Distinguished Gentleman's Ride - Goulburn 2026

Blown away I tell you, the Goulburn DGR was beyond our wildest expectations.

Our team thought, maybe we’ll get 50-60 riders and $5,000 first time out and we would have been happy with that.  How silly were we, our local motorcycling community embraced our dream head on and delivered 128 riders and just under $17,000 in donations to the DGR cause.

Now let’s put some meat on the bones here, DGR Goulburn had only 18 less riders than Canberra and 4 less than Newcastle and we raised the same amount as Newcastle, talk about punching above your weight!

We beat virtually every regional centre in Australia for riders numbers and ended up as of today 14th in donations out of 40 rides.

The Goulburn motorcycling community showed yet again they are great supporters of both the local community and important causes, and our club cannot express just how grateful we are.

So a few details for those who couldn’t make it, first the weather.  

Yeah I know what you were expecting, Gtown would turn on it’s typical 4 seasons in one day and blustery winds that blow straight through you following up with a torrential downpour to teach you a lesson whilst chilling you to the core.  Well it didn’t, the weather was perfect, we started out with a lovely fog that added some ambience to the 9.00am gathering in Montague St, it was simply stunning with the remainder of autumn leaves still on the Belmore Park trees. Then the skies cleared to reveal a gorgeous blue sky, the wind didn’t bother to show up and the mercury climbed to an incredibly pleasant 20 or so degrees…bliss and a great to relief to the organisers.

Then there was the attire of the gentle folk attending, just wow!  Check out our gallery and the Facebook channel for the pics, so many went all out, we had top hats, bowler hats, flat caps and snazzy chaps.  Pressed suits, ties and scarves were in abundance, heck we even had fob watches.  And it wasn’t just the men folk the lady folk embraced the theme with aplomb.  I think next year we need to have a fashion parade.

The route worked well having a mix of the main street, city streets and slow quiet rural sections, all ably guided by local all round great guy and well known local supporter of all things motorcycling Senior Constable Lindsay Wallace.  Brilliant job Lindsay and greatly appreciated by our club.

The entire ride went off without a hitch and our fabulously attired First Aid officer remained on her sweet vintage Jawa at the rear and got to enjoy the ride with everyone else.

Maybe the only slight complication of any note was that somehow the smallest capacity machine on the day ran dry half way round, but the owner does have form on this account and often gets a good natured ribbing from club members, anyhow amazing what you can do with the bottle found on the roadside.

Food, yes of course there was food.  The club decided to ask Can-Assist, a local cancer support group to cater for lunch at the Goulburn Waterworks, after all their goals are very much in keeping with the objectives of the ride and they have a great record of catering for previous CRCG events.  Great news, they got excellent sales and good donations from the crowd.

Additionally the local CWA ladies had the Waterworks cafe set up and did a brisk trade in tea, coffee and scones with jam and cream, and the icing on the cake, well the Pump House was steaming on the day and they took in double the number of visitors they normally would.

From our club’s perspective we had a number of goals, to provide a vehicle to raise funds and awareness of Men’s Mental Health and Prostate Cancer research, but we also wanted to value add to our local community and importantly help put our club top of mind when our community thinks about motorcycling.  The DGR is part of a larger strategy of expansion our club has implemented but from a PR perspective the success is over-whelming, we gained 240 Facebook followers and over I/4 million views from 31,000 meta account holders in just 28 days, vastly exceeding our hopes.

We are expanding into Instagram in the next month, the content is already there and will start a YouTube channel before the year is out.  Importantly we have a wide array of public and club events coming up before the end of the year and except for a short winter rest from June to August (well Gtown is pretty miserable in mid winter) we will be relentless in spreading the opportunities for motorcyclists and their family and friends within our community.

The obvious question is will the Club do it all again in 2027, absolutely, in fact many of the DGR team have already being discussing what we can do to make it bigger and better both from a stats point of view but also for the attendees and the public.  Rest assured we have plans, lots of them!

Check out our DGR gallery on this site and follow us on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Cheers

Brad Nichol

President CRCG