The British Downhill Series Needs You In Llangollen

The British Downhill Series (BDS) are appealing for more entries; organiser Si Patton writes:
“Entries available for all categories of the HSBC UK National Downhill Series Presented by GT Bicycles Round 4 at Llangollen on the 19th and 20th of August. Please note you do not need a Race Licence if you are entering either the ‘Open’ category or either of the two ‘Trail Bike’ Categories: 19-29 years or the 30 plus category.”

You can find out more and enter here.

As it says, in the past few months, they’ve launched a trail bikes category that requires no race license. This certainly opens the event up to a wider field of racers, though not all BDS fans are happy about it, with a few purist downhillers grumping in the comments.

Late entries are a typical problem that event organisers face, with people spending months of the fence about an event, then expressing surprise if it can’t go ahead. On top of that, costs for most things have gone up sharply since the referendum on EU Membership, and that includes all kinds of things racers don’t really see or think about, but that event organisers frequently lose sleep over. Concurrently, sponsorship budgets have not really increased in that same period. According to outgoing organiser Si Patton, the economy is biting very deeply into the BDS – without entries picking up for the rest of this year, it seems it might not happen in future.

It was only a couple of months ago that the BDS had to cancel a round in Moelfre:

“It is with great regret that we must announce the cancellation of Round 4 of the HSBC UK | National Downhill Series in Moelfre.
This has been a difficult decision to make, but due to the low number of pre-registered riders making the event impossible to deliver, we have been left with no choice but to cancel. All riders entered have already been withdrawn and refunded.”

Hopefully, they won’t have to cancel the whole BDS in 2018.