Just received my copy of Singletrack Issue 51 in the post where you will find a long term test of the Golden Willow Scandium on page 60. Dave “360″ Clarke (no relation to techno God) writes: “it really does seem like you’re getting two bikes for one.”

We agree, watch out Tesco, Bionicon is on the warpath……

For those of you who haven’t noticed, Bionicon has a line of urban bikes, which just like our MTB’s don’t follow the usual rules….

A “stylish and functional urban machine” say the reviewers of ‘Cycling Plus’ in issue 224 (July 2009) awarding 8/10 points - we  can’t argue with that.

Wow, I survived Megavalanche….actually quite an achievement.

I’ve been meaning to come and ride the Mega for a long time, as usual I needed a kick up the arse from my biking neighbour Gavin to actually make it happen. Off we trundled to France in the official Bionicon Team UK Fiat Doblo racing machine. Loaded to the gills with bikes, tyres and every possible spare part you can imagine.

Training for the event and riding at altitude took us to Morzine & Pila (northern Italy, go there!) and eventually Alp Duez. After riding both qualifying and proper Mega tracks I decided on using an Ironwood for the qualifying and my Supershuttle for the actual race…yes it’s a hard life being a bike industry bitch.

All was going swimmingly well in Friday’s qualifying, after a shockingly bad start I’d clawed my way past lots of riders to about 38th place. Then at the top of the last climb my chain snapped, bugger. Even a high speed repair allowed about 60 slower riders to overtake me. Overtaking on the loamy singletrack wood trails was fun but limited. I finished the qualifying race 102nd in 37 minutes.

This meant I missed both the main race (top 45 finishers from each 200 qualifying group) and the “Promo” race (next 45 finishers) - I would be racing the “Megaffinity” race on Sunday, directly after the main race departure. This had the advantage of missing the mass start with flying bodies and bikes raining from the heavens - a good thing.

The bad news was that after 450 riders had passed over the glacier the snow became totally unrideable. What was a fun high speed blast in practice became a frustrating, dangerous out of control trudge across 2 km of mush…oh well. Still I was 39th in the Affinity race with a time of 1 hr 25 min 31 seconds….just a bit behind overall winner Remy Absalon’s winning time of 49 minutes.

So I’m officially addicted! I’ll have to go back and do it again! I’m sure this is the secret of the event, 2/3 of the competitors have to return every year to see if they can actually make it into the main race. Oh and there’s the small matter of an epic 2500 meter descent with snow, rocks, alpine meadows and the finest woodland trail you’ve ever seen…