It gives me great pleasure to review 2024 in this last Bleat of the year and to reflect on what we achieved as a racing cycling community. While we admittedly don’t offer club coffee rides, we stuck to and enhanced our core values, which is putting on good, safe, value-for-money cycling races for our members under the coverage of our $140 annual race licence.
Overall, we have 272 members, comprised of 261 racing members and 11 officials, and we put on 73 events during the calendar year, including 45 track velodrome events, 28 criteriums, 7 open road races, 7 kermesses and one time trial.
Our criteriums at SFP remain the most popular format of racing, attracting over 1,980 riders across 28 crits, and averaging around 75 riders per crit. Foul weather forced the cancellation of just one crit. We decided to offer value back to club crit riders this season, and 62 of you took up our value-for-money-season-crit-pass proposition, and I would be keen to hear from you how that’s going and whether it has provided the extra motivating factor to race at least 16 times to break even. We’ll look at the data at the end of the crit season to analyse its uptake and benefits.
Our other closed circuit racing venue at SDTC was popular, with the six race Sutton Super Series attracting 254 riders, and on average 42 riders per kermesse race. We ran one points race at Dairy Flat, and had to cancel the other.
While running open road races remains a challenging task, we were encouraged to see an average of 38 riders across the seven road races, and 26 race at the age standard time trial. We crowned queens and kings at our road and crit club championships. We raced at Lookout Hill three times, in varying formats, and at Smiths Rd Mt Tennent twice, as a handicap and a scratch race. Iron Mike was our most popular handicap race attracting 46 riders.
Unfortunately, we were not able to race on open roads in NSW this year, and we had to cancel Gunning. We are working towards offering a few races in NSW in 2025, including a club favourite the Gravel Pit towards Lake George and back. We were able to train and certify five members so that they can control traffic in NSW, and this goes a long way in helping us get back to racing on our favoured NSW parcours. We are watching the investigations into the Armidale AusCycling tragedy very closely, and its impact on open road racing, and our hearts go out to all affected.
Our comprehensive racing calendar is not possible without the tireless efforts of many committee members behind the scenes to deliver good value racing to our members. It is also not possible to run a race without volunteers willing to step up to do their bit so that others can race. You will have noticed over the past five years, a shift away from road racing to crit racing, or to gravel pursuits. We recognise that cycling culture is constantly evolving, and as a Masters club, we are trying to keep up with innovation, while keeping many of our traditions alive. However, we also need to change with the times. As many of you know, we will be moving to mandatory club volunteering of one event as of 1 January 2025 and as a condition of you renewing your membership with our club. I expect that we may lose some of you due to this policy, but we are reconciled in that volunteering to run events must be shared equitably across the whole membership. Additionally, there may be other ways that you could contribute back to the club other than to help out at a race. So please reconsider this option and get in contact with me, if you are departing the club due to this policy.
Working on the committee is a privilege on behalf of our members, and balancing our lives with running races is tricky. It is difficult to keep the ship afloat while delivering some reform and keeping the standard of racing and compliance high, particularly if the committee is only on a one-year cycle. We acknowledge significant contributions from the departing committee member Ed Logue (The Bleat, race organisation and results) and the departed Damian Copeland (Secretary). We are looking to recruit and build a strong, effective, efficient committee team that can work cohesively together to build a vision across 2-3 years, and leave a working footprint for the next generation of club leaders to follow. I hope to remain in this position to see it through. Hit me up for a chat if you would like to discuss coming on board.
Tonight, along with the presidents of the other AVCC clubs, we acknowledged that the national membership fee needs to go up from $120 to $125 to meet rising insurance costs. Our local committee discussed that we will be lowering the club component from $20 to $10 to offset this increase for a total of $135 for the 2025 membership. Please note though, that in 2025 you will pay about $5 in transaction fees, not to the AVCC, so all up, it is roughly the same membership price as 2024. I am expecting that the 2025 membership portal will be open next week, just before Christmas. Please keep a look out here for the 2025 Hello Club portal announcement https://capitalregionmasterscyclingclub.org.au/membership/. We will also put out a Special Bleat and a FB post. Please allow a couple of days between renewing your membership in Hello Club, and when you can register for races in the RMS calendar, due to manual processes involved in the back end, and knowing that the Membership Office is not staffed 24/7.
In the lead up to the next AGM on 10 Feb at 7pm via Google Meet (https://meet.google.com/qnx-uion-ace?hs=224 ) I wanted to draw your attention to the Life Membership policy that we recently dusted off and published on our website https://capitalregionmasterscyclingclub.org.au/life-membership/ . This lists the four current Life Members, and the process to nominate Life Members in the 2 week lead up before the AGM.
I hope to catch up with many of you at the Christmas Wheel Race. If not, please have a safe and restful Christmas holiday period and we look forward to seeing you at the next race on 7 January 2025.
Conan
CRMCC President / membership officer
