British Cycling Hall of Fame and more 2010 thoughts

The initial 50 inductees to the British Cycling Hall of Fame have been announced, and it's great to see some of the mountain bikers I grew up idolising on that list, in particular the late great Jason McRoy who as a fellow North Easterner and top class racer was a bit of a hero to me in my early teens. Caroline Alexander, David Baker and Tim Gould are also worthy inclusions as some of the best XC racers ever produced in the UK.

Team line-ups for 2010 from elsewhere in Europe and the UK have started to appear, but there's little news on who will be riding for which team in the UK. Liam Killeen, having parted company with Trek and after an injury-hit 2009, will be riding for an as-yet unknown team. There will also be a different look to the BMBS Elite field, especially the Elite Female one, where regular winner and podium finisher Jenn O'Connor is returning to her native New Zealand, and I believe Melanie Spath might be returning to Germany. On the additions side, the top 5 Expert riders by year end rankings should be in Elite for 2010, which should see the likes of Maxine Filby continuing her meteoric rise up the categories and Jessie Roberts joining her, plus possibly some of the Juniors although I believe Carla Haines will be in Expert next year. On the Elite Men's side, Sion O'Boyle moves up from Expert to join his brother in Elite, and Phil Lenney, George Budd and Christian Aucote should join him.

More details are emerging regarding the 2010 UCI cross country World Cup race in Dalby, Yorkshire, but the British Cycling World Cup mini website is still looking a little less polished than the Rare Management equivalent for the Fort William event, though Rare have had longer to perfect it.... As outlined at http://www.olibeck.com , Oli Beckingsale and Nick Craig have been doing some of the course testing and making sure that the 'chicken run' slow lines take more time than the more technically difficult lines, which is as it should be, and unlike the 2009 Mountain Mayhem course! Oli's assertion that the course is a good one and has been improved over the 2009 BMBS event course is good news, and bodes well for a hopefully fun but technically testing race in April.

2010 and looking towards the Olympics

There's quite an interesting Luke Webber interview with Phil Dixon, the Great Britain XC coach, at http://new.britishcycling.org.uk/mtb/article/mtb20091123-Road-To-2012-Part-3-0 in which the plans for 2010 and onwards are discussed. It looks like Annie Last, Lily Matthews, Dave Fletcher etc. will be doing fewer races and less travelling than in 2009. The hard work done by GB's Elite Female racers in 2009 to close the gap on other nations for Olympic qualification means at least there is now a chance of seeing someone on the start line in 2012 in both Elite Male and Female, which didn't appear at all likely 12 months ago. Once the year end UCI rankings are available, we'll know how many nation points GB have amassed from 01/01/2008-31/12/2009 and hence what needs to be done before 31/12/2011 to ensure a least 1 rider in both the Elite Male and Elite Female XCO events at the next Olympics.

There's also talk of R&D work for mountain bike XC which, combined with the news that British Cycling are working with the F1-related McLaren Advanced Technologies, could lead to some interesting developments and components I hope. It's been good to see the GB racers experimenting with different kit this year, for example Reynolds carbon rims and Dugast tubular tyres used by Fletcher and Last for much of the season, the relatively rare FRM CU2 M18 double chainsets or Oli Beckingsale's 1x9 gear set up with chain device.

As far as I can see, there's no news to date on which team or teams the GB Podium or Academy Programme riders will be riding for. Rebecca Romero has been doing some MTB XC racing recently, however, and since it seems likely that her track specialism won't be possible in the 2012 Games, I wonder if she might consider changing sport once again?!

* edit* According to the interview with Joolze Dymond at http://www.xcracer.com/ , Rebecca may do some more XC racing with a view to trying some BMBS national level XC racing in 2010, which could be interesting...

So it begins....

Having said in my last post that not many XC racers in the UK are using video as a medium, I know see that Kate Potter and her husband have bought a Flip video camera and uploaded some footage to Kate's blog at http://katepotternet.blogspot.com . It's good to see some footage of the new Cotic CX bike being put through its paces.

Now that SouthernXC are producing videos from their events and Kate is doing the same for her page, the momentum is starting to build for XC video in the UK. Right, I'm off to read the manual for Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 and to get some more practice in with my camera.....

Riders using video to maximise sponsor exposure etc.

Although there are a few British XC riders with their own blogs and/or websites, it seems that racers elsewhere in Europe are more likely at present to use these to raise awareness of them and their sponsors. Very few XC racers in the UK seem to be using video as part of this awareness raising.

However, this is possibly beginning to change. Maddie Horton, the Devon-based Elite Female racer, has been nominated for the Plymouth Amateur Sports Personality for 2009, and put up a post on the XCracer forum asking for someone to get some footage of her at the recent Soggy Bottom series race. Since I've already got a number of clips of her racing from this season, I offered that she could use some of those instead, partly as a trial for how this could work in future.

Having checked out a few of the better ones of Maddie, I'm now testing MSN's SkyDrive file hosting in an attempt to easily transfer the raw, uncompressed clips to the Plymouth Herald newspaper for editing in advance of the awards ceremony. At 13GB per hour of raw footage, even short videos are too large to transfer via email in their raw state.

It seems a shame that she's the only individual racer making use of the many hours of footage I shot this year, but if it helps her and helps to expand the sport, it's a step in the right direction. I wonder if any others will be looking for video footage of themselves in future?

2009 BMBS round 5 video

After juggling a limited amount of hard drive space, the video from round 5 of this year's BMBS is finally complete. Recording onto miniDV tape means a download to PC needs 13GB per hour of raw footage so it soon eats up a lot of space.....

Anyway, I've uploaded the same source file to both Vimeo (as per the rest of the race series) and also to YouTube, as I was keen to see which looked better and which will receive more hits, even though I think I know the answer to both of those questions.

The YouTube version is at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cboxA_ryiuU

The Vimeo version is as below:

2009 British Mountain Bike race series round 5 from Eldrik on Vimeo.

Let's see which works better as a combination of footage quality and popularity/views!

The Twentyfour12 video is finally complete

After quite a lot of work, I've finally managed to finish my video summary of this year's Twentyfour12 race from Newnham Park, Plymouth. I can now finally free up some badly needed hard disk space and get on with finishing the footage from round 5 of the BMBS, also from Plymouth, which I hope to complete very soon.

Anyway, here's the link to the Twentyfour12 video:

Twentyfour12 2009 from Eldrik on Vimeo.

BMBS round 5, Newnham Park, Plymouth

It was round 5 of the 2009 BMBS this weekend just gone, and for the first time since being kicked in the knee by a clumsy oaf in mid April while playing football, I was able to take video footage of an MTB race without being on crutches. This made the whole event SO much more fun, and quite a lot easier to boot.

It was a UCI C1-ranked event, which brought more world ranking points for the riders, additional prize money, and some interesting overseas riders, including multiple European and World Champion and Gold medallist at the 2004 Olympics, Gunn-Rita Dahle-Flesjå (pictured). The Norwegian was returning to racing after her 2009 season was interrupted by the birth of her son, Bjørnar.

The sun shone, 'The Pipeline' descent was included in the course for the first time in years, the river crossings were tricky, and all the riders I spoke to and/or interviewed were friendly and happy to chat.

I hope to get the video up soon, but I have to finish another one first....