This should be obvious

Thanks to all of you who have emailed me with questions about sponsorship. I’m sincerely flattered and I apologize if I haven’t gotten back to you. But sometime in the next few months, I’m planning to launch a little website where you can post your sponsorship materials, give feedback to each other and get advice from me and some other people who have a lot more experience than I do. Keep reading this column for more details. Keep reading the rest of ROAD, too.

Now that we’re a paragraph behind schedule, I’ll get to the point. The road cycling community is not doing nearly enough to support bicycle advocacy.

From local clubs to pro teams, not a single sponsorship proposal that I’ve seen has talked about raising money for a bicycle advocacy organization. Not one! Racing has done a lot to support some worthy causes – cancer research being the most common – but we’ve largely ignored the people who make it safer for us to do our thing.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about groups that promote the use of bikes for everyday transportation and defend the rights of bicyclists to use public roads. Sure, they ride hybrids. They attach mirrors to their helmets and wear those reflective straps to keep their pants clean. Lame, right? As if we don’t look ridiculous wearing our tights, shoe covers and those clear plastic rain jackets that should have been made obsolete a long time ago. We can makes spokes out of carbon fiber but we can’t come up with anything better than clear plastic to make our rain jackets our of? It’s 2008!

Sorry to get off on a tangent, but someone needs to look into this. Anyways, every cyclist benefits from the work of the bicycle advocacy community and we all need to return the favor. The most important thing you can do is to use your bike for something other than training and racing, or recreational riding if you don’t race. If you can ride 200+ miles per week, you can ride a couple miles each way to work. Go to the store, the coffee shop, the movies or – in Neil’s case – Waffle House. Get a dedicated town bike if you need to. They’re cheaper than a wheelset. Next, put in some time and money. Talk to the people that you ride with and make a donation in your club’s name or find a time to volunteer together.

Admittedly, some people in the advocacy community have a negative view of racing and racing-inspired recreational cycling. There has never been any significant dialogue but I think it’s safe to say that advocacy has done more to reach out to us than we’ve done to connect with them. Where I live, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has tried repeatedly to get the conversation started but to no avail.

So, whether you’re a commuter or a pro racer, everyone who rides a bike has something in common and a reason to collaborate. This should be obvious!