Six teams entered for the Corporate Challenge (although one failed to turn up), including a team of 4 from AVN (Mark Wickersham, Shane Lukas, Stephen Holmes and Mark Withington (of Kenneth Morris)).  The event was a relay-style, 4 x 1.5km laps of the street circuit around Salford. 

It was clearly going to be a tough challenge with the Geoff Thomas Foundation including a former GB number one cyclist in its team.  And it was made even tougher when the AVN team was “taken out”, presumably due to our fearsome reputation.  The start/finish area was only just wide enough for 5 riders so absolute chaos reigned at the changeover with the riders coming into the changeover area at speeds in excess of 20 mph having to stop and tag their next rider.  One team decided not to stop the conventional way using brakes but instead to stop by riding into Mark Wickersham, falling onto his wheel and sitting on his bike.  By the time bikes and riders were untangled it was obvious that team AVN were too far behind to have any impact on the race.

 

Clearly this was a pre-meditated tactic to destroy team AVN from winning (which I’m sure we would have done… or at least we would definitely have got into the top 4).

 

Anyway, it was great fun.  And it was great to do something more to help Geoff Thomas and his foundation.