Cycling race may be stuck on the blocks

This weekend, cyclists will descend on Lenox for the second annual Berkshire Cycling Classic

And even before the first peddle, the Town of Lenox has already begun turning their wheels to make sure they can keep the event for the future.

The town is facing assaults from afar – last year, the race was an International Cycling Union-sanctioned competition, but this year, Cold Spring, N.Y., was able to buy that away from The Berkshires – and from closer to home, as other towns, including Great Barrington, push to be the host to the event in coming years.

With the idea of marketing seemingly hanging as a five-ton albatross from the neck of the selectmen, many see this event as a potential perfect example of the power of the town working to bring events to downtown.

Yet, the question of if the town is on the right track with marketing seems to only get louder as events continue to struggle.

To try and get the events on more solid ground, the town created a trial run for an events coordinator position and hired experienced event planner Tara Consolati to take up the post for $8,000. Ms. Consolati was supposed to help with the fourth annual Memorial Weekend Marathon and work to create a mid-June car show to replace the Berkshire British Motorcar Festival.

According to Ms. Consolati, planners of the Memorial Weekend Marathon told her “she wasn’t wanted” to help with their event and the car show has been trimmed from a multi-day event to a one night cruise-in style event on Main Street, that furthermore was scheduled on the same night as a Lenox Fire Department Stag even though the department was supposed to be involved in the show.

That left just the Berkshire Cycling Classic to come through as a shining example of the usefulness of the position.

Once again, the numbers there are not good either. Besides the loss of the sanctioned part of the race, other flaws have appeared in the second year of the event.

The greatest of those is the stark drop in riders. This year only 80 riders have registered, a far cry from the nearly 300 that took part last year. This has led race director John Eustice, head of Sparta Cycling in New York City, to agree the event has lost momentum.

How has it lost momentum? In only its second year, with the town hiring someone to work on the event, and the Events Committee again giving its largest grant, another $5,000 in funding, how did this happen?

We have been told there is a sun rising on the horizon. Mr. Eustice has told the town that if they continue to fund and promote the race, they could host the World Masters Championships in 2015 or 2016. Now we are talking about a major event worthy of creating a position and continuing high levels of funding.

The world championship and two of the three Grand Tours, namely the Giro d’Italia and the world-famous Tour de France, form the “Triple Crown of Cycling.” The event draws half a million spectators, is watched on TV by over 300 million and in a recent bid, a potential host estimated the economic impact is over $150 million to host the race.

The problem here: the race is never coming to Lenox. Not in 2015 or 2016 and most likely not ever. That is not an opinion, it is fact.

Those races have already been scheduled: in 2015 the race is in Richmond, Va., and in 2016, the race is is Qatar. The race moves from region to region around the world and with the USA hosting already in 2015, and not anywhere near Lenox, the next chance the country has will be around 2040. So why does Mr. Eustice want to give the town false hope and why are they buying it?

All of this leads to many questions. Perhaps the biggest one: Is Mr. Eustice a bad businessman who is in over his head, or is he a “good” businessman looking to take advantage of a town that may be in too far?

Posted by Kameron Z. Spaulding on June 6, 2013. Filed under Editorials,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry