CROSS IS COMING

And holy sh*t is it expensive.

I fell in love with Cyclocross last year, finally.

After years of doing one or two races a year, I felt the stoke that so many friends have after dedicating a few hundred bucks to a functional bike and consistently going to races.

The community is rad. The racing is fun, hard, painful, and short. It’s perfect for a guy like me that doesn’t sign-up for gravel races because they’re too long.

The cost is relatively minimal compared to other cycling disciplines.

At least until organizers feel the need to make more than a few bucks per participant.

It helps that I snagged a few podiums (and a dub!) last year...

Hosting races isn’t free

I’ve hosted my fair number of bike races in the past, all on a collegiate level, and all with a population that was very cost sensitive and had to travel a long distance to get to events.

I only charged $20-25 per race. We still made money every weekend.

How? Honestly, I’m not totally sure, but I would guess it was because of the community behind the scenes. Volunteers, mostly.

Race flyer circa… 2017?

Road races were difficult. On top of mandatory USA Cycling/Insurance fees, we had to pay police, city, EMS, and public works officials, plus reimburse for any gas or costs that volunteers incurred related to the events.

Costs associated with hosting the race varied, but we were able to do it for anywhere from $3500 to $4200 depending on the number of registrants. With inflation that number is up to around $6000 on the high end, but still reasonable, and only increases the reg price by about $5.

Even with all that, we still made money on road races with ~200-300 registrations, and were able to use that cash to help get us to national events on the collegiate calendar. By made money, I’m talking $800 to $1700 per weekend, max. Mountain Bike races were slightly more profitable due to significantly less overhead but would get less racers overall.

I still want to be involved in hosting events and making things happen, but I’ve found the community here to be more “gate-keepy” than what I would assume to be normal. Maybe that’s just the way it is. Maybe I just need to keep pushing the issue.

Calling out the obvious

Racing is too freaking expensive.

$100 for a 3-minute DH race?

$105 for a 70-minute off-road triathlon?

$50 for a 45-minute cyclocross event?

$22 for a Wednesday night 5-minute race?

All absolutely ridiculous. I’m a competition junkie, I love anything remotely competitive even though I know I’m never/rarely the fastest person at the start line.

I love the community, and especially the competitive race scene, but it’s shrinking at an alarming rate because I can’t in good conscious recommend a suffer-fest to anyone when it costs more than $1/minute for an endurance event. Of anyone I know in the scene, I’m probably the person that peer-pressures people to bike race the most.

If I can’t recommend people try racing, you’ve got a serious problem.

$30 races were a big part in convincing Crystal to try it out (and love it!)

So, where’s the cash going?

At a certain point, local race series start to get popular amongst the casual riding public, and it gets more and more common to make a decent amount of money on every event.

Once it reaches that point, it becomes imperative that the events keep making money, so the cost goes up to float the “less profitable” events and bring the series deeper into the black. After all, it’s scary to rely on 200 $25 registrations, when you can more easily guarantee 100 $50 registrations.

Eventually, you’ll bleed the horse dry.

I’m speculating, but at a certain point, maybe organizers go down to part-time at their day jobs to better prepare and host events, because events take real money and real time to host. Once their income and lifestyle are heavily reliant on the event’s financial success, the costs on racers shoulders start to skyrocket.

So is this just a greed issue? Same old same old?

Muddy. Dark. Wet. Stoked on cross.

Take the most popular event in North America last year, MFG’s Woodland Park CX in Seattle. A huge event that garnered just north of 1000 registrations in 2023.

Let’s assume that each registration was ~$45, that gives the organizers a gross amount of $45,000. With expenses being mostly fixed, I presume that it costs the organizers about $9/racer for things like insurance and timing (I paid $5.87 back in the day).

At the City of Seattle’s website, I found the Restricted Use Fee for a full park to be $5,000. Plus, a number of miscellaneous fees to account for shelter, hours, and vehicle fees. We’ll say it costs about $6,000 to host an event at Woodland Park for the day, one of Seattle’s most popular and largest parks, located right next to the Woodland Zoo (Seattle Zoo).

Another $15/crowd barrier for day use, plus some miscellaneous numbers like tape and marking materials throws another $500 down the drain.

