The case of Ballymena Road Club's Wallace Caldwell Memorial, which goes ahead tomorrow in Co Antrim, is a curious one. The big news this week is that the event is definitely happening after it was at real risk just days ago due to a lack of entries.
Though club racing secretary, Luke McMullan, and his team were contemplating having to cancel the event, entries then began to flood in. The reasons for this big spike - at a time when race promoters are struggling for numbers - would be well worth further research, even a rider survey, by Cycling Ireland and/or Cycling Ulster.
McMullan told stickybottle it was "very hard to say" why the club had so few entries for so long, followed by a big surge. Though entry for the race had been open for the last month, by Monday morning there were approximately 30 riders signed up.
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That modest number was spread across four races - C1s, C2s, C3s and Wome. Facing such a dire scenario, Ballymena Road Club took to social media on Monday and said the race format was changing. It had decided to hold just one race that would be run on a handicapped basis, with 10 minutes between the limit and scratch groups.
Within days the number of entries had exceeded 100 riders. And that resulted in the club having to change plans again. They decided to run two races - one for C1-C2 riders and one for C3s - rather than one, as they were oversubscribed for one event.
McMullan added while the pick-up in entries - with just over 100 entered by time stickybottle spoke to him on Thursday - was welcome, it was unclear if changing the race to a handicapped event for all categories was behind the surge.
"I'm a C1 rider and I probably shouldn't be," he said speaking of recent category changes. "The points I gathered up last year were in A2-only races and I would be on the very low end of C1. I could just about hang in for a couple of hours and that's me cooked. There's a few guys like that in C1, up against M40 riders, M50 riders who are, or were, C1s and were downgraded to C2s.
"And the C1 entries for previous races have been very low," he added, citing the recent Carn Classic, where fewer than 15 signed on, with only eight turning up on the day. "They ran that as a separate C1 race and obviously they were losing money."
McMullan's own club was at the start of this week "getting closer" to the point of canceling the event for lack of numbers - and the entry revenue needed by the clubs to run these races. However, Cycling Ulster were then "a massive help", with outgoing chairman Tommy McCague to the fore.
McCague started calling people, effectively canvasing riders to enter the race and generally "making it happen", said McMullan. Entries continued to arrive right up until the initial deadline of midnight on Wednesday. He added "all of the entries" came in this week. And of the 102 entries that had arrived by Thursday morning, between 25 and 30 arrived on Wednesday alone.
McMullan said it was possible riders were waiting to see the weather forecast for the weekend and when they saw the conditions were going to be good they decided to enter. However - like everyone else in Irish cycling at present - he simply said he could not be sure why nobody entered the races for so long and then a surge took place that necessitated a second race being created.
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While that late rush was a very pleasant surprise, McMullan said it posed problems for race organisers. For example, Ballymena RC initially had catering planned for its race tomorrow - to offer tea, coffee and other refreshments to riders and volunteers after the event.
But when the numbers proved so low initially, the catering was cancelled. Then the club was scrambling to get it back in place when entries increased midweek.
Another problem was what to tell the large number of volunteers who had agreed to work at the race. While they were all in place and ready to go, word soon spread rider numbers were low. And it was unclear if the volunteers would be needed after all.
And so McMullan and his team were torn between urging the volunteers to continue to be available or telling them they were not going to be needed and to go and enjoy their weekend with their families instead.
"The volunteers we have in Ballymena are great, they really put themselves out to try and make the race happen," he said. "But it's also hard on them. I was going to people earlier this week saying 'sorry, I don't know what I'm doing wrong'."
He said he felt pressure to let them know as soon as possible if they would be required, though was doing everything he could to keep the race alive.
McMullan added in his decade or so racing, a lot of races had been lost on the Ulster scene, including many run for all the categories on a handicapped basis. With fewer races, he said there were fewer chances for C2s or C3s to get points to be promoted to C1, which in turn would impact the numbers racing in C1 events.
He remembered a time when he started racing and events like the Annaclone GP would be held - by Banbridge CC at the start of the season - and riders would rush to enter the moment the link went live online. Indeed, entries came in so quickly it would sell out immediately and some riders would inevitably miss out.
While we could look back at this and wonder what had gone wrong, McMullan said the cycling community should not forget now that the categories had changed and clubs were being asked to put on races for each category.
In the past, with races handicapped, there was room for 80 riders across the categories in the event; perhaps with a second race held for A4s.
However, clubs were now being asked to promote races for each category, resulting in the very significant challenge of trying to assemble fields for three races at a time when overall numbers were down. (Cycling Ireland said said the number of racing licences reduced from 4,000 to 1,700 between 2018 and last year.)
"How do you go from looking for 80 riders to looking for 240 riders?" he asked. "And then you suddenly say, 'ah the sport is in decline'. We've moved the goalposts. It used to be one race on Saturday and that was good enough for anybody. But now we need three races, all the categories have to have a race."
