Afternoon guys/girls Just read through the comments from everyone who rode yesterday. Thanks for taking the time to post these, as organizer of the event I take your feedback seriously and would like to address these issues on a point by point basis. Marshals Based on feedback I received from the marshaling convenor, traffic department and riders I can only agree that they were pathetic. As a charity organization we've always opted to use community projects to provide marshaling as a means of providing work opportunities. This year we were contacted by a young gent from the community who offered us his services and promised us professional & experienced marshals. Clearly this was not the case. Suffice to say we won't be using his services again and for that matter we won't be using community projects again period. Traffic Officers I've heard from a number of people that the traffic officials left their posts earlier than they should, or in some cases were not at key intersections. How this happened I don't know yet. We are in the process of lodging a formal complaint with the department in order to get answers to this question. Coka-a-Cola Coka-a-cola provides the drinks at the end of the race as a free service. So unfortunately we as organizer do not have control over the number of cups per rider. With regards to those folks who commented on cups with barely any coke in them, I can say that I visited the table early in the morning and noticed the same thing. I spoke to the manager of the table who told me they simply half fill them to keep the cups from being blown away and will top them up with cold coke once riders arrive. Those "empty" cups may just be a case of the pourers being overwhelmed by large rider groups and riders taking cups which aren't actually fully poured yet. Seems like a simple case of miss communication, I will however alert Coke to this to prevent it in the future. Toilets Sorry you folks had to walk so far in your time of dire-need It was not our original plan to have the loos way at the back. Unfortunately club management told us at the last moment that we are not allowed to place the loos on the field close to the riders and we had to make do with the "option" we were given. OKW The "late" start is causing congestion on OKW and I've been told by traffic that running an event over OKW next year is looking less-and-less likely. We will however try our best to keep our event on this beautiful route, this includes pushing for a 5:45/6:00 start next year. Again, thank you to everyone for taking the time to comment on the issues you had. If you didn't meet me yesterday that's a shame, but you may have as both myself and some of my team were walking around and chatting with riders to find out what you thought and where you think we can improve. As you know we do this for charity and if you don't like our race charity loses out in the end. Thanks for all the feedback, we take it very seriously and, like you, would like to be able to host an event in the S-Suburbs again. I hope you'll give us another chance next year.
