|
 | | |
Minneapolis bike expo, R.I.P.Lack of industry support, Chicago politics and exhaustion kill 2-year-old showby Bill HaudaThe Minneapolis Bicycling, Travel and Fitness Expo died recently. After its birth in 2006 and adolescence in 2007, the event appeared to be well on the way to adulthood this year with the promise of becoming one of the best bicycle consumer shows in the nation. Causes of the bike show's untimely death included the work involved and a lack of support. No visitation or funeral is planned. Burial will be in the graveyard of other bike shows that died of various but similar causes. Survivors include manufacturers and dealers who lost an opportunity to display and promote their products to cyclists, and the cyclists, who lost their chance to see new bicycles, accessories and other products and discuss them with the manufacturers and sellers. The Minneapolis bike show was the brainchild of Michael Fredericks, who also publishes the popular Minnesota Cyclist magazine. In its first year, the show attracted 12,659 paid attendees. Despite a foot and a half of snow falling two days before and hampering travel to the 2007 event, 11,287 people found their way to see the latest in bicycling products. At the same time, the number of exhibitors jumped from 127 in 2006 to 251 in 2007. No one knows what would have happened at the now-defunct 2008 show.  The third annual Minneapolis bike show had been scheduled for March 8-9 in the downtown Minneapolis Convention Center, but Fredericks suddenly pulled the plug on the event. His reasons were both personal and professional. "I really had a great time doing it," Fredericks said. "During the time I did the show, I met some wonderful people. Under different circumstances, I'd do it again. I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I just got tired and ran out of gas." Putting on a major expo is not something you do on a whim. Finding and securing adequate space and promoting the event to both the industry and the public is a Herculean task. It can quickly burn people out - especially when the industry being spotlighted is not heavily involved and supportive, either physically or financially. So when such a massive amount of work is being done for only meager financial reward, organizers of such events feel all the more overworked and overwhelmed. Fredericks said his inability to get major corporate sponsorship is due in part to the nature of cycling itself. "Cycling is such a narrow sport that it's hard to get corporations to recognize it as a sport," Fredericks said. "It is one of the most popular sports, but there is no way to register or record the number of people cycling. You see them riding up and down the streets, but we don't have any statistics to back up anything. Without statistics, it's hard to get major corporations behind something." An exception to that, Fredericks said, was the travel and tourism industry. "I got a tremendous response from the travel industry," he said. Why it took so long for Minneapolis - which has an undeniably large cycling community - to get a bike expo has a history to it. At one time, Minneapolis area bike dealers were members of the Chicago Area Bicycle Dealers Association (CABDA), which encompassed a territory that included all of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The epicenter of this regional bicycling business group was Chicago, and that's where CABDA held its expo, which ruled out any competing event in Minnesota. Chicago drew industry exhibitors from across the nation and cyclists from as far away as Missouri. But CABDA disbanded about a decade ago and the event rights were sold to Chicago's Amateur Athlete (CAA). CAA eventually moved the show from the convention center in Rosemont, Illinois, to Navy Pier, which was more convenient for downtown Chicago cyclists. In retrospect, that seems to have been a big mistake. Not only was the Navy Pier location highly expensive for both exhibitors and attendees, but there was a political problem. An group of anti-car cyclists declared war on Chicago's big corporate sponsor, Subaru. They pasted anti-SUV stickers on the vehicles on display. And through a bullhorn they demanded an answer to the question "What is an SUV company doing at a bike show?" Soon Subaru and its sponsorship money were gone, but still throwing their support behind the pro-SUV International Mountain Biking Association. (After all, you can't get to the singletrack on a commuter bike. You need an SUV to haul your bike and gear.) As Subaru drove out of what it perceived as a hostile community, the major bicycle industry players were also in the process of scaling back their participation. The result was a dramatic decline in the numbers of both exhibitors and paid attendees. In response, the Chicago bike show will be back to suburban Rosemont again this year. The Chicago expo isn't dead yet, like the show in Minneapolis, but it's certainly on life support. Minneapolis will rest in peace eternally, unless new management resurrects it. In the meantime, cyclists should pray they do not read the obituary of another bike show death in Chicago. Bill Hauda is a bicyclist, veteran of some 50 marathons, including 13 in Boston; a former competitive triathlete; founder and first president of the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin; currently a BFW board member; and former director of Wisconsin's two major cross-state bicycle tours, GRABAAWR and SAGBRAW. A professional journalist, he has written newspaper, news service and magazine articles and columns on running, health and fitness since 1978.
| ||
Back to the top Waupaca Publishing: 717 Tenth Street * P.O. Box 152 * Waupaca, WI 54981 © 1999-2008 Site last updated 07/01/08 Designed by
PBW | ||
|
