Sportive Kinross - Part 1

I'm going to try and be disciplined here and keep this blog going through the coming weeks and months as I pull together (with a team of very able colleagues from the cycle club) a brand new cycle sportive for April 2011. If you follow this blog you'll hear all about the traumas, excitement, anxieties and pleasures of organising a cycle sportive from the perspective of a novice organiser. Be assured there are plenty and we are only six weeks or so into the process! So let me take you to the beginning. I am a ‘regular’ as in very ordinary mountain biker who some years back bought a road bike (which I hardly used), who joined a very new cycling club around 15 months back. It’s a cycling club which sits in a location that has been gifted through the fate of many geological movements over millions of years, with some wonderful cycling countryside. When you combine this with some good summer or winter weather is pretty much as good as it can be anywhere in the world for road cycling. So shortly after I joined the club I suggested we organise some sort of event to celebrate the location and share it with fellow cyclists. Being a complete cycling philistine I had no appreciation of the niceties of the suggestion for a young club to take on such a challenge and the idea was quickly despatched by my peers to the waste bin. That was well, a year or so ago, and here we are at the end of August 2010 now organising our event for April 2011. The current process started in late June 2010 when after some discussion about club development it was agreed a meeting was required to focus this process. Having been the promoter of the ideas it fell to me to produce an agenda, and then try to coordinate a time that suited all. Something which is for those familiar with the phrase ‘...this tape will self destruct after 5 seconds’ from a popular TV show of the sixties and seventies (later made into a movie franchise starring Tom Cruise), Mission Impossible. So, as no one time suits everyone I opt for the evening of the mid week club ride, a Thursday night. I advise after the run we would have a trip to the ‘Club HQ’ The Kirklands Hotel and Restaurant to discuss ideas on developing the club. On making my adjudication about the date and time of the meeting the Kit Manager advises he cannot make the meet due to other commitments, but he has kit he wants collected and paid for, so he asks me to assist. This of course means, I arrive at the pub, sorry ‘Hotel and restaurant’ after the ride and once everyone has gathered promptly leave again to nip home to swop my bike for a car that can carry a pile of kit. In the interim I leave my agenda for club development behind with a member of the committee (after all a cycling club is in reality a kind of golf club,) and ask him to set the discussion off. Upon my return, I am advised all but the item on the proposed sportive had been dismissed from the discussion, if I want to organise it go ahead, ‘...the Club is behind you’, ‘... but we won’t have any silly names though’ (there had, at one time been an extensive discussion about event names when the topic of organising a sportive had originally resurfaced as an option) ‘...and it shall be called Kinross Sportif’. As I explained I’m a bit of a cycling philistine so I went home to use the ubiquitous and all knowing Google to discover what a 'sportif' and 'sportive' is in cycling terms at least. I wondered, are they infact the same? Type 'Sportif' into Google and the first thing you get is windsurfing, type 'Sportive' and the first thing you have is a pile of hits on cycling including this website. So my first call as the newly anointed Event Director or as one of my colleagues described me (when we had our first meeting with our charity partner CHAS) ‘Directeur sportif’ was to drop sportif. It’s actually the French noun for Sportsman and in English one of the adjectives that can be applied to it is sportive. My next call was of course a nice piece of irony. Having dropped the French word ‘Sportif’ in favour of the widely used English word ‘Sportive’ was to amend the now mildly parochial sounding name but correct in the English language of Kinross Sportive to a European language style and title the event Sportive Kinross. My argument being that sex sells attracts the attention better than sells sex, so if you read Kinross Sportive as opposed to Sportive Kinross I am thinking Sportive Kinross would be more appealing to the casual on looker than Kinross Sportive. So that was the name taken care of! What about the route(s), the entry fees, a charity partner, the council, the police, a website, and accurate elevational mapping, well that is all to come in future postings.