'twas not our day.
I snapped a chain at 12km. 10 minutes and 2 links later, we were ready to head off when another rider slipped his chain and failed to unclip in time - falling into my mate, Peter. This chap's head / shoulder hit Peter's front wheel and turned it into a taco. The wheel could not even turn one rev inside the forks.
We pulled and pushed it and put it on rocks and jumped on it until it could just rotate within the forks. We had to disengage front brakes and remove pads. It still lightly rubbed on the fork as the buckled section passed through - sounded like a duck was following me.
We limped into checkpoint 1 at 28km. No course mechanic until c'point #2. The bloke that crashed into the wheel comes running over and says his mate has snapped his seat-post, and that if he cant repair it we can have his front wheel. The saboteur's front wheel would not fit Peter's bike, because it was a disk and Peter has the cantilevered old style wheels. We wait for 30 mins while the snapped seat-post guy's sister drives in from Laidley with the post and saddle off her bike. It's a larger diameter post, but the bloke slams it in with a mallet and tightens it up with a hose clamp. No luck for us, so we head off the c'point #2. Peter has no front brakes and a wobbly dodgy front wheel. Very courageous display to tackle the downside of the razor back in that fashion.
We rolled into c'point #2 at the 58km mark and visited the mechanic. He thinks he can fix it, but we have to wait while he does other jobs in the queue, as well as any other minor job that comes in after us - because the wheel will take him more time. Can't argue with that approach, and anyway we had lost so much time by then we were just in it to finish anyway by this stage. Anyhoo, mechanic cant get the wheel in any better shape, so faced with riding the last 50km with no front brakes on a very dodgy wobbly wheel that could pop at any time, the sensible option was to abandon. Not happy, but there you go that's racing. We'll be back next year.
A big thankyou *(and therefore a big plug) to Nick Frederickson from Race Elements personal trainers up here in Bne. Nick pulled over to give us a hand with the chain and the [censored] wheel. The only reason he was not way ahead of us at that stage was that he was chaperoning his gf / fiance for the day. Nick and his brother Simon own and run Race Elements. They are both well credentialled MTB racers, and great blokes to boot. Race Elements has a strong focus on MTB. Peter and I went to see Simon for a program earlier this year and I highly recommend them.