All About Sports Events very own event consultant, Josh O’Boyle, has experience operating on or managing elite level and professional cycle races, including the Tour de France grand depart in 2014, the Tour de Yorkshire and the 2019 UCI Road Cycling World Championships in Harrogate.
There’s plenty of glitz and glamour associated with the top bike races in the world, including fleets of new vehicles, fancy VIP units and the renowned hospitality of the Union Cycliste International. But there’s plenty of hard work, man hours and issues that have to be overcome to organise a bike race and allow it to run smoothly.
Josh specialises in the management of the route and sport aspects of races, so this blog focusses on these areas. But of course, there’s a much wider scope of work that goes into each race, including: marketing, logistics, fleet, administration, conferencing, start/finish planning, counter terrorism and much more. But covering everything this would make this a 400-page book rather than a short blog!
Here’s just a little bit from Josh on what it takes to put together a UCI classed bike race:
Designing a route to please everyone and their dog
Whilst managing routes for the Tour de Yorkshire and the 2019 UCI Road Cycling World Championships we received lots of letters from local residents or keen cyclists of Yorkshire asking us to plan routes that incorporated climbs never used or a road that they believed would ignite the race during the next edition. However, as much as we would love to build routes purely on terrain, there are a number of factors that must be considered when planning a route. Below are just some of the key requirements that every route must fulfil:
· Not exceed the UCI maximum distances set for rider safety
· Start and finish at locations/cities that are already agreed
· Often there are only a select few ways to cross rivers or motorways which automatically takes out the option of reaching certain climbs/areas
· Include enough key climbs or sprints to make the inter race competition an interesting watch for the television audience
· Not impact upon emergency service depots, hospitals or major planned road works
· Road width - it’s amazing how small a road a convoy can drive through (Park Rash for example), but there’s a point when the road becomes just too narrow
The road book – the bible at any race
Imagine combining a year or mores worth of work into one book, this is what the road book is. It’s the organisers’ opportunity to provide competitors, director sportives, teams, stakeholders and suppliers all the information they will need to navigate the venues, starts, finishes, feed zones and intermediate sporting points. From day one, design starts on the road book, involving collating information from everyone in the organisation, writing up design briefs, making a million-design amends and checking every detailed instruction. One wrong turn on the timetable could send the entire peloton in the wrong direction or impact the time of a time trial effort.
Route Infrastructure: getting it built and then removed in a blink of an eye
You see it all on TV - the flamme rouge, branded gantries, feed zone structures and sporting signage. But what you don’t see are the structures built to house the filming equipment, the timing equipment and much more, and you certainly can’t see the build and derig schedules that we are working to on the route.
Operating on the highways is a constant battle between disruption to other road users versus requirements of the event. Because of this need to reduce disruption, the amount of time roads can be closed for the build and derig is squeezed to as narrow window as possible.
During the 2019 UCI Road World Championships we often had to activate and deactivate the 14km Harrogate circuit twice a day. This included moving 8km of barrier each time, removing branding, opening and closing barriers for road junctions and residents’ driveways (you don’t realise how many driveways there are in a 14km circuit until you have an hour to close them all!).
Closing Roads
Clearly closing roads to traffic is a huge part of delivering professional bike races and thankfully organisers get great support and specialist resource from local authorities in this area.
For the 2019 UCI Road Cycling World Championships, closing over 1000km of road for a cycling race was unprecedented in the UK. Typically, organisers close roads using either static/staffed closure points or specialist police escort groups to operate a rolling closure. For the 2019 road worlds, a whole new format was designed and developed to keep disruption, manpower and costs to a minimum without compromising safety. This involved utlising a hybrid method including both static and rolling closures, incorporating over 1000 volunteers. It’s a big job and one that shouldn’t be underestimated or under-staffed!
Making the route safe for riders
Now whenever I drive along a road, for any reason, I’m automatically checking for road furniture or low bridge parapets. In fact, if I’m driving in Yorkshire, to my partner’s annoyance I let her know what’s approaching on a road in terms of road furniture.
Making a road safe for a bike race means identifying resource for all these risks and allocating mitigations. These can include one of hundreds of specially trained volunteers, a police motorbike or a Safe Cycling LED screen. To manage allocation of these areas, create briefings/timetables and share the information with stakeholders we utilised technology, moving away from clunky CAD plans and operated on a specially designed GIS system.
Spectator safety is another area requiring special attention and local knowledge to ensure the correct locations are located for crowd safety stewards or no spectator areas. Often these areas are easy to identify, including climbs, sprints and town centre. But there’s always the odd road side party or wedding that needs to be accounted for!
One of the biggest jobs on race day involves driving a route safety car, checking all our planning is in place and filling any mitigations in that have been missed or left unstaffed. Unfortunately, there are lots of situations that cannot be directly planned for, which takes us to the next section.
On the Day: Weather, Protestors, Threats and More…
Over the last few years, I honestly think I’ve seen it all on bike races. But I know for a fact that that’s not true and I’ll be surprised again in the future. Here are just a few scenarios we’ve come up against on event day.
2019 UCI Road Cycling World Championships
Sunday 29th September 2019, I was sat in my kitchen at 5am getting reports that the route for the men’s elite road race had significant flooding in the Buttertubs area. By 6am I had discussed the issue with the rest of the route team, mapped out an alternative route and sent it across to the UCI/Gold Command for approval. 18 months of planning, significant costs on road work repairs and the route was amended with hours to go. That’s events for you!
Tour de Yorkshire
The 2019 edition of the Tour de Yorkshire tested us all, our contingency planning and ability to react to issues was stretched to the absolute maximum. Issues included protesting individuals on a climb who had sabotaged the route safety with cooking oil and a combination of high spring tides and high winds that led to waves crashing onto the racing route at Sandsend. For all of these incidents, the risks had to be dynamically assessed and alternative plans put in place to ensure the continuation of the stage.
To this day, I’ve not operated on a one-day race or stage race that has had to be called off before the event or abandoned mid stage. With the appropriate resources allocated and some careful contingency planning, it’s amazing how robust your event planning can be.
Comms and speaking with people in the middle of nowhere
I won’t go into too much detail here; comms tech certainly isn’t my area of expertise but in terms of event planning it’s a critical area. Bike races often utilise beautiful parts of country, but these areas are inherently rural and therefore phone signal is likely to be poor. My advice is plan for your primary comms method (often phones) not to work and ensure there are other solutions in place.
Everything else – easily forgotten
On top of everything outlined above it’s also important to remember the little things. For example, if safety pins haven’t been ordered it can put a halt to the start of a bike race or food for workforce being overlooked can reduce your staff efficiency. The devil is in the detail for events of all sizes.
If you would like hear more about Josh’s experience in bike racing or find out more about sports event management services that All About Sports Events offers, then please follow us on social media or email hello@allaboutsportsevents.co.uk.
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