Great day to be out cycling regardless of it being cancelled! On ya for being so positive about the whole trip. I still did the 120km and not going to lie it was brutally hard. Picturesque landscape made it worth it and 100% doing it next year!!!
Thanks mate!! Initially I was quite disappointed and almost annoyed. But while riding and in retrospect I could see the event was really good. Even though the organisers had to cancel, they still created an event and atmosphere which got people excited to ride their bikes and try something new.
Love it ! Well done all. No issues with any of your videos , they have all been great as they are so honest and engaging. My 18 yo has gotten into road cycling after watching your videos . Kudos !
Well done on the video & riding the course, and all the others that did the same. I'd like to know how many of the registered riders actually completed the course on the day (you're there, might as well do it), and it goes to prove that 'traffic management' is not really required to the level that they plan for. Kudos to the Bowral team & traffic mgmt Co for owning the situation rather than ducking & weaving for excuses.
The traffic management is probably more of a requirement due to liability and insurance. But yes, we ride around every weekend without traffic management and no issues.
Glad you guys made the best of it all, and kudos to the event organisers for trying to keep people happy. As for Altus, their ‘reputation’ precedes them, not totally surprising this stuff up could happen to them….
This was my 4th Bowral Classic in a row. It’s a great day of cycling and I’m looking forward to next years event. S?!T happens some times but we made the best of the weekend and completed the 120. I’m pretty sure I got on the back of you guys just before the Glenquarry KOM. I was feeling pretty knackered so it was nice to be pulled along by your team.
Josh - great video. You and your mates showed what cycling is all about - you delivered the message brilliantly. In relation to your early comment about the way you speak to the camera please just be yourself. Reason I watch this channel is because it is real and you are a good bloke. Good thing about RU-vid is personality does the selling - there are other guys I watch who spend time talking about tyre width, pressures, weight of groupsets, wind drag and all of the tech stuff and they do it well. The audience will seek that out and tune in when they feel the need for that content. Be happy with what you do and how you get it across. Horses for courses. Cheers and thanks
Thanks for those words, I appreciate it. I’m always trying to think of ways to make the videos more engaging and entertaining for people so I’m glad that you have enjoy my stuff so far ☺️
Amazing Video @josh!! Well done, I was planning to do it at last minute but never happen. Great content mate, a big hello from maybe your only Colombian follower in Sydney 😉🇨🇴
Just found your channel from your 200km around Sydney video! Loving your stuff mate, great videos to relax and watch after a day's of work, and it's getting me keen for the msgong ride in 2 weeks!
This video was definitely needed. It takes a light hearted approach to a shitty and accidental situation and shows that the event organisers were transparent and responsive via the messages sent out and the free feed at the end. Great video Josh and friends. I stayed home because I hadn't left yet when the message came out but glad to see heaps of people rode anyway. I will also be spending my refund on next years ticket 💯
Thanks very much, I see a lot of criticism of the organisers online. Maybe some deserved, but end of the day they still created an event which got lots of people excited and out riding.
Thank You Josh, a very nice video, and well done editing, such a shame it was Cancelled. I'm Pleased you enjoyed the scenary of our beautiful Southern Highlands, enjoy it again next year. Take care. Thanks again 👍👍
You described exactly how the emotions flowed on Sunday. And in the end most of us had a great time! At some stage your group overtook me. You were too quick and there was no time to say hi! Maybe next yesr lol. Thanks for sharing and happy riding.
I hope you had a good day! Beautiful weather and countryside, I would say it was hard not to. Ahhh next time come say hi if you see me round 😊 Safe riding mate
Great vid, it was a perfect morning for the ride. And agreed - I'll be using my refund to buy an entry for next year, it's such a great event. The free food made it a pretty damn good morning.
Mate, thanks for joining us on the ride. I hope you had a good time. I know you wanted to take the event a bit more seriously, but given the circumstances it was nice to just have a casual roll. Take care and see you next time 😊
What a ride! It worked out great in the end. Hopefully the organisers didn't lose too much money on the whole thing. At least Altus owned up to it... hopefully they give a huge discount for the next few years! p.s. Richard has the right technique! Congrats on the baby, and finally using your pump on an event.
Me and my partner thought we saw you on top of mount Gibraltar. Wasn't a hundred percent sure then now it's confirmed 😁. Not a cyclist but do really enjoy your videos.
Honestly, the event organizers reaction to the cancellation if anything, makes me more keen to enter this ride in the future. They had to accept a mistake (whether theirs or otherwise) and still decided to make all the food free & ensure the event village was operational. A classy reaction when they could have just cut their losses.
