Fossicking around in the Nzo packing area I found an old poster. The one I drew for the 1998 Moonride.
First of all: the Moonride. For those of you more recently embroiled in our sport, the Moonride was an early example of the type of event that caught the attention of many riders back in the formative years of mountain biking. Dreamed up by mountain biking pioneer Fred Christensen, it was a 12 hour teams event, that allowed anybody to have fun in a mountain bike race. The concept was based around a group five people sharing a number, with one doing a lap while the others sort of partied. It was complicated by the addition of various other categories, and eventually durations, but that was the basic idea.
Nzo had opened a scant few weeks before the 1998 event, and it was the first race we attended as a company. It is also the first bike event we provided the graphics and merch for. The poster and t shirt featured a werewolf (see above). Why I went in that direction is lost in the mists of time, but I am pretty sure it was unexpected.
Back then we worked with a Rotorua screen printer called the Inkdoctor. Jonny Clark is a great printer, and for this event T he busted out a glow-in-the-dark ink. One night I visited the printshop and he turned all the lights off, there was enough glow coming off the t shirts that were hanging around drying that we could see pretty well with no electricity involved.
The event itself was a semi-disaster. It was based that year at the Rotorua Racecourse, so each lap involved a couple of kilometres of city streets each way, an awesome passage through the Whakarewarewa Village thermal area, and a brief but hectic series of trails in the forest.
The disaster aspect was caused by a weather bomb. It rained prodigiously for the days before the race, and throughout. The trails became almost unrideable, the main marquee that was erected on the finish straight of the racecourse became a Woodstock-like quagmire, and the amount of mud transported indoors as the race was directed through the lounge areas under the grandstand rendered the carpet damaged beyond repair.
The duration of that edition was supposed to 8pm to 8am, but the event was called sometime around dawn. I recall getting stuck in what had been a shallow splash through a rivulet that had become a thigh-deep pond by the middle of the night. It was desperate out there.
The Moonride continued for the next couple of decades, providing thousands of riders some great days and nights of entertainment.
Eventually other event formats lured competitors, and those teams events disappeared.
We are very happy to report that the Cateye Moonride returns for 2026, and you can enter here.
We are on board with design of graphics for the event, you can order here.
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