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State of the Two-Wheeled Union

Bike events like Crankworx are critical to the corridor’s post-Olympic survival strategy, as long as we don’t waste time reinventing the wheel…
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"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I have faith in the future of the human race."

- HG Wells

Last month, the federal government started doling out money for tourism events. Mega bucks for mega-big events. $140 million was earmarked over two years for marquee tourism events and the PNE, the Calgary Stampede, the Ottawa Bluesfest and the Montreal Jazz Festival were amongst those to receive multi-million dollar boosts.

The 2009 Economic Stimulus Package also created a $25 million trails fund, which just contributed grants of $70,000 and $55,000 (in matching funds, thereby doubling the ultimate budgets) to the Pemberton Valley Trails Association and the Squamish Off-Road Cycling Association for ambitious trail-building projects that will boost the lure of both communities to bike tourists.

The feds have realized what corridor communities have long known - that special events drive tourist visits, raise a community's image and profile, and inject measurable economic benefits; that the bike experience is a destination-driver; and that the fastest and most measurable way to provide a boost in a softening economy is with a party.

Here in the Sea to Sky corridor, bike + festival + summer are the magic ingredients that mash-up into our own marquee experiences - self-defining events that have put Pemberton, Whistler and Squamish on the map.

Crankworx, a loud and proud homage to gravity and freeride glory, kicks off on Aug. 8, and its nine-day high-test fest is part of the reason that mountain biking has now surpassed golf as the key driver for summer room nights in Whistler.

As it revolves to a stop, Pemberton pedals its signature bike event into gear. The yin to Crankworx's yang, Slow Food Cycle Sunday on Aug. 16, offers a slow and self-propelled cruise along a flat valley road to sample local agriculture offerings, from Pemberton Meadows Natural Beef burgers to tastings from the first batch of Schramm organic potato vodka.

And in Squamish, the 35 test pilots behind the Test of Metal (and its Triple Crown Series siblings, the Ore Crusher and GearJammer), can take a breather for a few minutes, before they start directing their attention to the 2010 series.

The positive impacts of these events is quantifiable: Crankworx attracts 55,000 unique visitors and injects $11.5 million in non-resident expenditures. The Test of Metal brings in almost $1 million in direct economic benefit, and its 800 rider spots sell out within minutes. Slow Food Cycle Sunday has grown over four years to attract 2,300 participants (the equivalent population of the town of Pemberton), and yield an estimated $250,000 contribution directly into the local economy.

It's little wonder that towns across Canada are turning their sights to events and sports tourism.

Events of the future

The fact that these niches are part of Whistler's core business would presumably give the resort a competitive advantage. But the market power, increasingly, doesn't lie with resorts and destinations. The leverage is in the hands of an event's rights-holder.

Tourism Whistler is currently completing a Sports Tourism strategy and moving into the solicitation phase of its new Events Tourism strategy. Marketing director, Arlene Schieven, sees events as valuable tools for Whistler because they provide a powerful hook, creating an immediate and time-limited lure to visitors, differentiating Whistler from other alternatives.

"You just have to look at TWSSF, Crankworx, and Cornucopia, with what they've done to room nights... It really shows how events can drive visitor traffic, and add to people's experience and vacation when they're here. And they are increasingly important for us post-2010."

Carlee Howell, Tourism Whistler's Manager of Events Tourism, acknowledges that the pressure to fill the calendar with high-profile events following the Games is palpable.

"We're all fighting the economy, and events become more critical for once that afterglow of the Olympics fades. I am getting that feeling, with regard to my role and the focus for late 2010 event solicitation, that it's a critical component in the strategy for our event partners (RMOW, WB and TW). There's a lot of 'We've got to get on this. Why don't we have an event in place for 2010, 2011, 2012?'"

Part of Howell's role is to target events with a real capacity to drive room nights and a significant media value.

"Ideally we'd like to have a signature event almost every month of the year, to fill in the calendar dates that are a bit slower," she said.

Identifying events that fit with Whistler's brand, values and culture is not tricky - Howell mentions celebrity golf tournaments, mountain biking World Cups, sports events utilizing the 2010 Legacies infrastructure, Winter X Games, Canadian mountain running championships, the JUNOs or Eco-Challenge style Primal Quest events, as part of a laundry list of possibilities.