I can only imagine the organisers went through an absolute rollercoaster of emotions in the morning. I’m glad that the day ended on a high and everyone was happy and finished the course safely.
Another excellent video, Josh. Great cycling and life philosophy. Maybe see you there next year as I'll be definitely doing it following double knee-replacement surgery. Keep the vids coming.
Cyclists really are a different breed , we are prepared to suffer , we go to all lengths to get out on the bike and we make the most of less than ideal situations. Good on the organisers for coming to the party and not dropping the ball 👏 Looks like a great weekend and congratulations to your club for topping the charts 🍻
Hopefully the event cancellation doesn’t put financial duress on the organisers of the event and send them to the wall. They’d have still incurred costs in regards to the event, and now will have to refund entry fees which would’ve been used for those costs. Great video, thanks
Your vids just keep getting better and better. 👏🏻👏🏻 Looked like an epic day all things considered and the organisers by all accounts were awesome when faced with such a tribulation. Well done to them. They treated you far better than I was by Le Tape a few years ago.
Great Vid. Given the majority of daily rides are done without traffic management, it makes sense that you’d get out and ride and enjoy the day. I find it hard that “human error” could have been the sole reason. I imagine that for traffic control it entails booking in advance heaps of staff to staff the control points, booking in heaps of signage and barriers, radio communications etc. I doubt in organising all these logistics, times and locations, liaising with police, emergency services and event organisers it can possibly come to one person getting it wrong. I suspect there’s way more to it. In any event, it happened and even more importantly you guys made the best of it and had a great day and weekend
worked in events for 27 years. Human error happens. Even with the best systems. Often the fine details are checked but not the basic ones. Shit happens. As you say though...makes you realise how irrelevant it is to have 'traffic management' and spending hundreds of thousands on it so we can ride on roads we already pay to use. It's bonkers. If it's on roads cyclists cant ride on...sure...fine. But otherwise...makes you realise the stupidity of mass events...and why it costs more to ride per kilometre in a mass event than it would to drive the course...whic is bonkers. $1 a kilometre at least usually. I've ridden 200km for $1 before. And on a route that people pay $220 to do. Unnecessary costs.
@@out_spocken Agree largely with your sentiments (i too come from the Events world). I reckon the necessity for Traffic Mgmt is probably borne of the fact that it only takes one d^&*head to sue the event organisers for negligence in the event they crash or get hit by a vehicle, and successfully pin it on a lack of traffic mgmt. (perceived or ortherwise) to plunge event organisers into ruin. Probably speaks more to the current climate of societies proclivity to sue more than anything else 😔😔 And don't get me started on the current state of insurance costs for events! 😡😡
All fair and valid points. End of the day though people are happy to pay a premium to go to an organised event, with food and aid stations and amenities. If you’re going to be critical of that, then why do people pay $200 to run a marathon major 🤷🏻♂️
Such a shame the mistake happened, we are all human after all, im glad you guys decided to turn the frown upside down..its a very nice place to be cranky !!!
You should look at going to one of the best fondo events around .. in Thailand. The Chiang Rai Classic is on every year in early November. Cost of the event is $40 (includes timing chip, food and drinks after and a jersey) Yes you have to pay for a trip to Thailand but it becomes a great holiday. Doing my fourth one in 2 weeks time
@@joshkwan .. they run the event over 4 different distances 25 , 60,110 and 130km.. This year the 110km has 700 entries and the 130k has 200 entries. It is extremely well organised. The event is done in the valleys of Chiang Rai so a flat ride (you dont want 700 riders crashing on big downhills) Last 3 times I have averaged 36km/hr (I am 68)
@@joshkwan .. I also use a 3 bedroom Airbnb townhouse in Chiang rai. Cost is only around $75 a night so you could effectively go with a bunch of your cycling mates
Well done making a great day out of it despite the cancellation.. Love the skin suit saving 10watts.. but the fully unzipped gillet flapping in the breeze, losing 20watts makes me a sad panda 😢
We cyclists are a weird bunch. Something gets cancelled, so what, let’s do it anyway! Feel for the organisers and I hope it doesn’t put anyone off going next year. I hope to be there myself!
