kevin thompson

John, and everyone else who is interested,

I am speaking for myself, none of the handful of other mountain bike promoters have said they agree with anything I am going to say here.

This year was my 6th year running the Firecracker. Of course I want more people there. It takes just as much work to put a race if 10 people show up, as it does if 200 show up.

Several years back, Shane Young was doing the OBRA rep job at the mountain bike races and one of the things he did to entertain himself was to track attendance through out the season. The conclusion that he made was that after school got out in June, that fewer racers showed up to race. After reading John's email today, I went back to look at my history in the OBRA arcives. My data backs Shane's data up. I checked the old schedules to see what conficts where happening on the dates the Firecracker was happening. This is what I found.

The most surprising to me was in 2005 the firecracer had an entire July weekend to its self (just what John seems to want). I had 97 racers.

The complete history is:

July 2003, Brownsville crit, and state track on the same day, 115 racers
July 2004, Silverton rr, firecracker is the xc state champ, 89 racers
July 2005, no compitition the entire weekend, 97 racers
August 2006, Woodland rr, 75 racers
May 2007, Swan Island, 158 racers
June 2008, Silverton, 170 racers.

The last 2 years, the race was before school got out and I almost doubled participation.

I tried for 4 years to promote a race in the summer, it was not really worth my effort.

Any thoughts?

See you all at Pickets.

Kevin