The biggest challenge, though, is that many of these established signature events come with a hefty price-tag. Says Schieven: "Many of the events we want to bring here have significant hosting costs. These are events that can happen in many different locations, and have a large following and large media following, and they can command a price from the location... so we need to work out ways of funding these things."

Hosting costs can be upwards of $150,000. Bidding fees for various marquee sports tourism events can also tally in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It seems the federal and provincial governments aren't the only ones who've realized the economic benefits of special events.

Community buy-in

Organic, or home-grown events, often find themselves at cross-purposes with implanted or non-resident produced events. Grassroots volunteers frequently toil for very little money and sometimes resent seeing their efforts and successes outshone by the glamorous outsider festival, trailing celebrity friends, VIP status and expensive invoices.

In the bike world, outside event producers often take advantage of trail infrastructure that local volunteers have spent hours developing. The fact that they don't have to pay to play is an imbalance that irks Test of Metal founder Cliff Miller.

"For Squamish, one of the big problems is that local non-profit events, like the Test of Metal, the Orecrusher and GearJammer, contribute to trails, and out of town for-profit events contribute nothing. This year, we've had MOMAR, the B.C. Bike Race, and there's an offroad triathlon coming in September. MOMAR has not, to the best of my knowledge, contributed anything to the trails. Last year, the B.C. Bike Race did contribute some money to build a bridge. But Test of Metal charges $5 per head, as part of the ticket entry price. That's the cost of doing business. We, a local not-for-profit event, contribute $5,000 for trail maintenance every year, voluntarily, because it's the right thing to do."

Tourism Whister's Event Strategy acknowledges the importance of community buy-in in creating a successful event, and part of community buy-in is contributing to the social and recreational infrastructure of a host community. Live Nation's Pemberton Festival did a text-book job of this last year, catering several community open-houses at local bars and providing a community grant fund from ticket proceeds that was later distributed amongst a host of local non-profit organizations.

Says Schieven: "Ideally, we can build that consideration in when we work with the event."

But negotiating for those kind of community benefits all depends on who has the bargaining power.

"The challenge that we run into is that we're not the only place these events go to," says Schieven. "Comfortably Numb takes its profits and invests them back into trail maintenance. They do an excellent job and give back locally to the infrastructure. And maybe that (should be) part of the cost of hosting an event... We need some criteria to evaluate (implanted) events against, as we move more into sports tourism, so the vetting process can be a bit more than just (whether or not we can manage) the funding. We need to develop a strategy on the funding side. How do we make a bid to host the World Cup for mountain biking?"

Summer Sessions' lessons

Given the natural infrastructure, the athletic talent and the proliferation of bikes of all kinds in the corridor, bike events on all levels are a natural, authentic area of focus for a post-Olympic events strategy.

The bike is a beautiful symbol for sustainability - a self-sustaining machine, the most efficient animal on earth in terms of weight transported over distance for energy expended, as well as most efficient machine on earth in terms of weight transported over distance for energy expended.

It's green, it's fashionable, it's fun... It's a no-brainer that the bike would anchor signature events and festivals and sports contests throughout the Sea to Sky corridor.

The important thing, though, is not to waste time reinventing the wheel.

Whistler has a short institutional memory, but it already was awarded the opportunity to host the 2001 and 2002 mountain biking World Cup. The bid fees had been paid. The bid had been won. And in 2000, Whistler turned it down.

Marika Koenig, now a realtor, was an event promoter in the late '90s with a love for all things bike.

She created Whistler's first major mountain bike festival, the Summer Sessions, featuring the first bikercross event in Whistler and incorporating music, kids events, and animation through the village bars and restaurants.

"We were inspired by the World Ski and Snowboard Festival," she said. "We saw the way the music component and getting the public involved in a sports event made it viable as a destination event, as something more than just a sporting competition. Adding the festival component made it that much more fun. And our goal, with Summer Sessions, was ultimately to bring a World Cup to Whistler and incorporate it in."

They were successful in their bid, but the opportunity was euthanized when the resort's key event stakeholders couldn't coordinate a massive implanted event, a local events coordinator, and conflicting corporate sponsor obligations.

"Politics killed it," says Koenig, and Summer Sessions folded shortly thereafter, with one more local events producer hanging up her hat and moving on to other fields.

