A Rant on Adventure Racing
Everything has a cost dictated by the market price, and this market price comes from demand and the intrinsic value which we as consumers put on it.
A Lemon is worth "X", a McDonald's meal is worth "Y" and diamond ring is worth "Z"
The market value of the item, doesn't necessarily represent the real monetary value, case in point, diamonds, which are common and artificially made expensive by manipulation of supply, skillful marketing and our own stupidity.
Sports are no exception and our actions and perceptions dictate the price and products that we receive.
A good example of this is golf. Golf is no differnet to other sports, yet a series of clever marketing moves, celebritiy associations, success theories and other factors have deemed golf an elite sport, and we as consumers go along with this and are willing to pay top dollar for watching, playing, learning supporting the sport.
Compare the price of a private golf tutorial to the price of a private swimming lesson. The gulf between the two is laughable. Is this because a golf-instructor teaches something that is inherently more valuable? Of course not. Demand has created this discrepancy based purely on our willingness to pay, not on the product itself. A swimming lesson could save your life or that of another perosn, a golf lesson certainly has no power EVER to do this, yet is worth 5x 10x more.
A self-fulfilling cycle ensues,
The cost of the golf attracts people with money and the people with money inflate the cost. The upside of this is that the influx of money means the product gets better and as the product improves, it attracts more people with money. Great work if you can get it !! Nice one golf !
Compare this to adventure racing (AR) and you will see the stark opposite. We as participants in adventure races actively starve the sport of resources and in doing so keep it disabled.
Before you close the website in disgust, let me first say, that it's not entirely our fault, competitors are not fully responsible for the mess, and we must attribute some of the blame to AR's unfortunate birth.
AR is the bastard child of Marathons and Charity weekend events, and like any child, it is afflicted by it's parents bad points and blessed by their good qualities.
"It's all for charity, mate!" is a yoke AR needs to shed if it's to develop and become a sport that is safe consistent and constantly developing.
When AR started out, it relied on the good natured and generous help of individuals to help out and make the event a success, and what was left over from the meagre budgets went to charity. AR in its infancy was a group of like-minded individuals and friends, getting together for a good day out and a bit of competition. Who would have thought that such altruistic actions would hobble the sport for years?
AR is no longer this, and anyone who thinks AR should be like this is living in the 80s and actually contributes to the sport not developing.
Let's get one thing very clear, AR is a business, it is desperately trying to escape its roots as a charity event, but we as competitors refuse to accept AR as a respectable business, and the outcome of this is that we always receive an inferior product. Compare this to golf?
Our biggest fault is that we don't want to pay the price that AR is actually worth. Over the past years we've enjoyed heavily subserdized races by volunteers and now, any company that tries to move away from this model meets with immediate push-back.
Right now the AR business model is flawed, it's so flawed it's not even funny and the only reason that it probably still remains like this is that we've never really taken the time to think about it.
Let's break it down
Unless you're really lucky, we all have to go to work, and even though you may be lucky enough to have a job you absolutely love, the chances are, if you didn't have to do it, you wouldn't.
Our time and value has a monetary value which varies across businesses. Businesses run by compensating you with money for the time and energy you invest in them. This is business at its raw basics.
If you were going to open up a businesss selling bananas you wouldn't get very far if your business model only relied on volunteeer help. After a while, as the bananas began to sell the volunteer would think, "stuff this, I'm doing all the work and getting jack for it." They might be benefitting the greater population's health by providing them with a nutritious food, but this is not going to cut it enough to make them stay and make you a succesful business.
To sustain the model, of not paying for help, you could keep bringing in a fresh supply of volunteers, who would be prepared to work for free for a week or so before quitting. The obvious downfall to this is that there is no knowledge retention in the business as you will be constantly training new people.
All in all, businesses based on volunteer help are doomed. Even large charities employ full time people to make it work.
Relying on volunteer help alone, you couldn't even sell bananas!
And yet, AR is totally dependent on volunteer help and we've been so spoiled by their generous help that we now can't come to terms with the actual price of AR.
There's a paradox here, as we actively starve a sport that needs more expertise and money than other sports to survive. Goodness knows how AR has come so far considering it's malnourished history.
Can you name another sport in which we risk our lives, and trust in others to such a severe degree, yet almost refuse to pay for the expertise that the organizers and workers offer.
if you want to get a tennis lesson you could expect to pay upwards of HK$500 an hour, yet 90% of those working on an adventure races don't even get HK$500 a day, yet we put our lives into their hands. Why should a tennis instructor get more money than an AR safety consultant? The reason is because as consumers we drive the demand.
