Is the longest running mountain bike race festival in the state in trouble?
Probably not, but anyone who went to Winthrop this year and compared attendance this year with two years ago has to wonder what the future holds. Two years ago 295 mountain bikers lined up to race along with 82 down hillers. Last year it was 176 xc racers and 75 dhers.
This year they decided that they had to make the festival "family friendly" and scrapped the downhill stuff and added cyclocross along with a road ride and a couple of mountain bike rides. I am not sure how the cyclocross went but I heard the attendance wasnt that great. It seems to me taking out the DH took a few more riders out of xc who would have done xc and downhill . They probably didnt know when they started changing everything that there would be two other cyclocross races in the state the same weekend. Maybe next year the downhill can come back.
How was the race itself. Fun- How about a mass start to make things interesting. Sport started 42 riders at once which formed a bottleneck entering the single track. I politely waited my turn going into the single track although I think it took about 6 miles to finally separate from the faster and slow riders.
Probably not, but anyone who went to Winthrop this year and compared attendance this year with two years ago has to wonder what the future holds. Two years ago 295 mountain bikers lined up to race along with 82 down hillers. Last year it was 176 xc racers and 75 dhers.
This year they decided that they had to make the festival "family friendly" and scrapped the downhill stuff and added cyclocross along with a road ride and a couple of mountain bike rides. I am not sure how the cyclocross went but I heard the attendance wasnt that great. It seems to me taking out the DH took a few more riders out of xc who would have done xc and downhill . They probably didnt know when they started changing everything that there would be two other cyclocross races in the state the same weekend. Maybe next year the downhill can come back.
How was the race itself. Fun- How about a mass start to make things interesting. Sport started 42 riders at once which formed a bottleneck entering the single track. I politely waited my turn going into the single track although I think it took about 6 miles to finally separate from the faster and slow riders.
