First – a reminder that the club’s Annual General Meeting is next Wednesday 24th November at 7pm in the Strangford Arms Hotel. This is your chance to have a say in how the club is run, and what sort of events we focus on next year. All members should have received an email about the meeting – please confirm if you can attend, and if there’s anything you want to discuss.
And as the dust settles on last Saturday’s Bash, here are a couple of reflections on a very enjoyable evening.
One of the quiz questions asked who had managed to beat Peter McLean in a club event this year. The answer was just two people – Stuart Millar in the Scrabo Hillclimb and Alan Patterson in the Champion of Champions 25 (pictured above). And in both cases, Peter lost out by just one second! That’s an amazing achievement, especially given the rising levels of performance by Ards riders across club and open events in the last couple of years. Who’s going to push him next year?!
Chris Boardman on his way to breaking the 30mph barrier for the first time in an Irish 25 in 1993.
On the subject of records, Marcus Christie became the second rider to beat Chris Boardman’s Champion of Champions course record this year. When Boardman set his course record in 1993, he was Olympic pursuit champion and world hour record holder, and was rapidly becoming one of the best time trialists in the world. We thought his Lotus track bike was the ultimate in aero-technology. But things have progressed rapidly since then. Marcus Christie competed at the World Time Trial championships shortly after his CoC victory, and although he was a very creditable 39th overall, he was still over 5 minutes behind Filippo Ganna over a similar distance. How much more performance can the engineers extract from the simple bicycle??
And finally, it was nice to receive a letter of recognition from our local MP for our Samaritan’s fund raising. Well done again.
Thanks to everyone who helped to make the Bash a great evening. And we hope to see you at the AGM next week and/or the Christmas 10 🙂