It remains to be seen whether lessons learned from that experience have actually positioned Whistler as more or less able to revisit the opportunity.

Know your limits

Throughout the corridor, organizers are learning, most often through trial and error, what it takes to run successful and self-sustaining events.

Slow Food Cycle's founder, Anna Helmer, admits the go-back-to-the-land event has had a fairly short-term outlook.

"We pretty much take it year to year, deciding while actually riding each year's ride whether to do it again the next year," she says.

For Susie Gimse, SLRD Director for Area C, this short-term outlook is a concern. Gimse has supported the Cycle since its outset, allocating $5,000 in annual funding from the Area C discretionary fund.

"It was always the intention when I started that the event would be self-sustaining and would make enough money to move on, not be something that we would continue to support financially beyond the first few years," says Gimse.

"It is such a great event with respect to the community. We've seen increases in participation from 400 to 2,300, which is significant, so I believe we need to sit down and have a conversation with the organizers about where they see it going, and at what point do we create negative pressures on the community. You don't want to have an event where participants aren't having a good time, so the key is ensuring the right numbers and developing the capacity."

The Test of Metal worked out its capacity limits by year three.

"The first year we had 450, and it worked," says Cliff Miller. "So the next year we allowed 600 and it worked, and then we went to 800 and we saw where the problems started appearing, bottlenecks on course, and that's where we capped it. The difference between 800 and 1,000 might not seem like much, but on a trail, it's a lot. We went all the way up to being UCI sanctioned and that was the biggest mistake. Because there was so much regulation involved it stopped being fun. We got it back to the grassroots. And now we're having too much fun to stop."

For Miller, the event now is self-sustaining. Its 800 spots sell out within minutes. Close to 55 community sponsors stepped up this year. "Anything we needed, we were just given." No marketing budget is required. No one gets paid or takes a salary. Three hundred volunteers show up on the weekend to make it happen, and 35 "test pilots" take on various portfolios to organize the event, ascribing to three basic rules: 1. If you have a problem, solve it; 2. If you want to quit, replace yourself; and 3. Have fun.

"It's a labour of love for all of us, and it's really not that hard anymore. We're not concerned about making money, and we don't need to reinvent it every year," says Miller, who is more than familiar with burnout from his many years at the head of SORCA. And while the initial ambitions might have been to turn the Test into a huge tourism generator for Squamish, bring business to the downtown, and leverage the profile of the event for trails advocacy and protection, "Now, we just concentrate on making it the best event we can."

At the size Crankworx is at, the machine can't just self-perpetuate. Audience burn-out, rather than organizer burn-out, is the real risk, which keeps the onus on Whistler Blackcomb to keep innovating and upping the ante so the experience for the spectator doesn't get stale, and finding sympathetic sponsors to help defray the expenses. Last year, Crankworx introduced the VW Trick Showdown and the Giant Slalom to replace the Bikercross, as well as debuting the first Canadian Cheese-rolling Contest. This year, in addition to the Deraylor Music Festival, and the Saint Deep Summer Photo Challenge, the Canadian Open Enduro will let the squishy bikes and the cross-country mounts duke it out.

Hope for the future

"This year is very challenging," says Carlee Howell. "I think a lot of event producers are finding their numbers lower than anticipated this year, and yet, we do see a spike in visitors when events are taking place. Personally, I see the corridor and resort as needing events to survive. Events play a key role in driving traffic and room nights, and also enhancing the overall experience for people."

But there's no quick fix to the economic slowdown ahead. Many commentators forecast a complete paradigm shift looming - a global economic meltdown meets climate change meets Peak Oil storm. When the thunderclouds clear, the bike may enjoy a revitalized role.

There are already over a billion bikes in the world, almost twice the number of cars. Ironically, as velo-love proliferates in the Sea to Sky corridor, formerly pedal-powered countries like China are late-blooming with lusty affairs with the automobile.

Our consumer culture has been our most successful export - it's hard to blame citizens of the developing world for aspiring to have our toys, and material comforts. Perhaps the biggest impact we can have globally, not just locally, is to continue to proclaim the bicycle as the ultimate status symbol, tool, and toy.

Maybe our signature summer bike festivals are more than community branding exercises, grassroots celebrations, and destination visitor lures. More, even, than stimuli for our local economy, bike-centred celebrations might just be seeding hope for the future of the  



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