Steve Worland ride singletrack hard & drink a swig of cider per lap memorial cup 2014 at Bristol Bikefest, 7th June

Words: Organisation

Bike journalist, singletrack extraordinaire, Bristol local and close friend Steve Worland has very sadly passed away during a run in his beloved Ashton Court Park in Bristol.

To keep his spirit alive and in honour of his role in the UK cycling and mountain bike world a new event has been added to the Bristol Bikefest.

Steve spend countless hours on his Ashton Court test loop, he has been a long standing supporter of the event, has raced it many times and has spent countless hours on the side of the track chatting to people, watching the racing and enjoying the odd pint of local cider. So it didn’t take much debating to create a slightly different event which will run within the 12 hour Bristol Bikefest and which reflects what Steve enjoyed whilst riding his bike – riding singletrack hard and enjoying a swig of cider.

We present the ‘Steve Worland ride singletrack hard & drink a swig of cider per lap memorial cup 2014’. From this year onwards we will run the memorial cup in every Bikefest to keep Steve’s presence and spirit on his beloved Ashton Court test route alive.

The event is a ‘one category fits all’ affair (so only one big category) where teams of any size battle out to be the worthy winner of the cup and get invited to drink a drop of cider (encouraged but not mandatory) half way around the lap in Steve’s honour. The winning team will take away a very special trophy, which will stay with them for one year before it gets handed onto the next winner at the 2015 Bristol Bikefest. Every rider will receive a special ‘Steve Worland ride singletrack hard & drink a swig of cider per lap memorial cup 2014’ gift.

As Steve was an advocate of everything retro, unusual and quirky but also very often ahead of the time (the man rode 650b wheels years before we got our head around 29ers) we invite everybody to ride in retro gear and bring along that retro or unusual bike (anything goes as long as it is safe).

Proceeds of the event will go to pay for a defibrillator as well as to the Psoriasis Association Charity which were both chosen by Steve’s partner Jo and his daughter Holly. Further to that we hope to run an exciting ‘bike bits and pieces’ auction at the end of Saturday’s racing action which will also be donated to aforementioned charity.

Entries:

To enter teams simply go through the entry facilities which can be found on www.bike-fest.com and enter the 12 hour event as normal. The only difference to the normal Bikefest entries is that we ask the memorial cup riders to add ‘SWMC” at the beginning of their team name. Team which are already in the event can be moved over by simply sending an email to [email protected]. Please keep in mind that there will be no age categories and that all teams irrespectively of their size will also be in that one and only category.