Box Hill Road Race – Why Us Cyclists Should be Ashamed
Millions of people are expected to line the route of the Olympic road cycling race on Saturday. It will be a national celebration of a sport that has suddenly captured the public’s imagination. It will be confirmation that cycling – and cyclists – are finally major players on the world sporting stage.
Except it won’t be any of those things, not really.
In fact one part of the route will be an illustration of just how far Britain still has to go before cyclists are truly taken seriously.
The 15,000 spectators on Box Hill, where Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish, Chris Froome, David Millar and Ian Stannard of Team GB will be aiming to complete nine grueling circuits ahead of the peloton, have had to pay £15 for the pleasure.
That’s £15(£5 for kids) to access what, at any other time of the year, is effectively free, public space.
Can you imagine that happening on the Tour de France? Can you imagine what would happen if the French government suddenly announced it would be charging fans who wanted to greet the peloton as it crested the Tourmalet or Aubisque?
There would be more than just tacks in the road.
How did it get to this? How did we allow the Olympic organizers to charge £15 a head – not an inconsiderable amount of money for an event supposedly embracing Corinthian values being held in the middle of a recession – for spectators to stand on the side of a public road to watch a sport that, anywhere else in the world, is considered a free spectacle?
The justification trotted out by LOCOG(London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) is that the money raised will recoup the costs of a “detailed wildlife survey” carried out on the area to determine the viability of allowing access to spectators.
The survey, incidentally, reached the conclusion that “increasing space for spectators will not cause any harm to the area.”
Did it really cost in the region of £200,000 to establish that?
Part of Box Hill – including the famous 1.6 mile climb up Zig Zag Road – is owned and managed by the National Trust, hence the need for the survey. But just because it’s home to a few species of dormouse and wood-eating insects, does that really justify charging spectators?
Are we supposed to believe that high on the slopes of the Tourmalet, which has been crossed 77 times in the history of the Tour de France, all wildlife has been wiped out by those hordes of flag-waving, wig-wearing, beer-swilling cycling fans? The Tourmalet is part of a national park network which proudly bills itself as “The Kingdom of Untamed Nature”. And they’ve never had to charge a spectator in their history.
It won’t surprise you to learn that the National Trust won’t be getting a penny of the ticket money. All of it goes to LOCOG. That’s the same LOCOG who have threatened to sue any shopkeeper who puts any Olympic symbols or slogans in their windows. The same LOCOG who, according to The Times this week, has banned the village newsletter, the Box Hill News, from being sold along the road race route because it is not an official sponsor.
To me, this whole episode just serves to show that when it comes to standing up for our rights, the Brits in general – and, I’m sorry to say, cyclists in particular – are a bunch of spineless wimps.
Yes, there were a few murmurings of dissent on cycling internet forums when the idea of charging spectators was first mooted, but that’s about as indignant as we got. All those roadies, mountainbikers, fixies, commuters, MAMILs and weekend warriors just couldn’t form any kind of collective, sustainable protest movement. We just rolled over and died.
The simple fact is, this should never have been allowed to happen.
When they start charging for places along the route of the Tour of Britain, we’ve only got ourselves to blame.
Picture via buhsnarf
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