Iain & Paul recently travelled to Växjö (various pronunciations available) in Sweden to spread the Moto Gymkhana love.
So Sweden. Famous for; Ikea, ABBA, forests & meatballs. Not as well known for, but perhaps more importantly, one of the largest national motorcycle safety organisations; Sveriges MotoCyklister (SMC) or in English; Swedish Motorcyclists Association. https://www.svmc.se/om-smc/organisation/
With around 65,000 members and train 10,000 riders each year. This is from a population of 10 million. Significantly, they are advisors on motorcycle safety both nationally and internationally.
But how did Moto Gymkhana West Midlands get involved? Well in January Staffan Nordin (the SMC head of training) reached out to us saying “Moto Gymkhana is not currently practiced in Sweden” and was looking for Moto Gymkhana training. And he chose MGWM to provide that training… lucky us!
The weekend was full on; Friday evening we began with a classroom session covering various aspects of Moto Gymkhana, including; what our great sport is, where it came from, how it works, benefits, culture & so forth. This included an open forum for Q&As. Both Iain and I were impressed by the quality of questions asked and their superb English! Certainly better than mine! Though to be fair, nearly all the attendees were trainers, so that level of experience made our work much easier.
Saturday brought on the 1st riding of the weekend. We started it all off with the favourite GP8. After all, it is the global standard we all work to. The 1st times were very promising, with around half of the riders doing sub 50 second times, plus one at 37 seconds. Handy skills. One comment was “who knew doing figure of eights could be so much fun.” After that, we moved on to some other exercises & then a small example course. They loved it! 5 of the faster (read as ‘competitive’?) riders also took on some tail-chasing and pretty much nailed it.
Then in the evening, we gave them another presentation centred around course building, most was to do with the various considerations that must be accounted for. Like; will it be for practice/training or competition, will there be more than one rider on the course at once, fast & slow sections, etc. We also showed some examples of courses that had been used in various countries. This was a shorter session, because we gave them homework; design a course for the next day!
On Sunday we all adjourned to the practice car park – big thanks to Euromaster for letting us use this. Then the fun began! They started by splitting into sub-groups and built sections that caught their eyes the night before. Then put in joining obstacles. We only gave advice. The whole course was built, amended and was ready to ride in under 2 hours! Super impressive. Even more so was that it incorporated everything we has passed on & would have been suitable anywhere. The riding was at a high standard and quite competitive. We finished up with a few different little training courses, including the Japanese ‘A’ course. After which, everyone was comfortably worn out.
Feedback from all present was super positive; so much learned, new friends made and SMC already have their 1st Moto Gymkhana event planned!
Biggest thanks to Staffan Nordin & Petter Hammarbäck for organising a truly excellent weekend. Let’s do it again sometime.
Also I can’t leave out Ted, who journeyed with us & took these photos; cheers mate!
