Ride for Michael Bonney sportive needs entrants to avoid cancellation

The annual Ride for Michael Bonney sportive needs entries to avoid cancellation. The event, which features a 30-mile and a 60-mile route, begins in Penrith on October 4. A separate fundraising campaign has also been launched to get Bonney himself pedalling again via a Functional Electric Stimulation exercise bike.

Bonney has long been a major figure in the UK bike industry with Orange Mountain Bikes, but in March 2013, while taking part in his local Eden Valley sportive, he fell and suffered injury to his spinal cord at the C3 vertebrae, resulting in paralysis from the neck down.

In an interview with BikeBiz that same year, he said: "I don't want anybody to stop riding bikes because they think they might injure themselves. I want people to get out there and ride bikes. I've spent all of my working life getting people excited about bikes and even though spinal injuries happen to cyclists, and especially to mountain bikers, it's very rare. I was unlucky, shit happens. Get out there and ride, for me."

Ride for Michael Bonney takes place each year, but Bonney recently tweeted that entries were urgently needed to avoid cancellation. Entry is £25 for the long event and £20 for the short event. More details can be found here.

The Michael Bonney Trust is also currently running a campaign to get Michael pedalling again via the purchase of a specialist Functional Electric Stimulation (FES) exercise bike. The bike fires electric pulses into the user’s leg muscles, allowing them to turn the pedals. As well as physiotherapy, this provides obvious psychological benefits.

The fundraising target for the FES bike is £11,500 of which over a thousand has been raised thus far.