The country’s top event for Human Powered Vehicles saw schools gather from all over to showcase their rides, including students from St Margarets Berwick Grammar School who took a big win at the competition.
Held in Maryborough Energy Breakthrough is the biggest event on the Human Powered Vehicle calendar, this year it was run over five days covering a range of categories between Wednesday 22 to Sunday 26 November.
St Margaret’s sent four teams to the event, all doing well despite the challenging competition with the Senior Girls team winning the category for Overall Open Girls.
Hundreds of teams from across Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales converge on the small country town.
After the covid pandemic, the St Margarets HPV team has been working to rebuild a number of events.
This year the school sent two Primary School teams and Two Senior School teams to compete.
The Primary teams competed in the ‘TRYathlon’ which consist of time trials, obstacle course and Endurance race of 8 hours.
For most of the Junior teams this was their first time at the event and they did extremely well in all three races.
The Senior Boy’s team placed eighth overall in the Open category, the team was made up of year eight and year ten boys were competing against older boys up to Year 12.
The Senior Girls team continued their strong form for the year. After winning the State HPV Series in the Open Girls category this year they headed to Maryborough as strong favourites.
At Energy Breakthrough the students must not only test their vehicles, they must also do presentations to a panel of judges.
Their are two presentations which focus on design and construction of the vehicles and the second looks at what is required for the training, building, nutrition, safety, environment and community of being in an HPV team.
These two presentations plus the race results combined to give an overall winner, which the Senior Girls team took for the win for Overall Open Girls category.
For the St Margarets HPV teams, Maryborough is the only event on race calander that goes for 24 hours straight.
The Senior Girls Team in this time completed 495 laps and travelling 782 kilometers in that time.
The riders start at noon on Saturday and don’t stop until noon on Sunday. It’s a true testament of their character and dedication as they race through rain and all sorts of inclement weather through the night and the early hours of the morning.
The HPV program at St Margaret’s wished to thank the commitment of the community and parents.
From ex-parents of the squad to ex-students they thanked them for their essential help behind the scenes constructing and maintaining the vehicles, as well as their direct assistance at the competitions from the starting line to the pits.
The school is grateful to them for making the team an open and caring environment and enabling the teams to compete at such a high standard.
