Victoria summer road racing

[luke1972]

Hi,

I am trying to organise some summer road racing in Melbourne. I have been told not to do it because it might clash with some track race that attracts 5 riders. Can anyone explain why we do not have road racing in summer? Should we abandon the idea because track racing is in summer? I tried track racing last summer and liked it but the fact remains that there is probably only a couple of hundred trackies in Victoria. Criterium racing attracts hundreds of riders per day at some events. Would people prefer to race the same crit every week for 30 weeks? Would they race track if they had the chance? Would they like to see summer road racing?

At the moment our road calendar goes from May to October. In May we have 120+ riders and we loose 10 per week. By October we have 20 riders max.

All ideas welcome.

PS I have sponsorship arranged for a 2 day tour in summer in country Victoria, but the clubs in the area do not want it to go ahead because of a potenial clash with a track race!!

 

[luke1972]

36,000 post re road racing on this site. 294 re track racing.

 

[patch70]

I am assuming you have checked the various club websites for their summer racing calenders. A few clubs do midweek crit races.
The cyclesport vic website has a link to all the local clubs:
http://www.viccycle.com.au/Clubs/clublinks.htm

 

[luke1972]

Originally posted by patch70
I am assuming you have checked the various club websites for their summer racing calenders. A few clubs do midweek crit races.
The cyclesport vic website has a link to all the local clubs:
http://www.viccycle.com.au/Clubs/clublinks.htm

Yes but who does summer ROAD racing (not crits)

 

[fondy2004]

What kind of numnut are you? This is the whole problem with cycling in australia now. People think that road racing is crits!!!

You dumbasses, crits are when you ride round and round in circles for an hour. Road racing is what they do everywhere else in Europe and the world in summer. Road racing here is when 20 or so people race on the road in pissing rain, wind and freezing cold.

I am sure Luke1972 knows where to find crits

 

[fondy2004]

What kind of numnut are you? This is the whole problem with cycling in australia now. People think that road racing is crits!!!

You dumbasses, crits are when you ride round and round in circles for an hour. Road racing is what they do everywhere else in Europe and the world in summer. Road racing here is when 20 or so people race on the road in pissing rain, wind and freezing cold.

I am sure Luke1972 knows where to find crits

 

[patch70]

Given the choice between doing crits and doing no racing at all, I'll take the crits.

I am aware of the difference and I apologise if I was telling Luke1972 something he already knows.

 

[patch70]

On a slightly different note, Victoria seems to have in the winter road racing at least quite a few races that start and finish in different locations making a support person generally necessary. Is this different in other states?

 

[luke1972]

Originally posted by patch70
On a slightly different note, Victoria seems to have in the winter road racing at least quite a few races that start and finish in different locations making a support person generally necessary. Is this different in other states?

Melbourne to Warrnambool, Shepparton and Ballarat are the only races I can think of that start finish in different places. I would not want to do laps of Warrnambool

Grafton to Inverall in NSW is the same (different start/finish), do not know about other NSW races though.

Do you not do these races because of different start/finish? If so ask your club to supply some support for you to get back to the finish. If they cannot do this, join another club that will. Personally I like starting/finishing in a different spot.

 

[sreed]

Originally posted by luke1972
Hi,

I am trying to organise some summer road racing in Melbourne. I have been told not to do it because it might clash with some track race that attracts 5 riders. Can anyone explain why we do not have road racing in summer? Should we abandon the idea because track racing is in summer? I tried track racing last summer and liked it but the fact remains that there is probably only a couple of hundred trackies in Victoria. Criterium racing attracts hundreds of riders per day at some events. Would people prefer to race the same crit every week for 30 weeks? Would they race track if they had the chance? Would they like to see summer road racing?

At the moment our road calendar goes from May to October. In May we have 120+ riders and we loose 10 per week. By October we have 20 riders max.

All ideas welcome.

PS I have sponsorship arranged for a 2 day tour in summer in country Victoria, but the clubs in the area do not want it to go ahead because of a potenial clash with a track race!!

