Just a Sec

With the Audax season in full swing and an encouraging number of events in the calendar, it is starting to feel like business as usual for our sport.

This is backed up by continued growth in our membership.

Many of you will be honing your fitness ahead of LEL in August or trying to find the time and energy to fit in a BRM event of suitable length for prequalification for PBP. Some of you, like me, may be finding it harder than you thought to regain pre-pandemic form. Whatever your situation, it is just good to be looking ahead to a full programme of events. We all owe our organisers a huge debt for keeping the faith and continuing to plan and run events in such difficult circumstances.

Awards and Annual Reunion

One of the unfortunate consequences of the pandemic has been the ongoing cancellation of our Annual Reunion. The Annual Reunion delegates were in full planning mode just as the Omicron restrictions hit at the turn of the year. With venues across the country full to capacity as people caught up on postponed events and continuing uncertainty about restrictions, our delegates took the difficult decision to postpone this year’s Reunion to 2023. One of the knock-on effects of these cancellations has been a complete absence of awards ceremonies for those awards that were still made during the championship suspensions. Some awards have been sent out by post but there is still a backlog. We have a new Awards Secretary, Peter Davis, who is working hard to bring everything back on track.

On the subject of awards, at our latest board meeting we reviewed the nominations for the various discretionary awards before making final decisions on the deserved recipients. Peter will be in touch with the winners prior to posting details on the website.

Board Meeting

Our latest board meeting took place on the 6th April. The meeting was held via Zoom.

One of the items for discussion was AUK’s response to the war in Ukraine. With LEL on the horizon, this was a topic with more relevance than other years. Chris Crossland had been monitoring the responses from Audax Club Parisien and LRM which had been somewhat mixed. Our view was that Russian and Belorussian riders should be excluded from AUK events until further notice.

Kevin Lake, our IT Manager, joined the meeting to give us an update on progress on the IT Refresh Project. He reported that, with the introduction of the new event entry pages, an important milestone had been reached with audax. uk no longer simply being a front end for the older aukweb.net site.

It was now possible to see the point when aukweb.net would no longer be necessary as part of the active processes on the website. When AUK had achieved “one system” it would be time to review the current provision of development work which continued to be heavily weighted towards volunteer input.

Kevin proposed to convene a working party of organisers to help drive the next stage of the development. He was also looking at the user experience for the approximately 50% of users who accessed the website via mobile devices.

Our finance director, Nigel Armstrong, reported that AUK was in good financial health with substantial cash reserves available to meet future needs. He was working on budget forecasts for 2022/23 in a welcome backdrop of increased revenue. At the same time, he was keeping an eye on inflation in case of a need to increase subscription fees.

The Dartmoor

Ghost…

returns for its 2022 haunting on Saturday 13 August. The spectre of five haunted sites await. This is a night time Audax, which departs as the waning full moon rises, circumnavigates the edge of the moor under the arc of the nocturnal orb, then crosses the traffic-free high moor as dawn awakens. A full English breakfast is included in the £17 entry fee along with pizza slices at the start and a hall control in the middle of the night.