Rock up and Ride BMX | Scottish Cycling

Rock up and Ride BMX | Scottish Cycling

Just down the road from the location of the 2023 UCI BMX World Championships in Glasgow, is the Cumbernauld Centurions track. It’s here that Scottish Cycling, in conjunction with the BMX club and two local schools, Holy Cross Primary and Eastfield Primary have been piloting the new ‘Rock Up & Ride’ scheme.

Essentially the scheme looks to work with kids from less advantaged backgrounds, between the ages of 7 and 11 years old, and provide them with a block of four coached sessions to introduce them to the activity of cycling and more specifically, BMX Racing. What is even more impressive is that after the coaching is complete each participant is given a GT Mach One bike, a Full Face helmet, glove, Troy Lee Designs Pads, and a one year membership to the Cumbernauld Centurions, including all the coaching that comes with that. It’s hard to not be impressed!

The ‘Rock Up & Ride’ project has been funded by Transport Scotland (Scottish Government) to the tune of £900,000 for the Tax Year. It’s time we all went and talked to our local authorities about grass roots BMX promotion.

Obviously, the funding is not purely for BMX, but rather cycling in general. Neil Morrison, from Scottish Cycling told us, ‘We also run various other bike projects with Scottish Cycling clubs and community groups, as well as building an adaptive bike library up in Ellon. Our goal here is to try and create fun sessions that get kids stoked on bikes, and hopefully lead to upwards trend in active travel’.

So far the scheme at the Cumbernauld Centurions track has had 21 participants successfully completed the course but January will see another 20 take part in Cumbernauld, as well as a further 20 starting at a smaller BMX track in Newton Stewart. The involved schools are now also looking at ways to push forward these schemes to other schools due to the multiple benefits they have already seen.

Hopefully, the next time the UCI World Championships roll into the UK, we see some of these kids on the gate, and who knows, maybe even the podiums.

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