Of course, this is a bike race, and this is the TBD Journal, so you can probably guess that never everything falls in the ‘good news’ column. We hate it when our analysis creates cause for concern. But the reality is that, in some ways, this year’s Bear Mountain Classic raised more questions than ever about the sustainability of this race, not just over the long-term, but even over the near-term — forcing us to ask: is it possible that the 2019 Bear Mountain Classic was the last edition of the race?

Is the Bear Mountain Classic on Life Support?

As we summarized a few months back in The Bear Mountain Classic Pricing Conundrum, there are two significant challenges facing the Bear Mountain Classic: declining registration trends and the huge workload associated with organizing the race. On the former, we sat nervously over the past two weeks watching the Bikereg numbers come in. In the end, with a big marketing push, the final week registration rush that we were hoping for mostly came to fruition — we nearly doubled registrants in the final week. Unfortunately even with a glorious weather forecast, this wasn’t enough to get back to last year’s 550 registrants, to say nothing of the nearly 700-registrants the race saw in 2014 and 2015. Setting aside 2010/2011 - years when we ran an abbreviated course and field schedule due to construction on Tiorati Brook - the past three years have been the worst three years of registration for the race going back to 2008.