It started as a way to give fans some high-level racing to enjoy during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Crankworx Summer Series is likely to stick around in some capacity in future years, according to Crankworx World Tour general manager Darren Kinnaird.
The three-resort tour, which featured 25 B.C. athletes and stops in SilverStar, Kicking Horse and Sun Peaks in late July and early August, was a hit among host resorts, athletes and fans, Kinnaird said on Aug. 25.
“The online comments were super, super positive. People were super into it,” he said. “We’re still getting all the numbers together, but viewership was on par with any one of our normal festivals.”
While it’s unclear exactly what the series will look like in future years, Kinnaird said it would be important to bring high-level athletes to B.C.’s resorts.
“We’d like to explore seeing if it could become part of the World Tour,” he said. “These are world-class venues that we got to experience.
“They deserve world-class athletes and that is the long-term goal. How do we grow and continue to share Crankworx with more people and more locations, but with some of the best athletes in the world?
“We think there are ways to do that. We’ve got a bunch of strategizing to do, but in a perfect world, we’d be able to invite some of the world’s best athletes to participate in something like this in the future.”
Organizers previously said that the series opted not to utilize Whistler in order to share Crankworx with other resort communities in the province. Crankworx has previously trumpeted the knock-on events that its Whistler festival has had on mountain biking communities around the province, such as during the 2019 Mountain Biking Tourism Symposium, but bringing its events around the province helps further strengthen the sector, Kinnaird reasoned.
“We would look to share Crankworx with more locations. All three resorts we went to were amazing and there’s interest in us returning in the future in some way, shape or form but I’d by lying if I said we didn’t have a few phone calls from other resorts going, ‘Hey, how come we weren’t considered?’” he said. “It’s a good thing to have.”
One shift that organizers would look at in the future would be to avoid creating the gauntlet of a dozen events in 18 days like there was this year.
“One of the things we learned is that 12 events in three weeks is a lot on the athletes,” Kinnaird said. “You could tell, kind of, as we got to Sun Peaks that a few people were running on fumes and we had a couple injuries.
“One thing we’d consider changing in the future would be spreading things out a bit more or reducing the number of events per week to allow for some more overall rest time and downtime.”
Next up for Crankworx is the continuation of its World Tour in Innsbruck, Austria starting Sept. 30. Conveniently, the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships are also taking place in Austria the week after.
“Innsbruck is going to happen. We’re excited about it. We’re expecting to see a big, strong field of downhill racers there, being so close to World Champs, literally in time and space, as it’s an hour and a half away in Leogang,” Kinnaird said.
