Promote!

This article was originally in the Violet Crown News

by David Henderson
Racing in Austin is at a turning point. I know it sounds melodramatic but it's true. For years the same people have been putting on the races and, one by one, those people have moved away from promoting.

Those of us who have been on the local scene for a while can remember years when we raced every single Thursday during the summer. On the weekends we had a Best-All-Round series consisting of a criterium and time trial on one weekend and a road race on the next. We could race three to five times a week and multiple times per day on some days. In July we would race about every other day and go home to watch the Tour de France on ESPN. It was easy to commiserate with the plight of a TdF racer when you were fatigued from racing yourself. But people's interests change and enthusiasm wanes with time.

Bill Glaze used to put on quite a few races by himself. We always complained about his cheap prize lists. He would give inner tubes as prizes and the joke was that the prize for first place was an inner tube and second place was two inner tubes. Then he got tired of the complaining and stopped promoting and we were stuck with fewer local races. A race with cheap prizes is better than no race at all.

Another promoter who fell by the wayside is Steve McLean who now works at Bicycle Sport Shop. He promoted the dreaded "Bike Doctor" races. One criterium course he used had a diabolically steep, leg breaking climb. Diabolical is a word that seemed to creep into the conversation when talking about Steve's races. He was famous for waiting until late in the race to give out all the primes. The pack would already be fatigued and Steve would ring the bell every lap for the last three or four laps. It wasn't so much the fact that he saved the primes for the end of the race, as much as the way he grinned when he saw the forlorn look on the racer's faces when they heard the bell. It does make it easier to pick at the end of the race if everybody is strewn around the course. Steve eventually drifted away from road promotion.

When these two stopped putting on races we still had Jack Pritchard. And promote he did, single handedly filling the gap left by the others who's promoting efforts had ceased. He worked an amazing number of hours to put on an amazing number of races. With a little help he was putting on a spring and a fall Thursday night series. During the summer of '97 his help drifted away and he was left to do it himself. He put on the spring and fall series and at the end of the season announced that he too was through. One person can only do so much for so long before enthusiasm wanes and the excitement and novelty wear thin.

During this period of intense racing Austin racers did well when pitted against others in the state. We would go out of town and find that the plethora of local races had a beneficial effect on our results. One year at the Zilker Park Criterium, which was put on by George Kissinger, I was talking after the race with a rider from Dallas who was lamenting his lack of fitness and saying how he hadn't raced in weeks. I laughed as I told him that this had been my fifth race that week and it hadn't seemed all that fast. Now Dallas has races all summer long and they seem to do well when they race around the state. It is not a coincidence that Violet Crown was beat out for club of the year by a Dallas club.

So here we are at the beginning of another season of racing. Who will promote our local races now that all the old promoters have gone out to pasture? We did see a glimmer of hope when Jeff Austin from the Texas Premiere Masters Team organized the fall Thursday night series at the end of last summer. It was good to see a racer who is relatively new to the area and a team that is only in it's second year take the reigns to ensure weeknight racing. But what of weekend racing? What about our own club? Who will take the baton and run with it? Will it be you?

This is the reason for this issue of the Violet Crown News. The promotion theme is a way to disburse the information available on promoting. Someone needs to step forward and put on races. You don't have to do it alone and they don't need to be big races. Little one day weekend races are a good way to start. Or maybe a Thursday night series because right now no one seems interested and it looks as if we won't be racing locally this season. You don't have to do it alone. Talk to your friends and you will find out that they want to race also and together you can divide the tasks and make it easier on everyone.