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!