If you want to get your washing machine fixed you can expect to pay HK$300, just for the guy to look at it. At this rate the guy could easily earn HK$2500+ per day fixing washing machines. Try getting paid $2500 for working on a full day race and the event organizer will laugh you out the room. They just don't have the budget. Why? Because we as competitors don't see the value in having professional people working on a race. We'd rather it be cheap and unsafe. Go back a read the last line again and digest the real face of AR.
Another paradox appears, those same people, who happily pay $2000 for a round of golf, balk at paying AR entry fees, and are the first ones to complain when the shit hits the fan on a race. Complaining about the mangement, the staff and generally no-one having a clue what's going on.
As the old saying goes. "Pay peanuts, get monkeys!"
In our society, those with the most repsonsibilty get paid more. Flying a plane is harder than driving a bus, so we pay the pilot a lot more, because his burden is greater. Three hundred people hurtling through the sky at 500kilometres an hour is a big thing to be responsible for, no?
What about 200 people swarming over mountains, rivers and tracks? Seems to me like there's an enormous amount of responsibility on the shoulders of an AR organizer, but do we want to pay him the same as a pilot? No chance! In fact this is so ingrained into AR that we physically balk at the fact. It's quite non-sensical. We will put our lives in his hands but actively push back at the thought of him earning a decent salary.
A decent salary in the AR world is practically unheard of. Most AR organizers would be lucky to earn the same per month as your average Joe in an office, yet the burden of responsibility which they place themselves under is comparable to a pilot.
It's a common misconception that AR orgnaizers can make $1000s in just one day. This is a complete falacy, as one has to take into consideration that each race can take many, many hours, days and weeks to create safely. An AR organizer's hourly is probably around the same as an office temps!
Pity the poor AR organizer!
It may seem comical, but the biggest loser is the consumer, the racer, not the AR organizer. Obviously the AR organizer doesn't do it for just money, they do it because they have a passion for it. Yet, we consistently refuse to pay for the proper value of the race and in doing so WE put our lives at risk, not the organizer.
It is OUR responsibilty to demand that there are sufficient, trained staff working on a race and pay them the same as any other person in any other job! In fact more, because we place our lives in their hands!Until we do this, we will NEVER recieve the best AR product that we can expect.
So, next time you think about entering a race, think about what price you're willing to pay, for a seamless safe event. Think about how much money you're prepared to work for and you may come somewhere close to the real worth of AR.
Charities Give Back AR !!
It's great that AR has made lots of money for charity. It's a shining reflection of the type of person who particiapates in AR.
HOWEVER.... charities need to release their strangle hold on the sport.
The only succesful way to organize a big event is to link it with a charity. If it's for charity, you can get lots of people to help out for free, get discounts and permits easier and generally find the rocky path of organization easier.
If you look at it though, the trade-off isn't fair, because the money goes to charity, it doesn't go to paid staff. Becasue their are hardly any paid staff, there's no knowledge retention. No knowledge retention leads to ad-hoc organization. This leads to events always looking like it's the first time it's ever been done, reason being, that for most of the staff it is, because they're VOLUNTEERS!
Just get rid of volunteers in AR, it's the stupidest thing ever. A potentially dangerous sport manned by people who haven't really got any idea what they're doing. No wonder sponsors won't invest in the sport, it's a continual accident waiting to happen.
You don't see this in golf do you? For sure golf makes heaps of money for charity, a lot more than AR. But in Golf, it's a by product of the competition, not the main reason, and this is the problem for AR.
In golf, if an organizer wants a road to be closed, say because of heavy people traffic, he's not gonna be asked, "Well is it for charity?" Because we all know that the main reason the promoter is running the tournament is so he can make as much money as possible. Attract big names, draw big crowds, make big money. that's what it is all about, but in AR.......the common thought, across the board, not just in government is, "Well I don't think we can accommodate this if it doesn't have some charity element. It wouldn't be fair."
And it's not fair...... it's not fair for AR.
There are enough events running now to have a pool of highly trained individuals working practically full-time on events, making them safer and better for everyone, but this isn't happening, because events need to be associated with a charity to gain recognition. Like an old man and his unbreakable connection to opium.
We make a plea for major sponsors to invest in an Academy for Outdoor Marshals in HK. We are ready to make one, so that trained individuals can get paid on extreme events. This will free AR from the grip of charities, allow it to develop to its full potential and become a sport in its own right and not remain weak and leeched.