This article was produced in collaboration ASSOS and was first published in Rouleur Issue 139
The Saint-Gotthard Massif is a narrow sliver of Swiss mountains which curves around the Italian border as it juts northwards in Piedmont. It’s lower than some of its neighbouring ranges within the Alps – the highest point is Pizzo Rotondo, at 3,192 metres, but it has the classic picture-postcard aesthetic of the rest of Switzerland. This is a region where cultures meet, overlap and cross – the Gotthard Pass is a place where travellers, traders and money have moved north-south, through inhospitable terrain, for centuries. As far back as the late 1200s, the Habsburgs were buying up towns and settlements on the trading routes, the better to levy taxes and channel wealth into imperial coffers. Engineers built roads, then even better roads, and finally rail and road tunnels, the better to move people through the region. And two of Europe’s greatest rivers begin their journeys nearby: the Rhine rises in the massif; the Rhône’s source is just to the north.
The primary function of the transit infrastructure in the Saint-Gotthard Massif has been to move people through the region. However, this is also a corner of Switzerland well known to cyclists, whose motivations are sometimes to get from A to B, just like anybody else, but sometimes to enjoy the journey in between. And it is the location of one of the favourite rides of Deby Brunold, an Instagram influencer and former nurse whose own journey to cycling renown has been every bit as twisty-turny as the roads which climb this region’s passes.
Brunold is taking Rouleur on a circumnavigation of the western end of the Saint-Gotthard Massif. Starting in Airolo, this ride climbs the original iteration of the Gotthard Pass, complete with its famous five-kilometre cobbled section, then the Furka Pass, and finally the Nufenen Pass, before descending back to Airolo. It’s the kind of route where a rider must commit fully to the task of completing the whole circuit – the three passes are all over 2,000 metres and at 2,478m, the Nufenen pass is the second-highest paved road in Switzerland, and there are no short cuts back to the start, other than back the way you came.
“This is the perfect loop,” Brunold tells Rouleur. “It’s challenging, I think, and you are either climbing or riding downhill. Sometimes it feels like an easy ride, even for me. And sometimes I cannot do it.”
Three big climbs are a lot to pack into 100 kilometres, and Brunold says that the ride tracks closely the route of the ‘silver’ challenge in the annual Alpenbrevet event. The Alpenbrevet silbertour starts in Andermatt, north of the Gotthard Pass, crosses that climb, and then follows this route in the opposite direction – Nufenen, then Furka.
“Some people train the whole year to be able to ride these mountains, but for me it’s close to my home and I love to go there for this route. In the Alpenbrevet, you can do three, four, five or even six passes if you’re really crazy. But these three mountains have very different scenery and even very different weather, so it’s a really cool route.
“Normally I do it the other way round as well. I usually end with Gotthard, and the cobbles kill you, but it’s a typical Swiss beauty.”
Brunold is far from being the first person to be inspired by the Gotthard Pass, for better and for worse. Dutch Renaissance artist, Pieter Breughel the Elder, crossed the col on his way to Italy in the 1550s, and according to Andrew Beattie in his book The Alps: A Cultural History, used “the impressions of fearful precipices and abysmal chasms in his works The Suicide of Saul and the Conversion of Saint Paul”.
This is a reminder that the idea of mountains being places to go for fun is a modern phenomenon – the inhospitable conditions and terrain made them foreboding regions. But the Romantics of the late 18th and 19th centuries began to see them as places of beauty, which elevated the soul. First poets, then artists made their way to the Alps to inspire their work, and Joseph Turner painted The Passage of Mount St Gothard in 1804.
The Gotthard Pass, then, has inspired artists, civil engineers and now cyclists. It separates and links cultures and even weather systems. The south side, from which Brunold tackles the climb on this ride, is in Ticino, the main Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. The north side descends into the canton of Uri, home of William Tell and one of the original three cantons of Switzerland.
