President Putin has gifted an Alaskan man a Ural Sidecar
President Putin’s meeting with President Trump has been big news, but we didn’t have the Russian leader giving out a Ural motorcycle on our Bingo card!
In what seems like a very serendipitous meeting of east and west, an Alaskan man has been given a brand new Ural motorcycle and sidecar as a personal gift from President Putin.
Yep, at a summit with the US president on American soil, the Russian president gave a random Anchorage man a ‘Russian’ motorcycle because his was broken.
And no, I can’t quite get my head around that either.
And I say ‘Russian’ (with inverted commas), as, since the start of President Putin's ‘Special Military Operation’ (read that as war) with Ukraine, production of Ural motorcycles and sidecars has shifted to Kazakhstan. Ural was founded by the Soviet state in 1941, though, and its name comes from the Ural mountain range, which runs north to south in Western Russia. It was also still partially state-owned until the early 2000s when a management buyout made it wholly private.
Right, back to the bike! The new owner of the Ural is, as reported by the Independent, a Mr Mark Warren, an anchorage local who had brought his much older (and currently broken) Ural out to the side of the road during Putin’s visit. Fortuitously for Mr Warren (and Putin's PR team), a Russian state television news crew just happened to be there, and they had what the Independent describes as a “chance” meeting…
This meeting eventually caught the attention of Putin’s team, and then, we assume, the President himself. Not one to miss out on the chance to win some American hearts and minds, President Putin put a call out to Ural’s headquarters (which is located in Washington, USA!) and arranged for a new bike to be delivered to Mr Warren.
Speaking at the time of the handover, the Independent reports that Mr Warren was “speechless”, with him also saying "It's night and day … I like my old one, but this one is obviously much better … it's amazing. Thank you very much." Mr Warren had previously spoken to reporters about how hard it was to get spares for his bike, something he wrongly attributed to being because Ural bikes are made in the Ukraine.
So, there we have it, a totally chance, and not orchestrated in any way, meeting of a Ural owner in Anchorage and a Russian state television news crew has resulted in him being gifted a new motorcycle.
Almost like that’s enough to make you forget all the bad things going on in the world, isn’t it?
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
