A Perth events company has big plans for the local amateur cycling scene.
The company organising Western Australia’s premier amateur cycling event is bidding for the rights to hold a major world championship in Perth, which could bring more than 1,000 international cyclists to the city.
It also wants to add an internationally categorised event to attract some of the world’s elite riders to the annual festival.
In 2011, local events company CiC Events won a bid to host a qualifier leg of the UCI World Cycling Tour, which visits 15 international locations before culminating in a world championship final.
It has continued to run the event every year since and managing director Craig Smith-Gander told Business News it was preparing a pitch for Perth to be the host city for the 2016 final.
“That would have 1,000 international cyclists coming to Perth for a week, so the economic impact of that would be substantial,” Mr Smith-Gander said.
The World Cycling Tour features amateur riders over the age of 30, and CiC Events has managed to lure more than 350 to participate in the Perth leg in previous years.
The company has steadily expanded the scope of its annual festival, which includes the qualifying races, with this year’s event – Velofest – incorporating nine different races.
The festival, which takes place in late March, will include a larger gran fondo race – loosely translated as ‘great distance’ – in which Mr Smith-Gander expects around 500 cyclists to take part.
It has also added a criterium, or short-course, race to be held along the Esplanade in Fremantle.
Mr Smith-Gander said while such short-course races were not the cyclists’ favoured form of competition, they were a major drawcard for corporate sponsorship.
The Esplanade Hotel has signed on as a sponsor of the festival and is converting its Esplanade-facing rooms into corporate boxes for the event.
Woodside Petroleum is also a major sponsor alongside EventsCorp, which accounts for about 30 per cent of this year’s $500,000 operating budget.
Mr Smith-Gander said he was lobbying EventsCorp to increase its funding so an internationally categorised race for professional teams could be added to the 2015 festival.
He said if the proposal was successful, some of the best professional teams that competed in races such as the Tour de France could be lured to Perth.
“We’d certainly be able to lure them here, it’s a matter of convincing both the private and public sector to assist us with funding,” Mr Smith-Gander said.
“It’s not a massive leap in funding. To run an event of that nature it’s going to cost us around $1 million, so it’s actually relatively affordable in terms of the scale of the event.”
Mr Smith-Gander established CiC Events in 2010 with the goal of establishing Perth as an internationally recognised cycling destination.
It came about 20 years after Mr Smith-Gander and two friends undertook their first foray into cycling events, with the trio organising the Perth Criterium Series for three years in the mid-1990s.
“We just couldn’t work out how to make a buck out of it,” Mr Smith-Gander said.
“We weren’t losing money but we weren’t making money either.”
He said his second attempt benefited from an awareness of more sophisticated sponsorship arrangements so that CiC Events could operate sustainably.
Mr Smith-Gander said while the company did make a profit from taking a cut of sponsorship and entry fees, that profit would be reinvested into growing cycling events in WA.
