Words: Sam James
Photos: Jake Paddon
2022 has been a good year so far - things are somewhat getting back to normal here at the shop and in life in general. Our Ride Club has started again in a reasonably normal format, races and events are happening again and most excitingly, the NSMBA Fiver World Series is back! It's been a long old time since we've sponsored a Fiver event - three years to be exact, and we were super stoked to get back to it. Fivers are one of our favourite events on our calendar, combining racing with good food, good drinks and good times with our friends. What could be better?
The Fiver is an opportunity for the local mountain bike community to come together and pit themselves against each other with a casual race followed by an apres event organised by the sponsor. This year we sponsored Fiver number five in partnership with Fox Race Face, following Giant Bicycles, Obsession Bikes, Lynn Valley Bikes and Lululemon. Those guys hosted some awesome apres events and we want to share our thanks to them for being great sports and helping support the local mountain bike community. Unfortunately every fiver event previous to ours had featured rain on the weather forecast in some capacity, but we were hopeful that we could muster up some sunshine for the day and made the plans for a beach themed BBQ party.
When the skies opened and dumped an unbelievable amount of rain the morning of the race, we cancelled our kiddy pool plans (we should've stuck to our guns) but stuck to the rest of our plan. Huge shout out to the guys at Fox Race Face for helping organise the event with us, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as epic without them. The Race Face team were on hand at sign-up with a tailgate pad exchange program - simply bring your old one and food bank donation and get a fresh tailgate pad, as well as a competition for a set of Atlas pedals.
As luck would have it, the weather was on our side with beautiful sunshine on the flanks of mount Seymour for awesome, yet still slightly damp race conditions on Asian Adonis, John Deere and Applicator. The trails were running great with recent trail work and favourable weather meaning dirt was tacky and hero-like and the race was reasonably long, but awesome fun. Riders found their way over to Steed around 8pm and were greeted by our beachy BBQ theme complete with turf, picnic tables, pumping music from Greg at Daytime Cycling, beers from Wildeye Brewing, ciders from Windfall, Kombucha from Healthy Hooch and food with veggie, vegan and gluten-free options with hand made skewers and salads ready for hungry racers to chow down on.
Riders and volunteers alike seemed stoked with the spread, and though we did run out of food, we managed to high-tail it to Walmart for enough burgers to ensure that hungry folks had plenty of food to eat. All in all, the evening was a great success. It was awesome to see so many smiling faces at the shop and we're thankful to get one of our favourite events back. We're even more thankful to all of the volunteers, organisers and racers for making it happen, we couldn't do it without you! Here's to the rest of the season being just as good and 2023 being even better!