On-site EMS is tricky. For an event this size, they should probably have at least 4 professionals there. But I’m presuming they’re doing two with one ambulance on-site. At $200/hour, for 6 hours of racing (8am - 2pm), they’re looking at $1200 in medical.

I’m sure there’s more costs than I’m missing, but I think I’ve been fairly liberal with numbers so far. Yell at me if not.

So, after some calculator blip-booping, the best possible scenario for profit in one-weekend of a Seattle-based race is $28,800 (realistically closer to $25,000). That’s a lot! That’s a ton! If you’re making even close to that much profit 6 or 7 weekends a year, that’s more than enough to quit your day job! Even half that is enough to consider a career switch.

That’s the problem.

At $50, the break-even point for a Seattle race is ~175 registrations, slightly less since ~30% of your registrants come day-of.

At $35, an amount most people are comfortable paying for a half-day cyclocross event, your break-even for registrations comes ~280. Are you going to get an extra 100 people racing by charging $15 less? Probably not initially, but people like me will happily drag and peer-pressure their friends into a $35 race. I’m not going to do that if the race is $50, and I’ll be hard-pressed to want to race it myself.

Less-popular races in the Seattle area still garner around 300 registrations, even at $45-60 per race, so the demand is there. But the sport is not growing at $60/event. It’s not cheap entertainment, especially if a family of 4 is looking for something to do on a Sunday morning.

Brent and I are essentially a family of 2 during cross season.

So what? People making money is a good thing.

Obviously. I mean, everyone wants more money. That’s a simple truth.

The problem, like most things, is that it slowly ruins the purity of the sport, and it slowly kills it. More money, more pressure, less stoke, more at stake.

I’m not trying to go so far as to say that the organizers of a series like MFG should go back to their day-jobs, but it’s frustrating as a participant and proponent of grassroots racing to see popular local events go this predictable direction.

Race directing is an employable skill, and it takes a lot of time and energy to make a successful race weekend happen. MFG is not easy and the organizers should be compensated by their events. But enough to make a living off of? That’s a quick way down the drain. Every race has to make a considerable amount of money. Every racer needs to pay the maximum possible.

[Hot take alert!] Look- Make enough to buy a couple fancy bikes every year, fund your car payment, or afford a nicer place to live. Use your employable skills gained by directing races to start a career. Heck, if you’re going to direct 25-30 events a year, then by all means make it your career. But 7 race weekends every fall for a year’s salary? C’mon man.

Cyclocross only exists and is fun because of the community. It is and was one of the last “cheap” forms of racing. In the PNW, every bike is a cross bike, you don’t need suspension, gears, or even good tires to make it around a grass circle. There’s no “tire official” at the start line making sure you’re within the standard set by the UCI.

You just need to pedal.

It’s the least gate-kept of all the disciplines of cycling, and it’s sad to see our Seattle-based series go the same way as the DH, XC, and Enduro series we know and love.

Will you see me at MFG and Lemon Peel races this year? Yes.

Will I be as stoked, or be bringing a van full of cross-curious friends as often? Probably not.

Horse-bike-lady is probably not going to pay $50-60 to ride her hybrid around a grass field just for laughs.

Who’s doing it right?

Local and homegrown Cascade Cross. $35, good times and good vibes. This Bellingham-based series has fun down to a science. Give the people a hard course with fun features. Get the booze flowing early. Get venue’s that people can bike to.

I doubt they break even on all their events, but having enough cash left over for a pizza party and replacing some broken stakes is a fine way to run an event weekend. It makes me want to help and support them as much as I can.

Who else? Cascade Club. Another local homegrown event put on by the lovely folks at wes-bike.com. A $10 “donation” gets you moving and grooving every Thursday in September, with tune-up races and post-hangs happening all month long.

We want more of this.

Do I expect blowback from this post?

Depends on who reads it. Like, share, and subscribe (I guess).

Blog News

Apologies for the hiatus in blogs. I took a break from them after doing so much writing for CDN in a relatively short amount of time.

I might get back to a more regular cadence. These things do take a while, though.

As always, if you’ve got hate mail, you know how to find me.