In the years leading up to the pandemic, some regular competitors in Whistler Blackcomb’s Phat Wednesdays downhill series developed a sort of post-race routine: cross the finish line, grab a beer from the bar, and fire up a web browser to check their time on spokesman.online.
Rather than a list of results, mountain bikers searching for the timing site after this season’s inaugural Phat Wednesdays race on May 31 were instead greeted with a message on Spokesman's home page: “We're sorry, but something went wrong.”
Whistler software engineer Stefan Koch shut down the web application last month, nearly a decade after starting work on what he called “a community passion project.”
As Koch explained in a recent post to the Whistler Summer Facebook group, the decision wasn’t based on an unwillingness to continue spending his spare time working on site maintenance, data troubleshooting, or feature development, or to keep paying domain and hosting fees out of his own pocket, as he has since the site launched. It wasn’t even “because I don’t love doing it anymore,” he wrote.
Instead, Koch attributed the decision to a lack of communication from Whistler Blackcomb, leading to uncertainty over the future of a project he’s dedicated countless hours to over the years.
The idea to launch a race-results site was sparked on a patio in 2013, when Koch first started riding in the Wednesday night series. In those days, unless racers landed on the podium, finding individual results involved navigating through a crowd of bikers to a “massive stack” of printed paper, and leafing through the pile to locate their name, he recalled.
“Everybody's sitting on their phones anyway, so I said, ‘Why are we not putting this online?’” Koch explained.
His pitch to Whistler Blackcomb’s events team of the day centred around a user-friendly web application that would not only display searchable race results, but rank riders by time, gender, category and overall points. “They said yeah, let’s do it,” he remembered.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Spokesman officially launched. Since, it has served thousands of users, and expanded to include results from other local mountain bike events like Phat Kidz, Toonies and women’s-only Monday night races, as well as ski races (a challenge considering the differing event formats, said Koch, but a task he completed at Whistler Blackcomb’s request)—until 2020, that is, when the pandemic put a hard stop to in-person events. Koch anticipated the site would resume typical operations once Phat Wednesdays made a comeback this year, but was hopeful it would do so with a slightly more official agreement in place.
“I said, ‘Look, guys, this is not how I want to operate.’ I do this all volunteer,” Koch explained in a video call. Aside from Spokesman’s users, “the only one who really benefits is [Whistler Blackcomb], because they don't need to do any work. They just upload the results, and everything is done by the program. The point calculation, the timing calculation—they just need to make sure that the data is clean.”
Koch envisioned growing the site into a downloadable app with interactive and customizable features, and enough categories to make every single participant a winner in one creatively specific bracket or another—even “being the top ‘25-year-old on a Santa Cruz bike frame,” for example.
Ideally, the resort “should pay for that service,” he explained. “I’d keep paying what I’d be paying, and they would keep paying to use the tool. This would be the best solution for all of us.”
In an email, a resort spokesperson said Whistler Blackcomb’s events team spoke with Koch last September, when they told the software engineer “Whistler Blackcomb was unable to fund the development or growth of his platform.”
While Koch said the September meeting left him with the impression the resort intended to continue using the Spokesman site, Whistler Blackcomb’s representative maintained “no contracts or agreements were previously in place, but it was clear that Stefan wanted to expand and shift his technology related to how he had previously been working with us. Given our policy in terms of how we work with third-party vendors, particularly technology, we were unable to continue using Spokesman for our resort.”
Other than a February text message from a Whistler Blackcomb staffer explaining the resort’s events team was in the thick of winter programming and would reach out when more time was available, Koch said his numerous requests for clarity about what Spokesman’s relationship with the resort would look like in 2023 were met with silence from October onward.
With Spokesman now shut down, bikers racing in this summer’s Phat Wednesdays series can instead find their results posted to social media—including on the Whistler Bike Park Events Facebook group—as well as listed on partner websites like Pinkbike and available to view by category on Seattle-based timing site Webscorer.
In an emailed statement, Whistler Blackcomb events manager Steve Crowley said the resort's events team “has enjoyed a great relationship with Stefan, working closely throughout the evolution of Spokesman.”
He added: “Stefan’s contributions have been an asset to our bike racing community over the years and we want to thank him for his dedication and drive. We wish him the best in his future endeavours and hope to work with him again in the future.”
Koch, meanwhile, said he is currently working with the Whistler Museum to contribute results Spokesman recorded from 53 different events over the years into the institution’s archives. He invited other locals to get in touch to chat about ideas for any software-related community projects.
