Campaign for mountain bike trails in Rivington

THE campaign to save trails in Rivington to be open for use by all mountain bikers is gathering speed - with the support of a popular mountain biking club in Manchester.

Reddish Vale Mountain Bikers are supporting the appeal for more rides to be kept open - or even built - around Rivington and offered up valuable advice about their successful campaign near Stockport.

"I am upset over the plans or risks to close off Rivington. and it begs the question what can we do? said Brian Cook, who has raised more than £1million with help from an enthusiastic local community for a new development.

"There's plenty you can do."

The full details of the proposal that Brian has headed up are available at Reddish Vale: Our Proposal

With mountain biking being a recognised Olympic sport it is important to have the facilities to train the new 'blood' coming into the sport. This facility could help produce some local stars for our 2012 Olympic team.

Brian's advice to boost mountain biking in and around the north west includes:

contacting the local PCT
talking to local schools
speaking to the culture secretary
talking to Tesco to help get some support for mountain biking
liaising with the council over the bridleways
contacting the IMBA

The proposal at Reddish Vale is to create world class facitites to train the MTB'ers of today and tomorrow. The proposal will be carried out in two distinct phase: The first phase will regenerate an area of open, flat boggy ground within Reddish Vale Local Nature Reserve (RV LNR) and provide a centre of excellence for all types of mountain biking and the second, The Tameside extension, will concentrate on a dowhhill (DH) track.

DH is a gravity assisted riding event usually against the clock on courses, which typically take two to five minutes to complete. As the name of this discipline implies, downhill races are held on steep, downhill terrain with no extended climbing sections, resulting in high speed descents with extended air time off jumps and other rocky obstacles.

It makes the concerns around Rivington seem small in comparison - but no less important. Sign up to our campaign.