Cancelled, just had an e mail. Not enough interest apparently. 😥

I didn’t enter in the end as couldn’t commit to the training. Would’ve been a good event though I reckon

Yes really sorry about this.

Previous years we have had around 150 riders signed up at this point, as of yesterday we had around 80 which makes the event financially not viable – we are just a mountain bike club, not a commercial organisation.

More importantly than that though was the lack of people volunteering to help marshal the event. Last year we had 25 signed up at this stage, but this year we only had 10. Clearly this is not enough to run the event safely so we have had no choice but to cancel.

This is obviously very disappointing for the competitors who had signed up and for the organising committee who had already put in a huge amount of work during their spare time to get as far as we did. We will have a think about how to make the event more attractive and hopefully we will be back with something similar next year.

Thanks for your support.

Boris
(Chairman of Bedgebury Forest Cycle Club)

That’s a shame. I was thinking of doing it this year. Must be a real blow to do all the prep and then have to bin it. Good luck for next year.

Sorry to hear it Boris. I did sign up and am dissapointed it’s not going to happen but hey ho I enjoyed the training.
Do you think that the fact it was later in the year this time was a factor? If it’d been mid sept this year it would have been glorious. Any chance of trying again nearer the summer solstice next year?
I think Bedge is a fantastic venue and is suprisingly all weather now due to the massive effort that has gone into trail building recently. It’d be nice to get a sponsor interested and get the event on the map (I’m sure you’ve been trying to do this!)
Anyway, please don’t be too dispirited.

I did wonder if the time of year was a factor, i’ll cycle in any weather but i think for some the thought of 12 hours in the wind and rain may have been some what discouraging, mind you this year that covers most months.

Surely one of the Southern XC series organisers would be interested in having a race there?

Must be someone you can ask?

Yes, September would have been better…

To give a bit of history though for the last 3 years the event has been promoted by the BHF and run by us in mid September. The BHF decided not to do it this year but kept us hanging on for a decision until mid March. By the time we got the decision, the earliest we could run it was the 20th October.

We did try and find a sponsor. We got some money from Quench – the on-site bike shop which was great but our “headline” sponsor was supposed to use their PR company to heavily promote the event. For unknown reasons this did not really happen as we expected it to – we need to find out what went wrong here.

We think that the lack of numbers was due to a number of factors – weather throughout the year, time of year of the event, cost of the event (although it works out pretty cheap compared with similar events), cost of fuel etc. Certainly the feedback we have had from previous years has been very good with very high levels of praise on the course, organisation, marshalling etc. So we don’t think we have done anything wrong in the past but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it better in the future.

We’ll have a think and a discussion at our next meeting and see what we think is realistic for next year.

Meantime we do run a successful XC series there over the summer months which works well and gets a few entries.

and rollindoughnut – thanks for your comments, it’s always nice when the work is appreciated!

Boris

I was thinking about doing it but needed to get the Saturday night off work. Won’t have to now though. Have heard some good things about Bedgebury of late, so you all must be doing something right. Hoping to get over there soon.