Sean Lamberth
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard Jul 2024
Sean Lamberth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Cyclists tend to find a bit of a challenge after the seventh lap. Seventh lap? Boy, oh boy. It can be, yeah. Seventh, yeah. Most of the really, really strong ones will do it very, very quickly and they'll ride it. Some of the weak, well, say weak ones, there aren't weak, there's no weak cyclocross riders. They'll probably carry their bike.
Okay, so the start area, which we like to call the start of the village area, where there's music and there's food and that sort of stuff, and where they all line up, is kind of in the middle of the park, opposite the main priory school, I would say, which is a bit up the hill. Then the course goes out towards Bell Street.
up the hill and then it picks up the tarmac path which we're on now all the way up to the top and then we dive in, in through the woods lots of off cambers and sticks and trees to avoid you will see in a second as we dive into the woods It's a fairly steep hill this. This is probably the easiest part of the course.
They should get lots of traction, and the fast ones will tend to use this as their getaway point, because when it comes into the woods, which we're coming up to now, basically it's very, very tricky. There's lots of very sharp turns, off camber, Which means your bike can slip away at any time, because we're going to cut through there. Cut through here, through the bracket? Yeah, normally.
Oh, there's a track there, is it? Yeah, we just cut through there. But luckily for us, we've been supported very well by Rygate and Baxter Council, who help us with the clearing and stuff just before the race. They've actually been amazing with the whole event, just really helping us out. They're really trying to encourage the sport in the borough, so...
This will be clear. Believe it or not, there's grass under there. They're picking up a bit of speed. They're coming into the woods now. Got a few sort of little obstacles they're going to worry about.
how much do you clear the track of of small tweaks and so on that could get caught in spokes or don't you worry is that part of the jeopardy there is jeopardy but no the week before we'll have like a raking crew right and we'll go through through the woods on the course we'll rake probably about a four meter course so there will be a few bits that are falling down in the meantime but it will look different than it is today today it looks a little bit like a
wooden floor, although it is quite clear. Where are we going?
Actually, this woods, I think people do tend to respect it. It's actually very tidy when you walk around. Most people do tend to pick up their rubbish and don't generally see a lot of...
rubbish so we're coming down to that main wide sandy track between the two kind of hills at the back of priory park that's right and you're heading then they'll be heading back down we're going to take a very very tight right here if you can imagine the speed we're actually heading down now they're picking up speed yeah what they call an off camber so it means you you will be turning but also but this is very slippery yeah because all the dead leaves yeah yeah this is um it's like beach beach mulch i would think
Now it's not too bad when it's dry. When it's a little bit damp, it gets very slippery. And a lot of bikes will sort of tend to drift, I think is the word, off to the left. And it's quite a tight turnaround. It's almost like a 180 turn, isn't it?
This, as you can see... If you've got five riders together, it's probably a three-and-a-half-metre gap. They're coming through here.
Yeah, everything's marked out with course tape. They know exactly where they're going. These guys are very skilful. But even so, they've got to work their way around. There's a first tight bend, picks up a bit more speed.
It's an obstacle, and you'll find that on... such cross courses like that sometimes happen in fields they will put logs to make that sort of thing which we've actually got naturally yeah so there's there's lots of very tight bends so there's actually five up and downs in this bit alone so again we go around another tight bend up again or slippy
up around this one this is like it gets progressively bigger so you've come around a big 180 you've come around a short bend then you've gone around a longer bend you're picking up speed again what kind of speeds we're talking about on the faster through the woods they're probably doing 25 mile an hour, I think. Pretty quick. That's pretty tasty, isn't it?
Pretty quick, yes. And you could, well, this is not grippy. No. Luckily, it doesn't hurt if you fall over on it. It's just like wood bark or mulch, isn't it? Yeah, it's mulchy, yeah, I'd say. I mean, it will be cleared, so all this, what I was saying before, this will be raked, so you won't have all the sticks and stuff.
And you can actually see, this is part of the course that was laid out from last, if you look carefully, you can actually see the arch. Oh, OK, yes, yeah. So there will be people overtaking. So how did you come up with this course? Is it just a matter of knowing the woods like the back of your hand?
So I teach, well, I coach junior cycle racing for Red Hill Raiders in Woodhatch, in the Surrey County Council car park on Sundays. And a lot of the younger kids were getting really... excited by the sort of new wave superstar cyclists so we've got like Tom Pidcock and Matthew van der Poel and sort of Europeans and they all came from cyclocross so they said what's cyclocross?
teach us cyclocross so we As it happens, my daughter goes to school at Priory and every morning I'd walk the dog through here and thought, this would make a really good cyclocross course. Surrey have been really good. They're in control of the tarmac path at the back. So they've come forward and said, look, They'll close it off for the duration of the race for us.
So Surrey County Council, Ryagate, and then some local sponsors as well. We've got Pilgrim doing the beer and prizes. We've got Maison de Velo, the bike shop. Schoolhouse, the massage, sports massage people. We've got a company called SOS Maintenance, which is like a local rescue DIY company. They're providing, like, the course tape, which is ridiculous.
Showing 1–20 of 34 · page 1 of 2
Next →