Hi luke 1972

I agree it's completely stupid that the entire summer is dominated by crits or track racing.
I think it just needs some people to start pushing out on the road and then maybe the clubs will listen instead of doing the same as last season (and the one before and the one before etc)!. Maybe the better bike shops ( SBR, PRO-MOTION, TFM, Fitzroy etc) might get behind your 2 day tour with age graded teams of two or three riders competing for something which provides some exposure and profile for the shops as well as the riders.

E-mail me if you want to pursue getting summer mooooving

steve r

 

[luke1972]

Originally posted by sreed
Hi luke 1972

I agree it's completely stupid that the entire summer is dominated by crits or track racing.
I think it just needs some people to start pushing out on the road and then maybe the clubs will listen instead of doing the same as last season (and the one before and the one before etc)!. Maybe the better bike shops ( SBR, PRO-MOTION, TFM, Fitzroy etc) might get behind your 2 day tour with age graded teams of two or three riders competing for something which provides some exposure and profile for the shops as well as the riders.

E-mail me if you want to pursue getting summer mooooving

steve r

Hi Steve,

Good to see there is another person willing to be excommunicated for running road racing in summer. The sponsors are geeeeed for action in February. I drove 400km on the week end to approach sponsors and everyone I approached agreed in principle to sponsor the race. Bumped into a local racer who said he would stand on a corner (with the rest of the family), he was so excited he went home and told his club president who rang me up and abused me for trying to organise the event. That said the riders (not the executive) are all keen to support the event. You did not leave me your email address, so you can contact me on [email protected]

PS I have been thinking of running a "team" event with bike shops putting money in for winner takes all (inc perpetual trophy for "champion shop" or something cheesy like that).

Luke

 

[sreed]

Originally posted by luke1972
Hi Steve,

Good to see there is another person willing to be excommunicated for running road racing in summer. The sponsors are geeeeed for action in February. I drove 400km on the week end to approach sponsors and everyone I approached agreed in principle to sponsor the race. Bumped into a local racer who said he would stand on a corner (with the rest of the family), he was so excited he went home and told his club president who rang me up and abused me for trying to organise the event. That said the riders (not the executive) are all keen to support the event. You did not leave me your email address, so you can contact me on [email protected]

PS I have been thinking of running a "team" event with bike shops putting money in for winner takes all (inc perpetual trophy for "champion shop" or something cheesy like that).

Luke

Luke My email address is [email protected] I wonder how difficult it is to get air time on channel 31 (TV) all the ethnic groups seem to manage it I wonder if road racing could do it too

steve r

 

[patch70]

Regarding TV coverage of road racing, channel 10 had the option of covering the Herald-Sun Tour at essentially no cost to them (ie the tour organizers were offering to cover ~all costs). They decided it was still too expensive for them as nobody was interested.

 

[luke1972]

Last stage of the Tour down under next year will be shown live on Channel 10 Australia wide, in SA they show 30min highlights each evening. TDU attracts 70,000 spectators to the stages, Sun Tour attracts more flies than spectators, hence no TV station would want to touch it.

PS TDU is run in summer and attacts Zabel, Boonen, all the top Aussies, ONCE, CA, Saeco, AGR, Telecom, FDJ,etc.

Why doesn't the Sun Tour run a week before/after the TDU? Why doesn't the Bay Series extend to become the Sun Tour (since it is half crits now anyway?) Would be nice to have some sun at the Sun Tour.

Luke

 

[sreed]

these are exactly the reasons why grass roots coverage on channel 31 by riders for riders might work if the word gets out. Maybe there could be some coverage of club racing / crits too.

steve r

 

[fondy2004]

Steve, I am the co-organiser of this race with Luke1972, perhaps if we told Channel 31 it was a homosexual bike race they might be down in a flash to film it.

Only kidding, Steve what club do you ride for?

 

[sreed]

What does sexual preference have to do with bike racing! If you actually bothered to read the programming guides for FTA channels,you would quickly see that your comment is as incorrect as it is unnecessary. Channel 31 has about 2hours of gay oriented transmissionduring an entire programming band of 112 hours each week, alittle over 2%!!, whereas mainstream TV provides at least half as much again on each of three separate channels.
Get Real!! If someone's a bike rider, TV producer, camera man, or anything else, who cares what their sexual preference is. Lets have more cycling exposure on any channel we can get.