For the past few years our weekends seem to be filled with an ever increasing list of biking events. When we look back at the summer that is wrapping up there has hardly been a week that has passed that didn’t include some level of event in the biking world. As the Whistler region is dominated by the Mountain Biking industry, and for very good reason at that, we are now starting to see other styles of events come into play. Enter events such as the casual cruise through the Pemberton Meadows with the Slow Food Cycle and the recent passing of the 1st annual GranFondo.
On the weekend of the Fondo we saw two extremes of our sport in the 120km road ride from Vancouver to Whistler on the Saturday and then followed up the very next day with the Red Bull 5000 Down event that started in the alpine of Whistler with an early season dump of 14cm on the start line. Both events went off with great success and will likely continue for years to come. The downhill races such as the 5000 event are great to see, but the more impressive success comes via the 4000 riders that lined up in Vancouver to race up the Sea to Sky Highway. The success of this event seems so impressive because it wasn’t that long ago that most people would be considered crazy to road bike ride along the Sea to Sky to Whistler. Now, you don’t have to drive that far before passing a pack of road bikers some of which are just on a shorter local ride, but many that were out training for events such as the GranFondo. This is new for this area and very cool at that.
After just a few days of the GranFondo wrapping up I have been hearing lots of riders talking about the race and their plans to sign up for the 2nd Annual. With the projected growth to hit upwards of 10,000 riders by 2012 you can see how that is possible. More people are getting out there on the bike and also spending more time out there. To me that is really exciting to see. I`m looking forward to filling up the calendar with events in 2011 and continuing to get out there riding bicycles.
Matt-
