2008 Blur LT - Press Release from Santa Cruz

This is the actual press release from Santa Cruz, click on the pictures to make them bigger and a lot easier to read.

Ibis Chooses Lopes, Lopes Chooses Ibis

Howdy ibis People,
Scot Nicol here, writing from Laguna Beach in Southern California, where we've just inked a deal with World Champion Brian Lopes to ride for little old Ibis Cycles! This is great news for you, for us and for Brian.

If you don't know already the quick story on Brian is that he's currently World 4X Champ (his fourth set of World Champion stripes), and has been World Cup Champ Six times and USA National Champ 9 times.
Brian is obviously a super talented rider, and beyond that he's a personable and approachable guy who is a lot of fun to be around.

The great news for many of you Ibis distributors is that Brian has a very busy worldwide travel schedule and wherever possible will be happy to participate in events and promotions for you on behalf of Ibis. In fact, starting in early April he'll be flying the Ibis colors for our Philippine distrbutor Pinoy Bikes at the 6th Annual Terry Larrazabal Bike Festival in the Philippines.

In addition to promotional efforts, Brian will be collaborating with us on our new product development, starting, well, a couple days ago.

We would like to encourage all of you to take advantage of our collaboration with Brian however you can. We are hoping to get a lot of new action photography with Brian and will share those with you whenever possible for your own promotional efforts.

Brian's tentative schedule is listed below and also attached as a word document. Brian is open to visiting you if we can fit it into his schedule. We think you'll enjoy riding and talking with Brian, he's a great guy.

We'll try to keep you all informed of Brian's schedule as it is updated, probably though a link on our website and probably his.
Speaking of that, to learn more about Brian, go to http://www.brianlopes.com/ for the full skinny.

Please feel free to add this great news to your website, and don't hesitate to contact me or Brian should you have any questions.
His email address is brian@brianlopes.com

We have one other piece of Ibis business today too. Tom will be sending all of you an email soon asking you to subscribe to our distributor list. This is so that we can more easily send email out to you, informing you of news from Ibis. Like this news about Brian Lopes. So when you see an email from IBIS HQ COMMUNIQUE, please click the link to subscribe.

Cheers, over and out.
Scot

NZ National Champs XC Pictures

George Bennet 2nd U19

Cathy Hamer 3rd Pro-Elite

Josh Barley 8th Pro-Elite

2008 New Zealand mtb Champs, Wellington

The NZ Santa Cruz Team had a good day in the office and the NZ MTB champs in Wellington.

First up, Tim Wilding set the standard by winning the Hill Climbs Champs on his new Blur XC.

Check out Tim in action of TV3

New 2008 Blur LT

Sneak Peak, don't tell anyone. More details soon, but it's good and you do NEED one.

Hogging the Podium, North Island Final, Palmy.

Tim Wilding and Josh Barley, got it together for the North Island XC Cup final in Palmerston North.

Tim Wilding just got his new Blur XC together for this round and it seemed to do the trick. 2nd place and only a minute behind Stu Houltham (1st place).

Josh Barely (also riding a Blur XC) just raced his best pro-elite XC race, his 3rd place result shows he is someone to keep an eye on.

The Santa Cruz riders hogged the podium in Palmy! Good Work Guys.

Weir was Heir

Happy to be at the start of Peaking Ridge

Mark Weir in Action

One of the perks of the job is getting to meet lots of cool people from all over the world, but my highlight so far is having Mark Weir, Sally Weir and Jiro Nakamura stay at my house.....with their NZ support team Laurance Mote (Ground Effect) and Caleb Smith (Spoke magazine). I can honestly say that these guys were fantatastic and have great taste in bikes. Did you know that Laurance can whip up a mean cheese cake. The few days they were in Nelson were filled with riding (Peaking Ridge and Wakamarina). A picture is worth one thousand words, so I won't rave, I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Brake Burner 2008, Team Santa Cruz

With the Nationals race in Rotorua and the Brake Burner in the Queenstown on the same weekend, a different type of rider was required for the Brake Burner.

Fenella & Barny Robinson and Cullum Smith were called into action to represent the NZ Santa Cruz team for the Brake Burner.

The Team finished 2nd in the Mixed class and 19th Overall (132 entries)...so basically they kicked arse. Their weapons of choice were a couple of Nomads and the new Bullit.

The Brake Burner also attracted Mark Weir (WTB/Santa Cruz/Fox) sponsered rider, he finished 2nd in the solo class behind local rider Geoff Small, who now has won it two years running.

Annika Smail Wins UCI Cat1 XC race in Rotorua on her Nomad

A very successful weekend in Rotorua, with probably one of the most amazing results in XC racing history. Annika Smail won the Category 1 XC race on her Santa Cruz Nomad, in the age of weight weenies raving about the advantages of light bikes and XC racing dominated with hard-tails, Annika blitzed the field on her 28lbs Nomad (with a gravity dropper seatpost too).
There is no doubting that Annika is a world class XC racer.

The other Santa Cruz/Bike Culture racer to stand on the top of the podium in the weekend was Mike Metz, winning the Vet1 downhill race on his Santa Cruz Bullit.

The weekend was quite succesful for NZ Santa Cruz and Ibis racers.
Jenna Makgill, finished 3rd in the pro-elite DH women.
Aari Barrett, finished 1st in junior men DH and placing 6th overall.
Pete Cooper, got a 4th in junior men DH.
Eddie Masters, still recovering from a broken heal, placed 11th in the pro-elite DH.

The XC podiums were a little more elusive for the team. The local riders seem to dominate the Rotorua round.
Chris Faithfull, convincingly won the Master3 class on first race back for mtb retirement and on an Ibis Mojo.