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Posted by Grant on 8. April 2011 01:11
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One of my pet peeves is when I see race organizations inflate their race dates on marketing material . . . it's like they're trying to trick racers into thinking they have this really long expedition race when they actually don't. It's certainly a recent trend; a race might claim race dates of "April 1 to April 15" but once you dig into things you find the racing starts on April 12 and ends April 15. For some reason, the organization feels it's important to pad their dates to attract racers (at least that's the only motivation I can think of).
I get the impression it's like when a race organization claims a high profile team (such as Team Nike) is registered for the race when Team Nike, in truth, has no plans to compete. I'm not going to cite specific examples of this, but trust me there are many organizations out there that do exactly this. It's a way to manufacture some false excitement for their race. I think the inflated race date thing is in the same category.
I mention this now because the Ecomotion race in Brazil shows April 7 to April 17 as their race dates on their home page and other race materials. Since today is April 8, I figured I would check in to see how things were going. My google translator informs me, however, that their detailed race schedule shows the first real day of racing is at least 48 hours away: Monday, April 11th.
Now, I understand Ecomotion is a popular race and highly regarded. It's another race in the AR World Series, so they're like family, right!? This is no commentary on the quality of the event or anything, just something that has started to really irk me as our organization has gotten more into the AR World Series. I'm not going to point fingers, but you don't have to work very hard to find other high profile races with significantly inflated race dates.
I should pause here to point out that our APEX race next month in Switzerland publishes race dates of "May 24-29" and if you look at our schedule we actually have some race functions taking place on May 23. May 24 is when maps are distributed and early the next day, the race begins, so we elected to put May 24 out as our beginning date since teams are absolutely in race mode from the 24th on; a team couldn't arrive on the 25th, for example, and expect to compete at the race. I guess we should've chosen May 23 in our marketing material and then casual observers might surmise it's a 6 day race. Better still, we could hold a few formalities on the 22nd and list the 21st as "arrival day" and list May 30th as "departure day" so we could advertise race dates of May 21st - 30th. Voila: we now have what looks like a 9 day, insanely long, adventure race! Every online race calendar includes race duration, and our race would certainly jump out if it's listed as 9 days, right?
I'm not exaggerating, here, that's exactly the trend.
Another observation on the Ecomotion schedule: the winning team should finish in 4 days, around Thursday. The closing ceremony is 2 days later on Saturday night. Many elite racers I know will be on the way home by that point, needing to get on with the rest of their lives. Heck, at the race in Ecuador we just finished, they had their closing ceremony the night after the first teams finished and even then only a fraction of teams were in attendance. My flight home took off about 4 hours after the ceremony.
I should add that Ecomotion is particularly famous for awesome ceremonies and parties. This is Brazil we're talking about! So I'm not commenting on this specific Brazilian case so much as I'm wondering what people think about the general concept.
If we didn't have any time cut-offs at Untamed New England 2012, we could certainly keep slow teams out on the course for 6 days if the winners finish in 4 days. But if we delay the awards and festivities until the night of the 6th day after the race starts, I suspect we'd have a very small audience!
Actually, maybe I've just answered my own question . . . we invest a lot of our race budget in excellent food and facilities for our closing ceremonies and prize giving. If we only had 25% of the attendance because we held it later, we would save a big chunk of money. And . . . the best part . . . I could advertise our 2012 race dates as something ridiculous like June 10 - July 3, 2012!
I think I'm on to something