Section 8:
Pacific Populaire and Flèche Organizers

As with the Rocky Mountain 1200, Pacific Populaire and Flèche organization are big jobs with a lot of moving parts. It would be difficult for someone with a full working and/or family life to take either of them on. The recent trend for both events has been to share the running of the event between several people. I think this probably a sensible compromise. In general I guess we should always be looking for ways to make both events as easy as possible for ride organizers. Part of this could be to compartmentalize aspects of the event so that they are manageable bite-sized tasks that a busy person could find time for. Examples of this are Harold's booking of the Harrison facilities, and Barry Bogart's route checking for last year's Flèche. I think this made it easy for Peter Lysne to step into the ride organizer's shoes. Another example is Deirdre's multi-year handling of the Pacific Populaire food responsibilities. As ride organizer you can put the food thing right out of your mind because you know everything's been taken care of.

The Pacific Populaire is a valuable asset. In 1995 the event had a near death experience - mistakes were made, very few riders showed up, and the event lost much of the credibility that it had built up over time. And there were serious financial consequences. I remember in 1996 there was no money in the rando committee's account at the beginning of the season. We made some payment deferral deals with our suppliers, and we all agreed to pay our personal spring entry fees up front in March in order to finance the season. It was a bit pathetic. It took 5 years, some hard work, and quite of bit of our then scarce recourses to bring the Populaire ridership back to 400 participants. It takes less effort and fewer resources when you're not starting from scratch. A little effort and attention up front will save a lot of effort down the road.

I bring this up now because it looks like we may be in a transition between organizers - I think Danelle and Sharon's involvement will be more limited for the 2003 event. (Am I right D & S?) As a general rule, we should perhaps be paying more attention to the succession of Populaire ride organizers. Here's one way of looking at a succession policy...

Ideally we would like to have a strong candidate (or strong team, as we have been fortunate enough to have with Danelle and Sharon) keen to take on the event and make it his/her/their own. When this doesn't happen, perhaps we should have a default system of succession... Perhaps the club president could be the Populaire 'organizer', with the vice president as assistant organizer, and the past president acting as advisor. For one thing, this makes the president and vice pres. more visible to everyone, not just the rando committee. Also, I like the idea of the club president being the one to shake the finisher's hand and award the pin.

If this approach were adopted, it would be important that the President not already be weighed down with other responsibilities, and that other committee members be ready to rally around - and indeed this has been the tradition. (Last year, for example, Ian could probably not have managed to organize the Pacific Populaire. He was too busy filling gaps and putting out fires to consider taking on any more. Did you notice? He did everything from soup to nuts - I think many people didn't realize that the club organization was stressed last year because every time something was not being attended to, Ian was there fast... problems got solved, issues resolved.) Anyway, if this plan is adopted, we should make it a goal to protect the president and vice president from secondary responsibilities so that they could be free to co-organize the Pacific Populaire.