A little while back we kicked off a caption competition to (a) have a bit of fun and (b) to shift some now-definitive Red Bull Mountain Mayhem DVDs that we had around the office. And it being Funsome Friday we thought we’d have a quick trawl through the entries so far and pick some winners. To aid your memory, here’s the pic (courtesy of Andy Armstrong):

Click for bigness

Before we proceed, we should probably mention that the stuff in the picture is actually a pile of wood chippings. Only Gary Ewing spotted that, with “Ouch, said Chipps”, an obscure pun on the name of the editor of Singletrack magazine. But worth a prize just for correctly identifying the substance…

The pile was taken by many to be hay or its close relation straw, leading to a quantity of most excellent punnage. Best of the batch were “This is just before I had a major stack” (Richard Ford), a two-for-the-price-of-one “Bailing out would be the final straw” (Scarlett Parker), the similarly double-barrelled “Dave’s preparation was hay-sty, resulting in this stack” (Ed Cooke), “Is this the straw that broke my Camelbak?” (Adam Youd) and the slightly obscure “RockShox Silo” from Lee Marshall. Also on a hay theme was “My rear’s flat, but at least I found the needle” from Laurence Wilks and essentially the same gag from Chris Keller-Jackson. Our favourites of the agricultural crop, though, were “Farmer sabotages MTB race. One straggler makes it out alive, nine others still missing” (Mark Davison) and the groansome “Proofreading error leads to problems at the launch of the new Kona Hei-Hei” (Steve Riley).

Then of course there were the inevitably scatological entries. It does, we concede, look a little bit like a large heap of manure. Hence: “So that’s what a dump valve does” (Paul Whittaker); “Well, I told you that drop-off was sh*t, what did you expect?” (Giles Harrison); “At last I’ve found the terrain to match my riding style” (Martin Hunt); “The Bikemagic product tester goes beyond the call of duty during the recent energy bar evaluation” (DaveB) and the splendid “With an almighty push, Barney the dinosaur finally cleared the blockage” from Dan Cathcart.

Rounding off the selection were the off the wall ones, including the straightforward “Where’d that come from? It wasn’t here last lap” from Stephen Hardcastle; Kate Motyer Lowndes’s “I wish those road riders wouldn’t shave their legs mid-race”; “Alan doubted the quality of Brains’s new launch ramp for Thunderbird 7” (Ian Beattie); “Sod your Marzocchis, this is proper suspension” (Keith Williams) and the splendidly surreal “Tiny mountain biker found in Weetabix” from David Bradshaw.

And it seems only fair to award Rob Hamilton-Smith a prize – his self-referential “Rob couldn’t afford the Woodward Extreme Camp’s pices so went for a more grass roots approach” is entirely justified as that is in fact him in the picture…

Excellent work one and all, prizes on their way. Look out for more caption competitions, ooh, sometime.