Tuesday 27 September 2011

So why Mad Cow Racing?

An obvious question really!

Mad Cow Racing started back in 1990, when three friends, myself, Graham Pentney and Pete Davis decided to have a go at the then new sport of Mountain Bike Racing.

Decidedly mediocre in our performance we decided that what we need was some decent bikes and that could be acheived through sponsorship but to get sponsored we would need to perform better... a bit of a Catch 22 situation.

So instead we decided to look for a gimmick to get some attention and somehow (I do recall it involved many pints of Guiness) we came up with the idea of sticking small plastic horns to our bike helmets!

We then had to think of a suitable name, after working on various permutations of devils, vikings and cows we finally settled on "Team Mad Cow" partly as a result of Pete being a dairy farmer back then and the BSE crisis being front page news. This then switched to Mad Cow Racing at some point in our early history.

We raced under the team banner in a number of sports both collectively and as individuals and got involved in a very wide range of sports and gave ourselves the title of "International Multi Sport Race Team" we never actually raced at an international level but calculated that with my Italian ancestry and Pete's Mum being Swiss, we were truly "International".

Our mission in life was...

If it's fast, unstable or has the capacity to cause fear and great harm, we would race it.

Approaching the Team's 21st Birthday we recently listed the number of different sports and adventure pastimes we had participated in over those 21 years, OK so not all of them were under the banner of Mad Cow Racing but all were done whilst members of the team, it makes quite a list...

  • Cross Country Mountain Bike Racing
  • Downhill Mountain Bike Racing
  • Slalom/Dual Slalom Mountain Bike Racing
  • Cyclo Cross
  • Time Trialling
  • Marathon Mountain Bike Racing
  • Mountain Bike Orienteering
  • Enduro

  • Running (5km to ultra Marathon including cross country)


  • Fell Running

  • White Water Canoeing

  • Kayak Slalom

  • Canoe PoloRock Climbing

  • Dragon Boat Racing

  • Dualthlon

  • Triathlon

  • Mountain Triathlon (kayak/fell run/mountain bike)

  • Karate

  • Judo

  • Ju Jitsu

  • Surfing

  • Skiing

  • Snowboarding

  • Open Water Swimming

  • Moto Cross (Beach Racing)
  • Side Car Cross

  • And now of course... Rally Bike Racing

As noted above we are now 21 years old and clearly a commerative T-Shirt was required



Available to buy from HERE

And did we ever get the sponsorship we were after?

Well never really as a Team but both Pete and Graham went on to get sponsored rides with other mountain bike teams and we certainly got the recognition; to this day I get approached at bike races and get told "I remember you, you were one of the guys with those horns"

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