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....

BMBS round 4, Crow Hill

Still on crutches after May's knee surgery, I made my way to the New Forest for round 4 of the 2009 BMBS race series. Here's the resulting video.

2009 British Mountain Bike race series round 4 from Eldrik on Vimeo.

BMBS round 3, Margam Park

Another BMBS race, another day spent hobbling around on crutches, which is a shame as I wasn't physically able to get to the most interesting sections of the course to take any footage.

2009 British Mountain Bike race series round 3 from Eldrik on Vimeo.

So it turns out that the fairly innocent football tackle a few weeks ago ripped a surprisingly large section of cartilage from the bottom of my thigh bone, at the outside of the knee.

I underwent surgery on it at the same hospital where I had my fractured scaphoid in my wrist operated upon, and am now recovering on crutches, icing and elevating the knee etc. The Chelsea and Westminster hospital really is an excellent advert for the National Health Service.

The good news is that the section ripped off could have been in a worse place, and that hopefully I can cycle again at some point. The bad news is that if new cartilage grows, it will only be 50% as good as the old section, and the risk of arthritis is much higher. I can't do impact sports from now on either, so no more football or tennis, sadly.

Despite the crutches, I made it up to Dalby for round 2 of the British Mountain Bike race series. The new course, built as part of a bid to host a UCI World Cup race in 2010, was a big change from many NPS courses of the past, and reminded me a lot of Fort William with the mini rock gardens and boardwalk sections. It was a proper technical XC course, and caught a few riders out who had not pre-ridden it!

2009 British Mountain Bike race series round 2 from Eldrik on Vimeo.

As I feared, I won't be able to race Mountain Mayhem, nor probably SITS, but should still be at both races with my team to take photos and video and sample the atmosphere, which is some consolation.