“At the beginning, I think the climb is quite boring, but the last six kilometres are super beautiful,” says Brunold. “It’s really Swiss – you have a lake, some cows, switchbacks, the scenery. But also you have a lot of wind there, always from the front – it’s normal to have bad weather on Saint Gotthard. The ride started in the Italian part of Switzerland, and there it can be super warm. You go up the mountain, and the top is mostly in between the good weather and bad weather. It holds the clouds.
“But you have the normal road next to this one, and usually the cars are on the other road, so this one, with the cobbles, is super cool for cyclists.”
The idea of things changing quite significantly over the course of a journey is not an alien one for Brunold. She has not always been a brand ambassador and influencer, and even cycling has been a relatively recent development in her life. Everything changed for her when an image she uploaded from a solo ride across the Pyrenees in June 2022 went viral.
Brunold had been posting on Instagram for several years by this point, but something about the image seemed to capture people’s imagination. Just a rider having what looked like a lot of fun, on the Col du Tourmalet, but it resonated.
Brunold grew up in Aargau canton, near Zürich. “I had a normal boring life,” she says. “Aargau is quiet, I would not even recommend it for cycling. Zürich is a nice city; Aargau is, how do I say this, like more of a farmers’ place.”
She studied to become a nurse. “I never really knew well what I wanted to do,” she says. “I thought I wanted to work with old people, so I ended up taking care of people in an old people’s home. Then I realised, my studies for that were the same as for nurses in hospital. I saw Gray’s Anatomy and thought I wanted to be a nurse. I went to a big hospital to do my studies and I was a heart surgery nurse.
“I liked it a lot. I learned a lot about humans, how they are. Empathy. But in the end, I felt like this still wasn’t making me happy. I was just going home and happy that nobody had died during my shift.”
At this point, Brunold did another mini-pivot, switching from being a ward nurse to visiting people at home, which she felt suited her better. “You get a really deep connection with the people you meet, on a completely different level. In a hospital, it’s like people are numbers, but at home it is so intimate. It’s way more important to be human than just giving people medicine because it’s your job. To be there, to listen and to be human is important.
“For me it was okay, but I always wanted to study more, I wanted to be responsible for other things. At one point, I thought about what I wanted to do, maybe go to school again, or back to the hospital in a different area. But the point for me was, am I going to do this for the rest of my life?”
The series of events that made her a cycling brand ambassador began when she discovered cycling through an ex-boyfriend, in 2018. “That was my first contact with cyclists,” she says. “I used to think cycling was for old people, and I didn’t see many young people on bikes, but suddenly, it was cool. I was not sporty at that time at all, but I thought that I have to change something, so why not start cycling?”
Brunold began on a mountain bike, even though she found it a little scary. She quit smoking and had a bad break-up with her boyfriend, but found that cycling was therapeutic during a tough time. Then the owner of a bike store got in touch to ask if Brunold would be interested in helping out with modelling for a cycling calendar. The shoot was booked for the top of the Col du Galibier.
“I had no idea about cycling or photoshoots, but we got driven up the Galibier, and it was the first time I’d been up there,” she says. “Of course, I was just there in makeup for posing and photographs and bullshit, but I was like, do people really cycle up here? This is beautiful! I’d never seen anything like it.
“So I was up there with this beautiful bike, posing, and I was like, this is crazy. I want to be able to ride up a mountain like this. From that moment, I fell in love and went crazy.”
She bought a road bike, and Brunold went from a nurse who used cycling as therapy and as a break from her job, to a cyclist taking on increasingly challenging and interesting rides and whose recovery time came during work.
“Now it is a part of my life, a big part,” she says. “It’s therapy for me. I don’t do it to impress anybody, I just get my peace on the bike and I can think about everything. It takes me places, and that’s why I started with Instagram. I always had an account, but just filmed what I saw, or took a picture. I just wanted my friends to see it because it was cool.
“I never wanted to be an influencer, but of course, you see all these people who are getting sponsored. I had some role models. But I thought it was really important to have a language in my pictures that people recognised. I thought, let’s edit all my pictures in the same way.
