At the December Minnesota Cycling Federation meeting the preliminary calendar was released. Utilizing the same procedures as in years past, the MCF awarded the preliminary dates to the promoters who had previously promoted an event on that date. However, clubs that failed to promote an event on that date this past season “lose” the rights to that date for future events unless no other event is in place to fill the void. Although this process has some flaws, it works for the most part and working from that rough template we now have a preliminary calendar that we discuss in this article.
It should be noted that for simplicities sake it was determined to hold off on discussions pertaining to the Cyclocross Calendar as there will be some reshuffling of the calendar in order to better facilitate the ridership in the region. This discussion will be led by Dan Cleary (Loon State) and will take place in the spring. We also want to make clear that once again there seems to be a full calendar of track racing at the National Sports Center Velodrome which we will cover in-depth over the course of the 2008 season.
In an effort to promote the 2008 racing calendar we have decided to do a preview of the 3 disciplines of road cycling; Criteriums, Road Racing, and Time Trials. The following is an analysis of the Criterium portion of the schedule.
A look at the numbers:
The 2008 season appears to be chock full with the following count of disciplines gracing the preliminary calendar:
Road Races: 10 (including Oxbow)
Criteriums: 26 (including Opus, State Fair and Dakota Tech Series)
Time Trials: 19 (including Black Dog Series)
In an effort to understand these numbers we have also broken down the numbers of the individual series themselves:
Criterium Series Totals: 16 races ( 6 Opus, 3 State Fair, 7 Dakota Tech)
Time Trial Series: 9 races (All at Black Dog)
The Criteriums:
As you can see a vast majority of our criteriums are part of a local weeknight criterium series. Tuesday night racing has long been an important piece of the local cycling scene and it is fantastic to see that over the course of 16 weeks there will be racing for the road racers in the Twin Cities area.
An important factor in the extension of Tuesday night racing is the reemergence of the State Fair Criterium series that is going to be promoted by the Category 6 racing squad over a span of 3 weeks in June. While there may be a conflict with the first Dakota Tech race, held by the Saint Paul Bicycle Racing Club. Since the club of over 100 members failed to have an attendee at the December meeting, the issue seems to be rather mute. It is of the opinion of BikeThrow that the SPBRC should attempt to push back the start of their Dakota Tech race or cancel it in order to facilitate a new event in the area that can better cater to local cyclists.
The historic town criteriums of Northfield and Hopkins return for the 2008 season, the two amateur NVGP criteriums of Mankato and Stillwater also return, as does the Cloquet Criterium (part of the 4 stage race in Duluth), St. Cloud Criterium and the State Championship Criterium will once again be held at the State Capital. New criteriums scheduled for the 2008 season include the Excelsior Criterium and a new criterium being held in conjunction with the Tour of Granite Country on the campus of St. Johns University. Missing from the 2008 is the Campus Criterium after last years promoters, Grumpy’s/LGR was unable to successfully secure the venue for a 2008 event.
The biggest question mark for the Criterium schedule for 2008 is the early April date of the Excelsior Criterium. Last seasons race was canceled a month before the event with the promoter hoping to get an event off the ground in September, but nothing ever materialized. We hope that the Excelsior Criterium will be a reality in 2008, but we remain cautiously optimistic that it will happen.
Historically many races fail to materialize after being placed on the calendar. Recent memory alone reminds local racers of the 2007 Excelsior Crit (Excel Cycles), 2007 Hutchinson Crit (SPBRC), 2006 Sibley County Road Race (SPBRC) and various cyclocross races such as the failed MN-WI Challenge in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and the last minute rescheduling of the Milaca CX race (Spirit River). Hopefully this practice of reserving a date and not producing an event is no longer the case, and a newly adopted procedure of forcing promoters to obtain a permit 8 weeks prior to an event will help local racers plan their schedules around events that will happen.
The second part of this series, examining the Road Racing portion of the local calendar will appear next week.
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