Is this the Rainton stop? (From a road.cc article
View attachment 783118
(Was their ride over? Or merely resting? Ceased to be, pushing up daisies, etc ... )
Thats definitely Rainton
Is this the Rainton stop? (From a road.cc article
View attachment 783118
(Was their ride over? Or merely resting? Ceased to be, pushing up daisies, etc ... )
My partner Rachel made those.
Ordered a LFL T-shirt off the website 😄
I heard today that there was more than one rider who did the whole thing.
One on the helpers' ride; others may have done it unofficially.
From an fb comment, 170 bikes were outside Rainton VH in a count made before early breakfast on Tuesday. (Edit: as ming has pointed out v v v , the 170 count was at Mickleton: up the Tees valley at the foot (effectively) of the long Yad Moss climb.) Rainton 100, then?Is this the Rainton stop? (From a road.cc article )
(Was their ride over? Or merely resting? Ceased to be, pushing up daisies, etc ... )
Interview with Ian McBride - recommendedIan McBride got to Dalkeith before the event was stopped,
From an fb comment, 170 bikes were outside Rainton VH in a count made before early breakfast on Tuesday.
I asked around to try to find out how many had stopped at Mickleton. Riders estimated anything from 70 to 200. When I spoke to the Village Hall later on Tuesday I asked them what they thought. They confidently said 170 so I asked them how they knew. Somebody had been around the site in the middle of the night and counted the bikes!
Perhaps he had no alternative but this comes across as an utter train wreck - was there literally no contingency in place? Someone asked about a time extension and they got shut down rather decisively. I suspect Audax Club Parisienne would have had to agree a time extension and knowing the way the Audax organisations seem to operate, it'd be a mountain to move... People have invested a shoot ton of time and money to participate on this ride and to abort it without any transparent discussions seems pretty unfair. I feel sorry for all the volunteers and riders.
My comment was not focused on the cancellation itself but more the the announcement, I felt it needed something like "after consultation with our volunteer team we concluded that we could not safely complete the event within a reasonable time extension". Whatever the words it would have shown the organisers worked on ideas as best they could (I'm sure they did).
Posted by @srw over on YACF:
"It's absolutely the right decision to cancel. It's much easier to allow rider discretion to prevail if you're only offering barebones support. But with schools having to be handed over on Saturday, volunteers and riders (for many of whom this will have been their only experience of a typical British summer, let alone an atypical one) needing to get back to reality at the end of the week and the meeja, hungry lawyers and risk-averse insurance companies waiting to pounce if something goes catastrophically wrong even for one rider, the decision was made much less difficult.
It's actually easy to bounce back from reputational damage if you handle it well. A reasonably open lessons learned exercise, an admission of any mistakes made in handling and comms and an explanation of how you'll manage the next event differently will go a very long way to restoring confidence. So far I haven't seen a bum move."
Thanks Stu.
For context, someone else on that thread had argued for allowing rider discretion and said that the organisers had trashed the event's reputation by cancelling.
That was covered by the regular drum beat of announcements. Number 1: pause, update at time X. Number 2, at time X: we all want you to be on your way but it needs to be safe. More at time Y. Number 3, at time Y: sorry, it's unsafe and we can't continue.
I don't know how much was preplanned and how much was done on the hoof, but it was well done. In emergency situations the job of the leaders is to make difficult decisions, consulting privately. Danial, a volunteer, (a) owned the decisions, and (b) made sure the Comms came when he said they would. That's considerably better than many people who are paid vast amounts to do this sort of thing.