The first year of the Yeti NZ Enduro Devo team is a wrap. Congratulations to all the riders for their awesome efforts.
Our focus in this first year was to to help these riders as much as we could with their personal goals and to have some fun riding and racing bikes together. It was pretty relaxed, but we tried to give the riders some knowledge about training, nutrition and other aspects of racing through fortnightly zoom calls.
Thanks to our other sponsors for help making it happen : Yeti Cycles, Fox Suspension, Shimano NZ. And for product support from Blue Shark, Marleen and Wide Open.
Here is a quick overview of the year :
We all met up together at the first major event, The Phoenix Enduro. It was an awesome weekend getting to know everyone and figure out how we wanted to run these events from a team perspective. Ollie showed his home advantage by smashing everyone, winning the U21 category outright and earning himself a spot in the pro field for the coming years world cups. Xanthe and Zoe also raced extremely well... See full overview of the race here
During summer we took the big Yeti van and gave the riders support at a few major events around the country. We turned up to Wellington for the Capital Enduro with 8 riders, and got some solid results, then tripped down to Dunedin for the 3 Peaks Enduro, which after 10 years organising I finally got to race. Bradley also proved just how fast our 160E E bike is too... read more here.
From here the riders dispersed around the country. Some did national DH champs and had some stellar results, including Poppy 3rd Junior Women and Joe 2nd Junior Men.
The next team event was the Cable Bay Enduro, which was also hosting the national enduro champs, the first time NZ has had such a title! Loui and Jess, two of our favourite Nelson riders, also organised this event and they did SUCH a good job. Rain caused havoc on race day and lots of our riders struggled. Our best results were Xanthe taking 2nd in U21, Cooper winning U17.
Finally I organised a trip with eight of the riders over to Tasmania for the first two World Cups as it was an opportunity too good to miss. Check out my full report here from that trip.
While that concluded our official support we were providing to riders, we had four riders keen to take to the skies and head to Europe to race the next 3 rounds of the world cup. With the international Yeti team providing support for 2 of our riders, it was an amazing opportunity for them to get some amazing race experience and prove themselves on the international stage again. Checkout our overview of how it went for them here.
Our planning for the 23/24 season is already well underway. The biggest decision around who will be in the team has already been decided. We are not planning to make any changes to the team at all, so to allow everyone a full two years in the programme, which we feel is an appropriate amount of time to really effect positive change. We will likely look to bring new riders in again this time next year, so if you are interested in joining the team, we are sorry, but you may have to wait another year before we can consider you. In the meantime we are alway open to more ambassadors who bring the stoke and are showing huge potential. So please don't hesitate to get in touch and tell us your story.
We have recently put together a calendar of NZ MTB events to assist with season planning, so you are welcome to use and share this around too. We will be launching into the new year with a training camp in Rotorua at the end of September, but have yet to decide which events we will focus on.
We run this team purely for the love of the sport, and we do it on the smell of an oily rag and we could really use some support. If anyone is interested in supporting the team financially through sponsorship or donations, please get in touch with me. kashi@blackseal.co.nz
Cheers everyone
Kashi