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Huge thanks to everyone who came along or bought tickets for the fundraiser on Saturday night. We raised a fantastic £4,635 for Helen & Douglas House, a massive achievement for which we can all be really proud. This is our second year running the event and we are delighted to exceed last year’s figure of £4,000.

The event was held at The Chequers in Headington Quarry. Owner, Steve Jenkins, kindly gave us use of his pub for the second year in a row, and put on an excellent BBQ Banquet for the 100+ people that attended, with on site restaurant Aziz serving delicious curry.

The evening started with club president, Cheryl Reid, showing a moving video from Helen & Douglas House, and explaining why their work was so important.

We then got down to business with people queuing up to test their mettle in the Watt Bike challenge. Philip Ross produced the biggest power output for the men, and Eleanor Law took the crown for the ladies. Many thanks to David Brown from Aspiring Performance for bringing their Watt Bike out for us to use and running the challenge so successfully! Joe Graystone cycled the furthest distance on the Crazy Bike, which was unofficially measured at 1 metre.

The quiz was a fun smorgasbord of anagrams, cycling questions, ‘Guess the Gel’ and ‘What’s in Chris’ jersey pocket?’.

Over £3,000 of prizes were raffled on the night – sincere thanks to all our friends and sponsors who donated prizes:

Greenoak Construction
Beeline Bicycles
Custom Cycle Coaching
Take3
Iconic Cycling Events
Becci Curtis Yoga
Optimum Body
Ritual Chocolate
Peloton Espresso
Broken Spoke Co-op

As a result of your generosity, every penny of ticket sales and money raised is going directly to Helen & Douglas House.

The Condors have always been connected with the Oxford community so it’s great to have a lot of fun while also supporting a really important local charity caring for children, young adults and their families.

We hope to see you again next year!

Yesterday 4 teams of Cowley Road Condor cyclists took part in the ‘Tour de Charity Shop’ visiting Helen & Douglas House retail sites for a shopping spree with a difference. The concept was simple – ride to a shop, buy something, and wear it for the rest of the ride. Many an eyebrow was raised as the outfits became increasingly more bizarre. Cowley Road, Rose Hill, Abingdon and Wallingford were on the 30 mile loop and riders battled on through the rain to be rewarded with sunshine and a pint at the end.

£484 was raised including donations from members of the public who saw what we were doing and wanted to support us! Thank you to everyone who waved, tooted a car horn or gave us a smile on the way round.

A special chapeau to Steve Avery and Cheryl Reid for riding a tandem tricycle, Tim Van Hartevelt for riding a ramshackle fixie, and Lucy & Matt Wicks for bringing baby Jack in their trailer.

We are also organising a Condor BBQ and Quiz in aid of Helen & Douglas House on Saturday 9th September. Please join the event page here to find out more, tickets to go on sale shortly. Top raffle prize is a £2,000 road bike… don’t miss out!

In February we raised £4000 in our quiz and raffle and we’ve continued to top up the pot over the year.

In August our ‘Tour de Charity Shop’, conceived by president Cheryl, saw four teams raise £350 as they cycled round Helen & Douglas House shops and surprised Saturday shoppers as they gathered an increasingly bizarre collection of dresses and stuffed animals.

And at September’s annual hill climb championship, we raised a further £144 in donations with lots of Condors turning up despite the rain, and several in fancy dress.

Chapeau Condors!

Thanks to everyone who came along or bought tickets for the fundraiser on Saturday night. We’ve raised a staggering £4,000 for Helen & Douglas House, a huge achievement for which we can all be really proud. We initially set a very aspirational target of £3,000 and never dreamt that we would go this far above and beyond, especially for a first time event.

The Condors have always been embedded and connected with the Oxford community, so it’s great to have had a lot of fun while also supporting a really important local charity caring for children, young adults and their families. If you missed it yesterday, please watch this video to find out why we wanted to support them.

