So perhaps the overlap between gravel racing/riding and the hardest and most prestigious stage race on the East Coast is lower than feared? Of course if the 9.2% of GMSR registrants that raced Rasputitsa shifted entirely to The Redemption Gravel Stage Race, then GMSR would be on the brink of having less than 500 participants. And at a certain registration level the scope of GMSR presumably no longer becomes sustainable? We hope that is a question that doesn’t get answered any time soon but those 9.2% of GMSR registrants represent approximately $15,000 in registration revenue (on top of the ~$50,000 of registration revenue lost from 2016 to 2018 when registration went from 729 to 553*) so the sums involved are significant.

It’s also interesting to consider this schedule overlap in the midst of the changing of the guard at USAC, where former-professional racer President Derek Bouchard-Hall is handing over the reigns to Rob DeMartini, who comes from more of an enthusiast cycling background (full disclosure: both have impressive business backgrounds that put my resume to total shame). As USAC faces a plethora often priorities and challenges - chasing Olympic success/funding, overcoming a faltering domestic pro calendar, stabilizing categorized racing, offsetting exploding insurance costs, and of course it’s own infamous IT challenges - how the national body balances a still shrinking categorized racing calendar with the explosive growth in mass start racing will play a large role in the future of the sport. It goes to the heart of the topic that we have been thinking about on the TBD Journal for years, going all the way back to ‘Are Bike Races Broken’ — is mass start racing, rather than categorized, the future of cycling?

If you can reach full scale (which is no easy feat), the economics of mass start racing certainly seem more compelling. An event like Rasputitsa generates 3-4x the registration revenue of CRCA’s highest grossing event, the Bear Mountain Classic (Bear also has the toughest economics on the CRCA calendar thanks to huge fixed costs - see Are Bike Races Broken). Even before accounting for additional sponsorship revenue, this scale goes a long way when it comes to production value. And whether its due to that production value or perhaps due to the lack of some of the negative aspects that seem to come part and parcel with categorized racing structures (elitism/segmentation of riders) the best mass start events - we certainly put Rasputitsa in that category - have a jovial atmosphere that we don’t often see in traditional road racing.

For our part, we’re a categorized road racing team at heart. We love our Tuesdays at Floyd, Thursdays at Rockleigh and weekends in Central/Prospect Park - all venues that don’t require a car/long drive and that really only work as part of categorized racing. Which also leaves us troubled by the loss of so many great road events in the region over the past decade. But events like Rasputitsa, D2R2, and Farmer’s Daughter have showed us the flip side of the coin as well - how mass start events can create a more welcoming environment and attract a broader array of cyclists (and a broader demographic? That would be another interesting analysis) than traditional road racing.