As part of our celebration of KinesisUK having reached the ripe of age of 15, we wanted to take a look at some of the personalities who’ve been involved with the brand over time. Obviously a great many people who know Kinesis know of Dom Mason’s pivotal role but they’ve been a range of people who we think have also played a role in the brand’s growth and development that we wanted to recognise as well.
This is one of we hope several blogs on some of the valued, respected and colourful characters that have been a part of the story of Kinesis.
Today's post is about Mick Ives, a multiple World Champion, who’s been riding Kinesis bikes for around a decade. During that time he’s won two Master World Cyclocross championships whilst riding Kinesis frames plus countless other championships and race wins. In fact Mick’s race team website proudly boasts of over 1,000 race wins by the team since 1997. Team Sky eat your heart out!
Photo: Mick Ives racing in the World Master Championships in Kentucky, USA
Mick has been UCI World Masters Cycling Champion 5 times, has won 81 British national titles (including winning 5 championships in 2007 alone!).
For around a decade now Mick’s team, MI Racing has collected an enviable and deeply impressive range of silverware across almost all disciplines of cycling. If you have some time, it’s well worth visiting the MI Racing website to see just how many titles they’ve won – it’s deeply impressive.
The team race 12 months of the year across road racing, track racing, time trials, triathlons, mountain bike racing, tandem racing, hill climbs and cyclocross racing.
Mick who’s now 75 and still racing turned pro for the first time in 1966 and raced road track and cyclocross as a pro for 8 seasons. In 1968 the British Professional Cyclocross championships were televised live on Grandstand and Mick won all 3 races.
Mick turned pro again as a mountain bike racer at age 50 and stayed racing as a pro for a further 8 years. Mick’s living proof of how cycling is something you can enjoy (and excel at) all of your life, as he’s been riding and racing since he was a boy. Mick’s first season of cyclocross was 1957 and he’s raced every year since then!
Photo: Another action shot of Mick Ives from the World Masters Championships in Kentucky
Kinesis began working with Mick and his MI Racing team about 10 years ago and Mick says he remembers the fact that some of the early (and silver) Kinesis cyclocross frames supplied to the team had disc brake mounts – a lot earlier than many people might have thought.
The team has always kept the Kinesis frames and bikes supplied to them and they get passed to new riders and many team members have bought additional Kinesis bikes as winter training bikes or as additional bikes for racing (particularly our cyclocross bikes).
Mick’s MI Racing team now boasts over 60 racing riders across all types of cycling and the number of wins keep ticking on up!
Photo: Mick on board a Kinesis in less muddy conditions
This year we’ve supplied another couple of 5T complete bikes that are being used for racing and to help junior and less experienced riders build their skills on.
After 10 years to date, Mick’s told us that he thinks the best is yet to come for Kinesis and we heartily agree. We appreciate and value MI Racing and Mick’s extensive knowledge and we’ve had a number of very open and positive discussions about how we’ll be evolving and improving our product range in the future.
We’ll next be meeting up with Mick at the Milton Keynes World Cup Cyclocross round on the weekend of the 29th and 30th of November and we hope we’ll see some of you there too.
Photo: Mick Ives having just finished second in the Masters World Championships in -12 degree temperatures