Category: TickerTape

Roll up roll up, come along and get loose in the woods for a Festive Tickertape winter series round 2 mix up with your friends.  Will the big ‘FC’ and ‘roody-olf’ make a guest appearance and give out some prezzies for biggest christmas pudding beanz.

Sunday 18th December

Freelap Timing from 1200 h – 1500 h (help needed setting up and packing away so please be there by 11:00)

£2 suggested donation

Be there or miss out, mince pies and festive clothing/decorations encouraged!

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!

Here we are again, at the start of another TickerTape series… except this time the weather is on our side!

Leaving the track announcement to the day of the event certainly made for some interesting racing as some had banked on Puppets being used, so had spent time practicing confident that their efforts would pay off. Unfortunately for them SPOONS was the order of the day, and Practicing Peter’s aside it was a very popular choice.

Now, apart form the course announcement there were a few other changes; the event was shorter by an hour, and we brushed UCI rules aside to allow a certain OAP mountain biking legend wear what can only be described as a paint on FOX T-shirt in a bid to finally win a coveted TickerTape sticker. Skintight clothing is normally reserved for our XC or Retro events, but we figured that Steve is pretty retro (over 40) so would need all the help he could get.

Well we were wrong, he schooled every one of us including Mr Smith and led the event from start to finish. Chris wasn’t best pleased with the Commissar’s T shirt ruling and could be heard protesting that the only reason Steve was wearing such a tight T shirt was because he’d developed moobs and needed all the support he could get!

Now Chris, I’m sure you could grow moobs like that too… so don’t beat yourself up about it, you must be nearly 40 by now anyway?

Back to the racing, well there were plenty of entrants, and a few new faces too. Nick G impressed with his playful style, pulling tweaks off of every feature and making everyone cheer as he styled his way down the course. Tom Dunford’s riding also drew a lot of attention, it was attacking and daring especially through the dreaded tight middle section where he flicked the bike confidently between the trees getting sideways but always making his way through. Both won beans for their efforts, and rightly so.

The new berm was pretty popular as were the slight changes to the routing over a couple of features, it’s nice to make the odd change, keeps things fresh and keeps people on their toes, though some would have benefitted from a map taking the old line out of the berm as if on auto-pilot.

So that was it, a great start to the series, with plenty still to look forward to.

Special mentions should go to Nigel Fudge for competing in his first TickerTape, Ben Batt for looking scary as ever on a bike, and Rob Lewis for timing only one run but getting a 4th despite hating the bike he was on and being a bit worse for wear.

Check the calendar for details of the next round, don’t bother asking me which course it’ll be on though as I won’t tell you!

Cheers to everyone for helping to set up and pack away, to MADISON for providing the race tape and to ROSE BIKES for providing the awesome trophies and prizes!

Photos thanks to Aaron Veness, and Daniel Irons