New Scottish Enduro Association Launched: Could you be part of It?

The future of enduro in the UK is looking uncertain, with major event organisers Tweedlove and Kev Duckworth of PMBA hanging up their clipboards for t …

By stwhannah

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New Scottish Enduro Association Launched: Could you be part of It?

The future of Enduro has been the subject of a lot of conversation up here, so this is good to see. Hopefully no one is negative about this. If they are then they need to say why and get involved.

That said, there are a lot of challenges with organiser costs, event locations and course design, as well as land owner liabilities to name a few. All that and more has to be brought to the fore, so everyone, especially the riders are aware of the challenges and differing opinions.

Hopefully we end up with good events with good spin off’s to local economies.

I’ll be the first negative voice then!

As a regular volunteer at Tweedlove and now a trainee commissaire for DH, I’ll not be keen to involve myself with Dmbins after their failure to support Tweedlove in any way in recent years.

I hope there is a future for enduro in Scotland, but not like this- its difficult to see what is being provided from that article?

You need to qualify this, “I’ll not be keen to involve myself with Dmbins after their failure to support Tweedlove in any way”.

Coming from the other end of the country and doing the same as you, I do see them support enduro, despite event organisers being private companies. Not saying its perfect but remember they have a remit, a budget, guidelines and boundaries they cannot cross. They are only the facilitators in getting this association going.

So. come on. Be constructive. Say what you would do and how you would run it all.

( Not right here though. I’m away out to do some trail maintenance)

OK- Tweedlove have been in regular contact regarding funding support over a number of years and got no help at all. Even requests to have their events publicised on the DMBinS website were ignored to my knowledge.

DMBinS recently paid for two youtubers to visit Scotland- they were riding in the vicinity of Tweedloves final GT7 weekender and avoided the event completely. That, to me is a massive snub of the organisation.

On one side of the coin, yes they are facilitating a new association, but on the other hand, why should they have the right to choose the board of an independent association?

The thing that gets me is that the remaining organisers in Scotland have been asking DMBinS and Scottish Cycling for a meeting about how enduro is taken forward for weeks/months – but have been totally ignored. That group also did a survey off their own backs to find out what the riders thought. DMBinS not interested in this either. Those organisers, who’ve put their souls into it for years, must be raging at this level of disrespect from ‘national’ and ‘representative’ bodies. They were also trying to get organised to host a round or two of the British Series but as that’s not BC/Scottish Cycling that was prob ignored too.
The rumour is that DMBinS funding is running out soon and their jobs may go, so maybe they’re using ‘saving enduro’ as a Trojan horse to get funding to save their own bacon. At the expense of the existing organisers whose jobs will likely now be lost. DMBinS is not fit for purpose, and this is a shameful way for a publicly-funded organisation to behave. They should never have planned or announced this without consulting the existing organisers first.

There’s something off about this, I can’t quite work out what it is yet.  It’s something along the lines of an organisation with paid staff asking for people to work for free with no real stake in the outcome to rescue something that they haven’t supported while people were trying to make a success of it.