Lucky review competition winner Matthew Haigh has won himself a Focus Northern Lite MTB bike worth £749! You can check out his winning review here. Please find below Matthew’s response to the competition.

Back in June I received one of the regular update emails from Wiggle which said that to kick off the new customer product reviews there was a competition with a prize of a £750 bike. At the time I was actually more interested in the reviews than the prize – I rarely win anything, and certainly not major prizes.

Whenever I’m buying online I do find customer reviews really helpful in choosing between similar products, especially as I take part in unsupported Audax and ultradistance events so reliability is paramount. Gear that is suited to a 100 mile sportive may not work quite as well or be comfortable for long distance rides like crossing the full length of Wales twice (including the Cambrian and Snowdonia ranges) over the course of a rainy weekend, or London-Edinburgh-London in under five days. I didn’t even think about winning, but put up a few reviews to help share some experiences and build up the body of knowledge.

I almost ignored the winning notification email – I was just wrapping things up at work before going on holiday and thought it was just another weekly mailout. Then I read it. And read it again, wondering if I’d misunderstood, or if it was a joke. When I showed it to my wife, she asked if it was genuine too! To say that it made our day is a gross understatement.

The most difficult part was choosing the bike; eventually I settled on the Northern Lite MTB in small, which I passed on to my son Adam. He also rides Audax – he did his first 100km ride just after his 11th birthday – but hasn’t yet had a full sized mountain bike. Once I’d finished dithering, the bike arrived within a couple of days. It only took a couple of minutes to put the pedals and handlebars on (good quality tools were supplied, and everything was set up properly) and we could go and hit the trail. Adam didn’t know the bike was for him until I’d set it up and pointed out it was a bit small for me!

The bike is great; well set up and thoughtfully specced. Adam loves it and has been using it constantly over the bank holiday weekend. Thank you Wiggle for a superb surprise, real people do win your competitions!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Competitions, Customer Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.