There’s been a bit of grumbling from BMers about the way British Cycling (BC) were handling the National Points Series (NPS) this year, particularly with regards to venues and high entry-fees. So we did some question-asking to find out what was really going on, and got some surprising answers. It turns out that British Cycling are no longer organising or financing the NPS and that this has all sorts of implications for the way the series is financed and run.

British Cycling are not at all involved in the series this year
In fact, while BC are the governing body for professional mtbing and continue to sort out licensing, the organisation and financing of the events has been handed over entirely to the promoters. According to Philip Ingram at BC, this has been how road racing has been run for several years, and BC have been wanting to move to a similar set-up with mtb racing for some time. Given that Ingram also told us that for the last 5 years the BCF had been running the series at a considerable loss, and had underwritten it to the tune of £10,000 annually, it’s perhaps not surprising they wanted change.

Although the Ingram stressed that the decision was not a financial one, other sources involved have spoken of “crisis talks” at the end of last season when it became clear that the BC couldn’t sustain the subsidies in the NPS. During these talks a small group of racing promoters managed to get together enough sponsorship money to make an NPS in 2002 a realistic proposition. But according to a couple of those involved, the series came very close to not happening at all this year.

So who is now organising the NPS?
This year the main face behind the series is Ken Ward of KW Racing, a former team rider and manager with 10 year’s involvement in mtb events, and the NPS Series Chief Marshall for the last two years. We spoke to Ken to try and find out what was behind both the locations of the NPS events and their relatively high entry-fees this year.

Among the other challenges facing the series organisers this year are the impact of last year’s Foot and Mouth outbreak and the rocketing of insurance premiums in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Last year the series was heavily disrupted by F and M, not only in financial terms, but also in putting the riders out of step. Philip Ingram of BC described the disease as “a disaster for mountainbiking”. When it comes to insurance, Ken Ward told us that for competitive sport and public liability the premiums were five times what they were previously, another race promoter told us that his premium had gone up by a factor of 6. But this is a back-drop faced by other race organisers, so it doesn’t fully explain the relatively high cost of entry for the NPS. So what does?

The financial realities of running a UCI event
While the series has secured some level of sponsorship from Giant, without which it wouldn’t have got off the ground at all, there isn’t much sponsorship money around for elite races at the moment. Crucially, there’s also no financial support whatsoever available from British Cycling.

But the NPS is still a UCI event, and keeping up with UCI standards costs money. While BC handed over responsibility for organising and financing the event to the promoters, this was on the condition that the restrictions / guidelines laid down by the UCI for UCI events would be stuck to. In practical terms this means that the organisers have to keep to certain standards, and Ken pointed out that the costs of doing this are significant. Running an NPS event requires, for example: a minimum of two ambulances, 12 portaloos and a pump-out, a certain number of marshals, PA systems, radios, barriers, and a fully marshalled official practice day the before. There were around 50-60 staff involved in the first NPS event of the year, last weekend’s race at Thetford.

To put all that into figures, according to Ken there’s about £70,000 worth of equipment tied up in the series over the course of the year and the budget for Thetford last weekend was around £11,000.

So, in short, putting on the NPS is an expensive business and this year there’s no financial underpinning from the BCF to subsidise the races for the riders, so the series has to be self-funding. One result is higher entry-fees.

And using certain courses
The high cost also means, of course, that the NPS needs a certain number of racers in each event to survive. The number needed varies from venue to venue, but as a rough guideline the organisers said they would be worried if they had fewer than 400-450 riders attending each event.
To minimise the risk of not getting this kind of turnout, the organisers are sticking to venues where experience tells them they’ll get the most riders turning up, and unfortunately for northern riders, this means the south and the midlands.

A risky business
There’s no doubt that the organisers themselves have taken a big financial risk in putting this series together. As another race promoter not involved with the NPS put it: “If anything goes wrong this year, the riders will still have had their races, the farmers will have had their course money and the insurers will have their premiums, but it will be the organisers, who’ve put so much hard work into it, that will lose out”.

We spoke to Mike Wilkens, organiser of the past Schwinn 100 and this year’s Kona 100 to find out how things were different for events like his in contrast to the NPS. Firstly there’s a difference in scale, the events that have a broad appeal and few thousand raiders turning up are obviously able to charge less per entrant. But he also said that the need to keep to standards set by BC / UCI would make a big difference in terms of cost. This raises the question, is there still a market for events at this level? As Ken Ward himself put it, “We have a product and people have to decide whether or not they want that product”.

Taking lessons from the endurance events
With sponsorship money and attention shifting away from professional riding into mass-participation events such as the Red Bull and Sleepless in the Saddle, and with the NPS running at a loss for so long while the promoters are committed to keeping up costly standards set by the UCI, you might think that the whole series concept is really a dead duck. You’d perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the organisers are crazy to take the financial risk necessary to keep it alive.

But the organisers don’t simply want to keep the series going as it was in the past, they want to develop the series and respond to changes in the racing scene, learning from the success of the mass-participation events. The idea is to make the series races less elitist and more inclusive of grassroots mtbing. There are a few ways the organisers are going about this. First of all, to encourage local riders back into the competition, you no longer need a licence to take part in the race unless you are in the elite categories. The NPS have also moved round the races, so now the open runs before the elite, to ensure the open race isn’t seen as an after-thought and the crowds stick around for the whole day. They’re also trying to make the event more of a family weekend out, with the addition of a race for the under-12s and a chance for them to meet up with members of the Giant/Helly Hansen team.

Making the event more attractive to ordinary mtbers also impacts on the choice of courses, as they need to be be challenging to pro riders in a fast race, but also still be enjoyable for ‘ordinary’ riders.

So the idea is to remodel the series and build it up, perhaps adding to the events / venues in future years if the new model is successful.

Well, it’s difficult to say. This year the organisers have the option of doing a further two years if both sides (they and BC) are happy with how things are going.
But at the moment, it’s very much a year-to-year thing, and whether there will be an NPS next year depends on whether or not it is supported this year.

The first NPS event last weekend is all we have to go on for now, and as far as Ken Ward is concerned that event was a success. There were nearly 600 riders who turned up to race and the feedback after the event has so far been very positive.

So at the moment there’s a cautious optimism for the future of the series in its new, more inclusive form. But the bottom line seems to be, if you want this National Points Series of races to not be the last of its kind, then get out there and race this year.

If you were at the Thetford event last weekend then let us know what you thought on the forum.