Champion

Well, what a shock this week has been. If you read my last post you will know that although I had a great last cross race, I hadn’t done quite enough to win the West Midlands league Overall, although I thought it would be close.
The results from the race got posted that night and confirmed that I had finished 6th in the race with Pete Banham 7th. However, this biggest surprise was to see that Matt Gee had finished 15th!
As the overall positions in the league hadn’t been updated, I sat there calculating time and time again to figure out the overall and it showed that I would finish up with 716 points and Matt with 708 meaning that I was the winner. Fantastic, great, awesome I thought, but in the back of my mind I knew that he finished closer than that and as it happens they did get his result wrong, the question was though, by how much?

The next 7 day were the most nerve racking days of my cycling career so far. I knew that he had finished 3 or 4 places back from me which meant that I still had a chance of winning the title. Everyday I would check the results to see if they had changed, but nothing. It went on like this for a whole week before finally on the following Saturday, the results had been updated with Matt placed in 10th.
Soon after the league positions were updated and showing that I had won the league by 2 points with Matt in second and last years U23 winner and overall second, Rob Burns Jr in 3rd place. So all of the top 3 places were won by U23 riders with 2 points in it, I knew it would be close but bloody hell, it really was close.

As I said before, I owe an awful lot to my team mate Pete who allowed me to cross the line before him at the last round. If he hadn’t, I would have finished with 2 points less, this would have meant that me and Matt would have been tied at the top! Then I would have gone to the tie breaker which was the rider who finished highest in the last race, which luckily was me, but still, that would have been really tense.

To say im happy is an understatement. I never thought in a million years I win the Cyclocross League, cross is just something that I do to keep me ticking over in winter, I don’t train specifically for cross, I usually go to races on the back of a very hard training week, I don’t have 2 bikes, I cant run for beans and I hate the cold!!!! Bit of a turn up for the books hey.
Even so, this is my first major series win and I will treasure it forever. So now I just have to thank everyone that helped me on the way to the win. Rich and John Preece for giving up there Sundays to take me to most of the races, thanks a million guys and I really appreciate it. Thanks to my Folks for giving up weekends as well and putting up with all of my shit and agro when things didn’t go well. Thanks to Echelon-Spiuk who was my registered team when I started the season, Alan Shirley who would come and give me never ending support, thanks to Cult Racing for taking me in to the team and Paul for his help and support and of course thanks to Pete for being a great team mate, a great competitor and a great wheel to hang on to on the big flat courses. Cheers mate.

Now just to collect my Trophies, WOOPWOOP!!!!