Graeme Simpson: Ask not what your club can do for you

The Rotorua Mountain Bike Club - a very important cog since the mid-1990s. Photo / Mike Robertson/Trailside Imagery

To paraphrasing John Fitzgerald Kennedy's presidential inauguration speech in January 1961: ask not what your Rotorua Mountain Bike Club can do for you, ask what you can do for your mountain bike club.

Well, as a starter for 10, you can join: www.mtbclub.org.nz

The cost is a tiny percentage of what you spent on your bike. Or how much you spend on coffee every year, actually…

Then, follow the club on Facebook and Instagram to learn more.

What do you get in return?

Let's start with quite a large chunk of 180km of some of the finest mountain bike trails in the world, recognised with gold status by the International Mountain Bicycling Association.

I was part of the process of achieving that status and I can vouch for the authenticity of the award and how it is evaluated.

For more than 20 years from the mid-1990s, your club was the volunteer driving force behind trail maintenance and development - from hands-on digging to making sure the paperwork was in order.

This is a club that was at the heart of the 2006 UCI Mountain Bike and Trials World Championships, as well as many National and Oceania Championships.

If you think any of these were easy, you weren't there.

Management of the bike park is now the domain of the Rotorua Trails Trust.

The work by the club continues but the focus is now on rider development, events (including the Giant 2W Gravity Enduro and Triple Crown) and the 1st Emergency Response Unit.

I'm a life member of the club and receiving that honour was a very, very proud moment.

Last year, I did make a donation, though. The money was going to the unit and I had experience of their importance after a crash on Be Rude Not To that left me unable to put weight on my right leg. Man, it hurt.

Back in the day, I probably would have had to scoot out, somehow. Instead, after a phone call to 0800 WHAKA 1, Budgie Woods from Peak Safety rolled up in the unit's 4-wheeler to haul my sorry butt to Waipa. I was at the Emergency Department at Rotorua Hospital a quarter of an hour later.

You don't have to be a club member to qualify for this service, which isn't cheap to run. Did I mention how tiny a percentage of the cost of your bike membership of the club is?

In some other parts of the country, like Hawke's Bay, access to trails is by a paid membership card. Imagine if the thousands of riders who enjoy the Whakarewarewa Forest, every year, had to shell out some sort of minimum charge?

Imagine how much revenue that would generate to improve services.

Membership will also get you exceedingly good discounts from the Pig and Whistle, Boss Lights, Zippy Central, Aly Bennett at Massage Recovery, Good Buzz Kombucha, Outdoorsman Headquarters and McDowells Professional Real Estate.

Member or not, you can find out more about what your club has done for you over the past year and the plans for the next year at the annual meeting: Monday August 26 at the Peak Safety office on the SCION campus with nibbles and drinks.