You Have Got to Be Kidding Me:

This is from the race announcement for a road race here next weekend:
Category/ Start time/#of laps Prize List/Cash
Men's 1, 2/ 11:00 am / 7 laps/ $75 /3 deep
Men's 3/ 11:00 am / 6 laps/ $75 /3 deep
Master Men (35+)/ 11:00 am / 6 laps/ $60 /3 deep
Women's 1, 2, 3/ 8:30 am / 5 laps/ $50 /3 deep
Men's 4, 5/ 8:30 am / 4 laps/ No prize list
Women's 4/ 8:30 am / 3 laps/ No prize list
Entry Fee for all races: $20

Total Prize List: $260
$260 total, 6 categories, 2 of them with absolutely NO prize list. This is ridiculous.

Call me the East Coast guy who only races for money and you will be wrong. I have been racing for over a quarter of century and quite frankly I am not that good of a bike racer. If I raced for the money I would have quit a long time ago. I like riding my bike, a lot. And I like racing my bike. But with bullshit like this, I have to admit I am liking it less and less. My bitch is the entry fee-prize list ratio. I will say it again, I think promoters should make money, I do. I don't put races on for free. I charge a fee. But what I do is enter it as a line item in the race budget and then our event management company gets adequate sponsorship to cover the prize list and all of the race expenses, including my fee. If we put on a race with a total prize list of $7500 (which we have) we try to raise at least twice that amount of money (which we typically do). That way, we keep the entry fees a reasonable amount for our customers: the riders. And where do those entry fees go if we raise enough money to cover the budget? They cover any of the short falls that we might run into after we get the champagne for the winners, the trophies, the ribbons for all of the participants in the kid's races, pay the podium girls, print the giant check for the winner of the main event, get lunch for our volunteers, pay our officials, our timer, our announcer, etc. Then any money left over, we give some to our local junior development club and put the rest in the bank to help us put on the next race. Do we always cover our all of our expenses and have a profit? Not all the time. Just most of the time.

I have lived here exactly 5 years this summer. I moved here with no established network and was approached by a local businessman to help put on some bike races because of my years of experience in the sport. We formed a LLC and within 2 years we were putting on the richest prize list crits in the area. How was this possible? We worked at it. We put together a sponsorship proposal, we arranged some meetings, we cashed the checks and then we put on some damn good bike races. And they weren't out in the middle of nowhere either, they were in town centers.

Bottom line, there are too many race promoters out there who make their money off of the riders and give little in return. My advice to those promoters: do some work other than the day of the race. Raise some money from some sponsors, it's not that hard. Then use some of that money to pay out a prize list that is reasonable for what you are charging in entries. Your customers, the riders, will thank you for it.

And quit putting on bush-league races like this.