Victoria Ave School breeding future Olympians

Teresa Douglas from East City BMX Club (NZ) reflects: 

Victoria Ave School truly embraced the upcoming Olympic Games by allocating the students to each of the Olympic countries and competing for playground bragging rights.

The weather held off long enough for their amazing opening ceremony and first day of games events. The East City BMX Club were represented by Corin and Joel Douglas, Scott Clark, Jesse Inia-Brown, Kurt Bagby, Tess Bates and myself; supported greatly by Cyclexpress, Richard McLachlan, Avanti Waipuna, ABD Bikes, Clinton Tudor and North Harbour BMX.

To close out the opening ceremony proceedings, the East City BMX team performed a riding display consisting of manuals, bunny hops, jumps and gate starts in front of more than 600 primary school students. The screams from the students to jump ever higher was incredible and the session finished with autograph hunters.

Following a short break to set up a short race course, which included a couple of obstacles for the kids to ride over, the racing started in earnest. Sixteen of the 197 year 5 and 6 students were selected to race for their adopted Olympic countries and needless to say these kids are champions in the making.

After a series of heats and run offs, the winners were decided and presented with their awards at the concluding prize giving. Not to be out-done by the kids, there was even a teachers’ race and if I'm not mistaken, there was no shortage of teacher race volunteers!

It was an absolutely fabulous and humbling day; one that we will relish for quite some time to come.

We [East City BMX Club] have been invited back to Victoria Ave School towards the end of the year and given the response we received, we would love to be part of similar events at this and other schools in the future.

We generated enough interest for one dad to visit one of our supporting bike shops that afternoon and if we can continue to make small in-roads like that, then we feel all our efforts will be more than justified.

Image courtesy of BikeNZ