It's like I pick apart a piece of life under a microscope ..."
- Christopher Blevins, 'Ink in My Pen'
Blevins' love of spoken-word poetry drove him to create his own compilation of nine tracks set to music. Completed more than a year ago, he worked on some of the recordings with just a microphone in his room, while the majority were cut in a studio in San Luis Obispo, with someone else coming in to produce and master all of the tracks.
Light to give
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/christopher-blevins-cyclings-slam-poet
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