From TBRs Minister for Communication and Lies - Domster

TBR had decided that they needed some body armour for their first trip to the Alps and they had also decided that the team budget wasn’t going to pay for it.

With this little rodent of a problem scurrying around the back of his mind Scott one day was watching some adventure program on Channel 5 about a gang of Yak herders who along with twenty Yaks were circumnavigating the globe in a yacht . He of course was amazed by their tales of daring adventure but what really impressed him was how this raggedy arsed bunch of Himalayan sheperds managed to get hold of a 40 foot yacht and all the necessary gubbins that goes along with it. All of them were wearing 400 quid Goretex jackets for christsake! (and that was just the Yaks).

The rodent stopped scurrying and bit hard into his lower brain stem. Thats it! Thats how we'll do it - SPONSORSHIP! Scotts buffoonio idea generating gland went into overdrive as he formulated a cunning plan.

"Right lads, we ride mountain bikes right’

"Errrr, right".
"Whats the highest mountain in the world"?
"Errr, Everest"?
"Right"!
"and...."
"Team Banana Racing climb Everest"!!!

"Right, errr OK Scott, you do know that Everest is not in the French Alps and that to actually climb Everest might be, you know a bit difficult without doing some training or something like that."

"Not a problem, listen"......

And so it was Team Banana Racing launched a self-promoting, sponsorship seeking, marketing campaign based around the hook line "Mountain Bikers climb Everest"! A stroke of buffoonery inspired genius, when you consider all they were doing was going on their hols and would coincidentally be culmulatively climbing at least the height of Everest over the two week period. The master stroke was getting Charity involved, the press just love Charradeee....

We won’t bore you with the details, the haggling, the phone calls, the photo shoots, the fame but I will summarise here the ‘output’ of the whole event.

Miracorously we raised over a grand for Help the Aged, got Altimeters (Cateye), body armour and hundreds of pounds of discount from local bike shop from JE James, 700 quids worth of Michelin tyres (we are still using them), hundreds of T-shirts and we eventaully mananged to cycle over 9000 cumulative meters which is a 1000 higher than Everest!

Here is an article example.

Here is the 'Post event press release we sent to the papers.