The Grand Venue in Clitheroe is more used to hosting blues bands and cinema nights, but on Sunday just gone the crowd had a more rugged look to them (though many looked like they liked a bit of live blues too to be honest…)
Appearing on stage was GT rider and professional adventurer, Hans Rey, for a one night organised by Random Adventure a new venture that aims to bring interesting mountain bike related speakers to suitably sized venues around the north. Given the respectable size of the crowd, who’d all paid good money to be there, it’s something that there’s a demand for (as we found out with our own ‘Evening with Ned‘ last year.)
Hans had also used the opportunity of being in the north to call up his old friend Steve Peat to see if he was free that day. It turned out that he was and a few stunned bystanders got the unique scene of Peaty and Hans taking in a couple of cheery laps of Gisburn trail centre on the Sunday afternoon, sitting around for tea and sandwiches and, well, just being mountain bikers really…
Once he got on to the stage, to great applause, Hans proceeded to give a hugely informative and wide-ranging talk in an easygoing style. With the aid of hundreds of slides, he covered the whole history of Hans Rey from his early trials bike start to his most recent adventure with Danny MacAskill in their attempt to summit Kilimanjaro (something that you can read all about in the next issue of Singletrack Magazine, out early April).
With a short break in the middle for top ups of beer, the evening ran from 7.30pm, right up to the venue curfew of 10pm, with no time for a planned Q&A session. No one seemed to mind, though, Hans had covered every topic from his adventures on his own and with Peaty (who joined him on stage for a while), those Irish cliff shots (and the pubs) and his own Wheels4Life charity, with a mix of chat, slides and film clips.
With many Singletrack forum faces in the crowd, we’re sure you had your own take on the evening, but from our point of view, it was great to see a(nother) legend of the sport taking the time to prepare an immersive and slick slideshow and to cover just about every topic that the audience wanted to hear. We’ll look forward to more of this in the future.
