Rides & Events
2007 May 11
2007 Big Ring Challenge Race Summary
Participants and spectators had a great time at GHORBA’s Big Ring Challenge 2007 that took place over the weekend of May 5th and 6th. This year’s race was presented by Sun and Ski Sports, and is GHORBA’s 6th race to date—we started back in 2003. The race venue was again in the beautiful Sam Houston National Forest, at the Double Lake Recreational Area.
This race is also GHORBA’s biggest annual fundraiser for needed resources to build trails, continue advocacy with land owners and land managers, run the Sprockids program for underprivileged children, and teach trail building and riding skills.
The theme this year was “The Race to Build Trails.” The BRC 2007 also highlighted local bike shops in the Houston Area and stressed the importance of cyclists supporting _local) shops, especially those that support all forms of our sport in our area.
We had a record “Fun-Events Saturday” attendance this year. The Expo Area included the “Lumberjack Challenge.” We also used the Expo area for the Kids’ Kup and other Fun Events.
The Kids’ Kup had huge participation. Our friends at Planetary Cycles organized the bunny hop race, a slow race, a ghost ride contest, and the grand finale was the “Huffy Toss”. Many of the local bike shop sponsors took part this year in a friendly rivalry of ghost riding and Huffy-tossing that made the event quite spirited.
Saturday night was a blast again with Karaoke, and a movie screening by the Toyota FJ Cruiser Team who set up a huge screen and showed some great mountain bike movies.
The race day—Sunday provided some awesome weather and a near GHORBA record of racers. We had nearly 500 racers participate, and barring a communication snafu (we apologized to the racers that got pulled), the race proceeded well. Some of the complements received included:
Thank you GHORBA for a great race. You organized a fun weekend. I especially like how you handled the group camping situation. It was cheap and easy. I was impressed when I went to the entrance attendant and they had my name on a list from registering the camp site with Bikereg. There were plenty of great camp spots and the day activities were fun. Thanks also to Mr. Bill for putting on the Kids Cup. My kids enjoyed the training wheel division and I think the medals got them pumped for more racing. The obstacles under the Red Bull banner were cool too. ... I look forward to it next year.
Once again, an EXCELLENT race guys, GHORBA hit one out of the park. The new start/finish design was very good, much less confusion and traffic than previous years. The new section of trail was good, can’t wait for the other mile to get cut in as well. And the bottomless beer was icing on the cake!
I’ve not had time to slow down enough to send you guys an email to tell you what a fantastic job you did with the race. Every racer I spoke with had a blast. ... I’m quite sure there were a ton of new racers there, more than any other this series for sure. That is the beauty of 2Lake. .... anyway, super job …
Sponsors for this year’s race included BikeLand, New Belgium Brewery, Pearland Cycles along with BikeSport, Candace Mann Realty, Clif Bar, Cyclone Cycles, Innova Electronics, Planetary Cycles, REI, Webster Bicycle, Daniel Boone Cycles, and Sweat Gutr.
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By: Veljko
May 11