Canberra Cycling Club
By now you’ve no doubt noticed that the registration price for our VCC CCC Road events has increased from $15 to $30. This was a joint decision of the Canberra and Vikings Cycling Clubs.
This has been for a number of reasons. We’ll set out the main ones here.
In November’s CCC Newsletter last year we highlighted that there would be an increase in road racing entry fees, and invited members of the club to contact us to help with establishing the new model.
The ‘Move to AusCycling‘ article is where you can see that.
Cost of Racing
The costs to the clubs of conducting road events have gone up significantly year on year as we have seen more requirements included in our road approvals. This has led to a situation where the most consistent approach to ensuring road races are run is to use paid traffic control.
This approach costs the clubs between $1700 to $2500 per race.
There are many other additional costs, such as timing system licencing, credit card and EntryBoss fees, first aid, fuel, and all of the other small incidentals that add up to the minor miracle of each road race being run.
This does not include the ‘costs’ of our volunteers’ time in the planning, conduct, and wrap up of each event.
By way of a quick example from last year, taking a ‘cheaper’ road event costing ~$1700, with approximately 40-45 paying riders at $15 each, we would have taken about $675 in registration fees. If this continued race on race then we would quickly exhaust the CCC bank account.
Reduced Membership Fees
As you saw from the ‘Move to AusCycling’ article, our income from our members’ fees has reduced by approximately 60%.
In the past, the entire membership subsidised the cost of racing through their yearly contributions. While this is still the case, it is to a much lesser degree.
What Can I Do?
There are a range of things that members can do to help reduce the costs of registration fees into the future.
The first thing is to support your club by coming out and participating in our races. We work hard with the Vikings Cycling Club to run a great road season for our combined memberships. We want to see you there!
With increased participation numbers the costs of racing will be spread over more riders and over time (with consistently increased participation numbers) we can gradually reduce registration costs.
The next thing we’d like to see is that the current trend of increased volunteering continues. There are two benefits here. The first is that when you volunteer you become eligible for free entry into our events. Details about this are on each race listing on EntryBoss. The second is that by volunteering you help spread the load of the work required in running our race calendar. For our recent volunteers, you would know that volunteering at our events is an enjoyable and rewarding experience.
We’d also love to see those members with an ACT Traffic Control Card or Accreditation contact us and let us know about their availability to help with traffic control at our road races. We offer a $100 stipend for members who help in this way.
Finally, if you have let your membership lapse, or you have friends or family who regularly ride their bike but don’t hold third party bike insurance, ask them to consider joining our club. Not only will they get the cheapest and best third party insurance out there, but they will be directly supporting cycling in the ACT (including our races).
Contact
If you’ve got some good ideas about how to help with some of the challenges the club is facing or would like to have a chat about the above, contact CCC Club Secretary Rainer Wilton on [email protected]
