Does anyone else think it would be great if this event came back?

It’s what got me in to biking many years ago and without it don’t think I would hear ever started.

Wasn’t really in to bikes at the time but got taken to it by a mate in the school holidays.
I owe that mate a lot for taking me.

We returned the following year but unfortunately it never happened again. That was 1999.

I know there was a stabbing a few years prior to this but it ran a few years after the incident so don’t know if that’s what stopped it? Pretty sad someone felt the need to us a knife on someone. What an utter lowlife.

Great as the event was, it went downhill massively after the stabbing. The problem was it was such a big event, it was attracting lots of people who weren’t going for the cycling, but were going for many other reasons (including to steal bikes, and/or fight other people with or without weapons).

In its glory years, Mountain Mayhem brought a lot of that atmosphere back to Eastnor, but to a significantly more mature crowd (which was crucial as far as the organisers were concerned). The only problem is, if you’re organising an event where the Booze and the Party aren’t the main event, everything else comes and goes with fashion. 24hr racing is way less fashionable now than it was 10 years ago, and then of course you have the damage caused to the Eastnor site in the horrific conditions of 2012, meaning it hasn’t returned to said site.

I’d love to see something like the Malvern Classics again, many people have tried (including Singletrack themselves, with their own Lee Quarry Weekenders), but nobody has succeeded and events have come and gone rather quickly for the most part. The Classic worked cos with 40,000 people in a field, but only 10% of them riding bikes, there was a huge party atmosphere where the cycling was kinda incidental, but those actually racing felt like superheroes with so many people cheering them on all the way (even Fort Bill WC only gets something like 10,000 spectators).

Doubt we’ll see anything like it again sadly.

Highly unlikely, Eastnor estate’s who’s land it was run on had great success duringythe mayhem era,they’ll want to see the same return no matter how small the field. They also have the mud runner event’s there so why bother?

Just go to an all nighter at Farmer John’s.

Very nicely put Mark.. 🙂

It was a great event back in the day – I seem to rember racing there in 1993, in the summer hols after doing my GCSEs! It was a hot and endlessly sunny summer, such as they seemed to be. The whole ‘crowd’ support thing really does come back to me now. You did practically feel like John Tomac coming down the last grassy descent (with a few ‘jumps’ on it if I recall), at the end of each lap.

Ohhh yes, and then the skies opened – and Sunday’s race was an absolute mud bath. Horrible… (It probably wasn’t quite that ‘perfectly’ sunny back then after all, then eh!)