“I went on a bikepacking trip over the Pyrenees, by myself, and that picture went viral and I got so many followers. I realised I could quit my job and do this for a living. It was a combination of having a good-looking profile, a little bit of luck, because Instagram pushed the picture so much. I was still on the trip, and a lot of people were seeing my pictures, going on my profile and thinking, there is this girl, what is she doing? Is she doing this on her own? This is interesting, let’s follow.
“I started in San Sebastian and finished in Barcelona, and it was amazing, but when I look back, it was crazy. I had no knowledge about my bike, I had nothing to fix it. The rides were sometimes eight or nine hours a day, and five hours with no contact with anyone.
“I just wanted to go riding where it was beautiful. I like to do stuff out of my comfort zone, but I don’t do it for a physical or mental challenge. I know my body, and I know I can do it. This is why I’m not doing ultras – I decided I was not that girl, sadly. I would love to be this, but I am not. I love my sleep. And mentally, it’s not really a mental challenge. Of course, every day is challenging, to work out where I sleep, what I do, having to do everything myself. But in the end, I have my peace where I can just cycle. All my thinking happens on the bike; I really need this.
I love nature, I can be outside and I can move my body. Sometimes I think, this would be fun on a motorbike, but then I would not be tired in the evening, and I like to be proud of myself, to achieve something.
“I ride without pressure,” she adds. “You see it on Instagram all the time – you have to be this fast or blah blah, and I think, I don’t care if I’m going fast, I just keep going and I’m happy. That’s why I wrote, ‘Not fast, just far’ on my profile. I don’t remember where it comes from, but it really represents me, how I am.”
After Gotthard Pass, Brunold’s ride takes us to the Furka Pass, where the famous Belvédère Hotel occupies a photogenic hairpin bend. This iconic building featured in the James Bond movie Goldfinger, though the realities of its isolated location high in the mountains haven’t been kind to it – the building is currently shuttered. “The Furka Pass is a super beautiful climb,” says Brunold. “It’s rough terrain, more like the Dolomites. You can see glaciers. For me, climbing the Furka is a big sign that the cycling season has started again. Me and a friend always try to climb it in winter, but mostly it’s closed and snowy. But as soon as you get to spring, we try to go there, and if you finally reach the hotel, it’s a happy feeling, like summer is coming.
“For me, this is the easiest of the three climbs. But the last one, the Nufenen Pass, is really a badass. I don’t like it so much. It’s really exhausting – steep and long and heavy. There’s no flat in the whole route; it’s just up or down. I like this – you go hard for one or two hours and you are in your zone, and then the downhill is fun.
“Sometimes I enjoy what I see, and sometimes I fall into a zone, like meditation. I like this, because you are really somewhere else. Sometimes you can talk yourself down and ask why you are doing this, especially during climbing, but then you come back to yourself and you’re more aware.
“And sometimes you have these moments where you think everything is so beautiful, you make a picture and people feel connected to me. I try to keep this feeling alive.”
Deby Brunold's kit
For the ride, Brunold wore the new AS-SOS UMA GT Spring Fall Jersey and UMA GT Spring Fall bib tights S11, the perfect choice for a route that ascends high mountain passes but that also navigates roads on the humid valley floor.
The UMA GT Spring Fall jersey, made with soft-backed RX fabric, is designed to preserve a comfortable, dry microclimate in chillier conditions, but it is lightweight and breathable enough not to stifle when it’s warmer. The revised regularFit is something Brunold particularly appreciates on big days like this, with its less restrictive but smoother silhouette, set-in sleeves and raw-cut cuffs. There are seven colours to choose from – she opted for Bronze Ash: both vibrant and natural, it echoes the hues of the Gotthard Pass’s gneiss rock.
The UMA GT Spring Fall bib tights S11 are, like the jersey, aimed at long-distance riding in cooler, dry conditions. The soft, brushed inner face supplies midweight insulation but the tights are also breathable enough to ensure effective thermoregulation in a range of temperatures. They’re made from a new POLAR fabric, which reduces ecological impact thanks to a 50% recycled polyamide content. Brunold chose the Primal Blue colourway to match with her Bronze Ash jersey, making up in her words: “The colour story I didn’t know I was missing”.