We sold more than 150 tickets and had over 100 of you there on the night. It was great to see a contingent of Mickey Cranks riders there too – chapeau for making the trip over from Witney! As the newest club to join the Oxfordshire Road Race League we look forward to riding with (and against!) them this coming season.

Huge thanks to Steve Jenkins, landlord at The Chequers who provided the curry and venue for free, and to all the Condors and Condor-friends who donated prizes:

Beeline Bikes and Greenoak Construction
Tom Kirk at Custom Cycle Coaching
Iconic Cycling Events
Fuelit Nutrition
Broken Spoke Co-Op
Ritual Chocolate
Mike Devaney
Sarah Harries
Dave Dyer
Becci Curtis

As a result of your generosity, every penny of ticket sales and money raised is going directly to Helen & Douglas House.

Thanks also go to Dave Dyer, Jack Wilcock and Sam Elliot, our teacher trio who gave us a great quiz (who knew maths could be so much fun – I’ll never look at a graph in the same way again).

And chapeau to our watt bike challengers, particularly Kat Young for taking the women’s prize with a massive 916 watts and Andy Ruane with 1620 watts for the men’s. Special mention has to go to Pete Smith who knocked our very own one-man watt machine Mike Devaney down to third place! Many thanks to David Brown and Louise Brown from Stoke Mandeville Tri for bringing their Watt bike out for us to use and running the challenge so successfully!

We hope to make this an annual event and have lots of other exciting ideas in the pipeline to help raise awareness of this special charity and raise additional funds. Later in the year we will be running a ‘mini shop audax’ where Condors must ride round local Helen & Douglas charity shops, purchasing an item of clothing from each and wearing them for the duration of the ride. And near Christmas we’d like to organise a ‘muddy santas’ cyclocross ride! But our next event will be a fun filled ‘cream tea and cake’ affair led by Kristen Lovelock. It will be held on a farm down near Garsington and may feature welly wanging..! Stay tuned for more details coming soon!

Some of you may be aware that the Condors are affiliated with Helen & Douglas House, you may have even spotted their logo on our kit, but how much do you really know about what they do?

This week myself and some other Condors got the chance to see first-hand what amazing work they do. Tucked away between Iffley Road and Cowley road (I didn’t even know it was there) it’s a very special place that looks after children and young people as they face life limiting conditions.

Richard Quayle and Annaliese Taylor took us on a tour, showing us some of the different areas and explaining the services they offer. It’s such an incredible place – beautifully decorated and full of interesting, fun things that help to lift the mood and forget why you are there for a moment.

There are lots of amazing things I could say about Helen & Douglas House, but the thing that struck me most was how they try their absolute best to give these kids the best possible experience in the time they have remaining.

The play area is fun and vibrant, wonderful handprints and artworks are lovingly placed on the walls and floors. We enjoyed hearing about ‘take over day’ where patients get to be in charge for a day and boss the staff around. It’s clear how much the staff care about the children and their families.

There’s a wonderful music room with lots of different instruments to allow patients to make lots of noise and express themselves. If they don’t have the strength or ability to pick up drumsticks they have a special machine that you can tap with a finger instead. Or you can wave your hand in front of a light beam to make lovely sounds.

We are so very lucky to be able to get on our bikes and go for a ride without even thinking about it. Like so many others we take things for granted, meeting up at Beeline while less than 1 mile away there are families going through the most difficult and heart breaking experiences.

If something ever happened to my nephew this is exactly the place I would want him to go. You couldn’t ask for a more caring, supportive environment. Unbelievably, only 12% of their funding comes from the public sector. The rest they have to raise themselves. 

As a club we can help by supporting Helen & Douglas house, so that they can continue to support these children and their families.

We can do this by talking about them, learning about them and by raising funds for them.

We’ve had some ideas which we are working on, but we’d love to hear from you too. If you have any thoughts or would like to help out please get in touch at [email protected]

I would ask you all to take a few minutes to watch this amazing video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbHL454vDJ0

Cheryl