So why Mad Cow Racing?

Well to start with we got into racing Mountain Bikes but we weren't that good. We reckoned on needing some unique selling point to get attention and therefore some sponsorship. Our theory was that with sponsorship we could get better bikes and then we would start to do better (so much for theories).

Our first ever Mountain Bike race was in 1990 at Filching near Eastbourne, at that stage we had no team name and Tony and Graham raced but didn't even qualify for the final, we suddenly realised there might be something in this training lark!

After one hard training session at the gym we followed up with an equally hard drinking session at the pub. At some point later in the evening we came up with the brilliant idea of fixing small plastic horns to our cycling helmets (it was a very hard session in the pub)!

This of course led to the need for a name! After several more creative brain storming sessions (i.e. many more pints of Guiness) we went through things like the "Horny Devils" but finally settled on Team Mad Cow. If I recall, this was largely due to the fact that Pete was a cattle herdsman but also cashed in on the widespread publicity caused by recent outbreaks of BSE (Mad Cow Disease).

We played around with it for a bit and even tried to make it sound more exciting by trying French: "Equipe Vache Fou" this was based on a principal used by a friend and motorcycle racer Steve Hands who ran "Equipe Grand Nez" (Yep - Team Big Nose). In the end we eventually settled on Mad Cow Racing and as they say, the rest is history.

For more details on that history take a look HERE

mad cows london to cambridge