News Vote for Geoff Apps - Mountain Bike Hall of Fame 2010

Geoffrey Cleland Apps, the UK mountain bike pioneer has been nominated for the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame - hopefully this year he will be voted in and a glaring omission corrected. Mr Apps was riding bicycles off road in the mid 60s and his unique take on the 'mountain bike' pre dates the Marin County pioneers by several years. If you don't know about Geoff Apps I suggest you read up about him and his bicycles here on retrobike, here on wikipedia or here and here in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.

Graham Wallace, long time Apps aficionado has made the nomination and has gathered support from Bike Biz (read their article online here) along with such luminaries as Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher. What can you do? Simple. Click here to register for the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame and vote for Geoff Apps! I know votes are closing soon so please be quick.

 

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[DM]

The link to the MBHOF isn't working - The site seems to be down.

 

[John]

Links are working ok for me...

 

[Graham John Wallace]

In order to vote for Geoff Apps to be inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame you need to become a member. Annual membership costs $20 and is really a way for the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame to raise money for its museum, which is a registered charity.

This is the first year that non-US residents can join via PayPal. Previously you had to post a cheque in US$ in order to join.

On the plus side the $20 does mean that only committed supporters will bother voting. If voting were free and open to non-members the results might be even more US weighted than now.

I suspect that the number of votes cast for successful induction may not be very large. In 1999, a campaign by Joe Breeze successfully inducted the then unknown 1950's French pioneers known as the VCCP, into the Hall of Fame.

The only Brit currently inducted is the racer Tim Gould, though he was internationally renowned.

Geoff is well known and respected amongst the US pioneers some of whom are prepared to support Geoff in preference to strong American nominees.

We also have the support of people in the UK cycle trade and cycle journalists who know of Geoff and his remarkable bicycles and inventions.

Last years nomination was a long shot. This year we are in the running.

 

[Graham John Wallace]

Voting is by postal vote by MBHoF members only. The deadline for returning ballot papers is the 15th July.

Anyone interested in finding out more about Geoff's story, including his modern bikes, can find pictures by following the link to flickr found on the homepage of the Cleland Website.

http://www.james-walters.net/cleland/

 

[Graham John Wallace]

My ballot form for the MBHOF has just arrived. It is a strange voting system with five voting categories and one vote per category per member. The three nominees or groups with the most votes will be inducted, so in theory all the inductees could be from one single, popular category.

Voting for others, apart from your preferred nominee, could mean that the extra votes, could edge the preferred nominee out of the top three. So the safest bet is to only vote for people you really want to be inducted.

The ballot form states that you need to, "complete the ballot & postmark it by July 16th 2010". So there should still be plenty of time for ballots to be sent out and returned.