Cancellation with that late notice is interesting, I'm only halfway into the vid, but as a runner, I would've done the same and still run the course haha, good choice
It felt like a wild timeline, and everyone was a buzz with speculation and conspiracy theories haha The road is still there regardless of event or not. 🤪
being in construction if they had short staff and where not able to fulfill legal obligations they may have just pulled the pin legality these days is making things harder
Agree that it is difficult waters to navigate. But I’m sure they would have had some redundancies for short staff, including subcontracting. I think the simple explanation that they messed up the dates is sadly the most logical.
Organisers needed to not send that text and just let people know when they arrived that it was an unorganised ride. They are free roads. We can ride them. Frankly I don't actually get why people basically pay $1 a kilometre (usual minimum cost) to cycle on roads you can ride on for free on any day of the week. It's one thing that shits me about cycling events. Monetising a free activity. I'm cool with paying if you ride say over a bridge you couldn't normally...contributing some money to charity (though really if you care about the charity you might as well donate directly to them), paying for a jersey most people never wear again. etc etc. I'd be really interested in a video on event costs and how the prices are justified. I think the thing most people love is being around a huge bunch of other cyclists aand sharing this great sport/activity we all love. That can be done for free. No different to a club group ride. - It's funny how when everyone gets in their cars to drive on roads there's no traffic management plan needed....but if a bunch of cyclsits do....gotta pay 'in the hundreds of thousands' for traffic management. Why? God it shits me that this exists because the culture is that bikes are a nuisance on our roads. The fact the 'event' went ahead without traffic management and it went well is evidence of the stupidity of red tape/regulation we have in this country.
Lots of fair points being made. The fact the event went off without a hitch without traffic control maybe is a sign of this. That being said the police did a fantastic job making sure everyone was safe. If they did not organise TC I don’t think the police would volunteer all their resources to make sure the event proceeded safely.
Interesting comment and you make several fair points. Why do I think people sign up to organised events that they can ride on free roads? For the vibe your honour! - The camaraderie of sharing an experience with thousands of other riders, of sharing highs, lows, and laughs, of joining the inevitable peloton bunch that forms, the feeling of having completed some sort of official stretch challenge, of being a 'real' cyclist, of getting away from the stress of real life for a day or two and just living the carefree childhood dream with your friends, maybe imagining that you are in some sort of tour de france that is actually achievable at your level, of just sucking in the scenery at an unfamiliar location. Whatever it is, there is a collective desire for it that the organisers are filling. It sucks how selfish irresponsible people and their lawyers have wrecked everything in our society but this is where we are now. An event costs money and a lot of that goes towards risk mitigation demanded by our risk adverse lowest-common-denominator society.
I have never understood why the police think that a bunch of cyclists legally riding on public roads have to be controlled by them. Not something that they impose on car drivers... Back in the late 80s when I was running the Great Eastern Australian Rally (GEAR) out of Bowral we had daily rides all over the Highlands over a long weekend, one of the rides was a 200km ride which included a climb up Macquarie Pass, only a very small number of riders were doing that ride, yet the police seemed to think we needed a control car behind them on the pass, I pointed out that having a control car would cause more traffic problems than small groups or individual cyclists riding the climb, it took a lot of convincing to get them to drop that stupid idea.
You're seeing it the wrong way. They're not controlling cyclists, they're protecting cyclists from car drivers. So many cyclists have been injured and killed in this past year alone. Just yesterday a man and his son got hit by a car on the gold coast - and they were riding on the footpath. Drivers can be unpredictable. It's like seat belts and airbags. They don't do anything 99.9% of the time, but the 0.1% is when you're glad you have them. I've never been in an accident myself but I wouldn't tell everyone seatbelts are pointless just because I personally haven't been in an accident. If an incident did happen on a big ride, people would complain that the organisers did not take participants safety into consideration which would affect the perception of the race and the sport in general. One cyclist on a ride might have a low probability of being hit by a car, but when you have hundreds of cyclists in one place at one time, the probability goes up simply because there are many more opportunities for an incident to happen. It's like the shotgun approach - one bullet might not hit the target but if you shoot a few hundred bullets in one go, one is more likely to hit the target.
Pretty much exactly what is written here. Once you are all riding under the banner of an event, the organiser takes in the liability of everyone’s safety. Before you know if, costs start to ramp up very very quickly.
@@veryboringname. I think you are missing the point here, at the most we would have had about 10 riders climbing the pass, spread over a few hours, not as one group. What the police wanted was for every one of the 10 or so cyclists to meet as a group at the bottom of the climb and have a car driving behind them all the way up the pass. Can you imagine the chaos and anger from the drivers stuck behind that car? Without the following car drivers could have passed the odd rider or two with ease.
