By Callum Ludwig
The Eastern 80 charity bike ride is coming up again in 2025, with this year marking a special milestone for the fundraiser.
This year is the 10th anniversary of the event and will hopefully also take it to a total of $100,000 raised since its inception.
Founder of the Eastern 80 Norm Orr said he’s pretty confident they can hit the $100,000 mark.
“We are pretty excited because I’ve gone through the figures from each year and you know, we’re very confident that we only need just over $8000,” he said.
“We’re going to start getting into it over the next week or so, I’m going to approach a lot of businesses about putting in teams and hopefully we can do that,”
“We want to bust over that $100,000 mark, not just reach it.”
This year’s event will take place on Saturday 15 February, setting off at 7.30am and starting as usual from the Warburton COG Cafe & Bike Shop at 42 Station Road, Warburton.
Mr Orr said they are still looking for any ambassadors for this year’s event who would like to share their experience with the Royal Children’s Hospital.
“We appeal to anybody that would like to promote their story and just try to get it out there where the hospital have saved their lives or certainly made their lives a lot better,” he said.
“We are hoping to get in touch with a team from last year, I think they were from Belgrave for somewhere, they’d been at the caravan park in Warby a little before that and one of their young fellows, Cooper I think his name was, he was suffering he’d been in hospital and was still suffering from leukemia and I think he was about 13 years old, so the team was there representing him,”
“We’re trying to track him down, one of the girls has sent an email to a contact because we spoke to them and we never got a contact because we thought we would’ve last year, but it didn’t happen.”
Ambassadors each year have consisted of families who have had children who have been helped or were currently being helped by the Royal Children’s Hospital as well as those who have grown up years after receiving important care from the hospital.
Mr Orr said they have reached out to resurrect teams of participants from previous years and are also encouraging new participants, particularly in the Warburton community, to join the regular riders and walkers.
“I’ve sent off a message this morning to one of our good friends who was an ambassador, young Ian Burrows the AFL umpire, to see if we can resurrect his team, we used to get about 15 umpires once but with the commitments that they have, they’ve dropped off a bit with but we’re hoping with things like that we can get teams back into it,” he said.
“The only disappointing thing in 10 years is we’d like more Warby people to really get behind us and join up, because our clientele for want of better word, has pretty much been the same all the time, we’ve had a lot of people that come back each year, and if they don’t come back, they get somebody else to take their place,” he said.
“I would encourage anybody that has never come along, they’ve got the three options as in the 50km ride, the 80km ride or the 9km walk to Millgrove and back, and if they’ve had any involvement with the hospital which most people have in some way, they can show their appreciation for the work the hospital does and has done for their own children.”
The classic Hawaiian-themed Eastern 80 shirts are making a return, available for purchase for $35 of which $10 will go to the Good Friday Appeal.
To register for the 2025 Eastern 80, visit trybooking.com/events/landing/1262869.
