15/01/2018
And relax !!
Sitting with a beer in hand reflecting back on the events of the last few days Iām exhausted yet buzzing.
Most of all I am proud. Proud of the event that we delivered as a team, proud of the entire Hetton Hawks club and proud of the way so many people involved in North East Cycling put their hands up and volunteered to make it happen.
We didnāt just put on the national champs, we delivered a FANTASTIC national champs
A lot of comments or praise are directed towards me, but I am just a loud āvoiceā of the club and it wouldnāt be right for me to take any more credit than anyone else involved.
It was the Hetton team that won the bid, but it wasnāt just a Hetton team that delivered. It was a much wider team made up of the skills, energy and enthusiasm of the whole of the North East.
200 of us worked together, delivered together and had fun together.
Thank you.
I have thought about how I recognise everyone individually, but that would be a completely impossible task, or at least not one that you would read to the end!
I canāt name everyone, but I must name a few.
Lisa Cooke ā The brains of the operation and without her it wouldnāt have happened. Lisa took the Ā£40,000 cost and begged/borrowed/loaned/called in favours to shrink the costs down to Ā£18,000. She then spent 12 months working through the red tape pulling together an event plan that was 400 pages in length including an āemergency flood planā when we are nowhere near a river! She then managed logistics and risk for the event with an iron rod to keep you safe and us compliant.
Mike Hoy, Dave Mclean, Paul Cooke, Barry Hadnum who along with myself did whatever Lisa told us for 12 months to work through every element until the event we wanted to run was in sufficient detail to give Lisa the answers she needed to complete the paperwork.
The core group of grafters that were there from Friday morning until this afternoon!
The Car-park team who dealt with so much pressure to manage a limited space even though we were down to 6 spaces remaining at one point.
CXNE who committed to support us financially when we realised that even with a reduced cost of Ā£18k, we were well short of that amount with race fees and sponsors.
To our sponsors who gave us everything from posts, tape, barriers, artwork, printing, materials, food, clothing, bike maintenance, marshals musettes, prizes and good old hard cash!
To our marshals who stood out all day on the coldest points smiling when their teeth were chattering and often stood in points where the action wasnāt the best, but never complained.
To our course building team of 40 who turned up in the dark and managed the Herculean task of building a world-class course in 5 hours
Our sign-on team who just nailed it without fuss or fluster.
To our young Hetton riders who extracted ādonationsā for programmes by being cute!
To Darran Moore Photography who took our request for āa few photosā and managed our entire social media with over 1000 fantastic photos posted.
Our security crew who stepped up at short-notice to protect the course from locals with a fe**sh for tape snapping!
The doctors who gave their time for freeā¦ā¦ā¦because we couldnāt afford to pay them!
The course repairers who wandered the park all weekend with heavy bags to put right the rider-shaped-holes in the netting.
The police cadets who dealt with issues wonderfully and meant we didnāt have to dispatch our own 'measures'.
Springboard who bent over backwards to make everything we wanted possible.
Our ādo-anythingā team who covered everything from marshals food to toilet cleaning.
Basically, if you did 5 minutes for us then you were a cog in a large machine that wouldnāt have worked without you.
Iām bound to have forgotten to recognise somebodyā¦ā¦ā¦but Iām tired !!
The 2018 National CX Championships were in Hetton Lyons Country Park and we had a blast.
Our aim was to deliver an event that did the jersey proud which you all enjoyed, the feedback from the commissaires last night was that together we delivered an event that was WORLD-CLASS.
We are all incredibly proud of that.
CAN we ādoā a national?
Definitely.
WILL we do another......................
Mike Charlton
Chairman
Hetton Hawks
