Tickertape winter series 10/11 round up

Riding bikes is great, riding bikes with friends is brilliant, making more friends riding bikes together even better, collectively running an unequivocally successful low-fi grass roots downhill event series on your tenderly hand groomed trails, for the benefit of the local cycling community.....priceless.

We asked Charlie Sheen (Actor, Philanthropist, Hero) for a few words on how he felt the winter series went; ‘’Well I felt it went a little something like this, ahem (pause) ...... uh, Winning?’’ We digress.

The whole series was point based, with the points weighted to encourage people to attend each round and the points staggered to encourage friendly competition.  This made the events more interesting as people could take it as seriously as they want with all the competitive elements at their disposal, turning leisure into sport and sport to competition and vies versa.

Over the series we had 45 riders take part over the 4 rounds with an average of 22.5 riders per round and 29 at our final round, I lost count of how many times were recorded, but it was up around 400.

Now for the results

After the final round in March I can tell you that Andrew Denham (2^nd,2^nd,6^th,4^th ) won the overall series finishing on 521 points, 11 points ahead of Ben Irons (4^th,4^th,2^nd,5^th), noticeably neither rider managed to score the fastest time of the day at any round.  A special mention goes to Curtis Saunders who only managed to enter 3 of the 4 rounds due to other racing commitments, but made good use of those 3 rounds posting the fastest time of the day at each round he entered, we awarded Curtis the title, ‘should of, could of, would of’, because if he had entered all 4 rounds we’re sure he would have won the points race.  Also a special mention goes to Liam Arkell (8^th,8^th,3^rd,3^rd), for most improved rider, Liam really impressed us with his commitment and improved performance over the winter, sadly Liam’s managed to break his wrist at a race recently, so we wish him a speedy recovery and look forward to seeing him progressing even further in the sport.

Overall it was great series, we were really happy to see more people getting involved and riders of all ages and abilities getting along and encouraging one another, helping each other out and seeing people make real progress with their riding.  Basically lots and lots of beans, black canon collective beans that is.

Thank you to Rose Bikes for supplying us with all the beans awards, and ‘madison’ for the special race tape.  We also managed to raise £180 over the series for more timing equipment for future tickertapes (from our bank breaking two pound a round entry tax), so THANK YOU!