Bikes Blog
Jayco Herald Solar Tour cancelled for the third 12 months working
Oct
In an announcement to CyclingTips, race organisers defined that they’d “been working diligently behind the scenes in a bid to make the occasion attainable subsequent 12 months” however that, after a lot consideration, “there are actually real well being and work issues of safety for riders and workers” that finally pressured each the lads’s and girls’s races to be shelved.
It isn’t clear what these “well being and work issues of safety” are however CyclingTips has requested additional info from race organisers.
“This has not been a simple choice, or straightforward course of to reach at this level, and as custodians of this historic race we’re dissatisfied that it’ll not be continuing in 2023,” mentioned Jayco Herald Solar Tour chairman Tom Salom. “We thank the [Victorian state] authorities and trade stakeholders for his or her collective efforts, and we’re conscious about the significance of this as an occasion throughout the state.”
The Solar Tour final ran in 2020 when now-Giro d’Italia-winner Jai Hindley took out the lads’s occasion, and Lucy Kennedy received her second-straight version of the ladies’s race. The 2021 Solar Tour was cancelled because of “the uncertainty and unpredictability brought on by the impression of COVID-19”.
There have been plans to deliver the race again in 2022, however once more the knock-on results from COVID proved a barrier. “The unpredictability that COVID-19 brings to our occasion presents too many challenges for us to proceed subsequent 12 months,” Salom mentioned in September 2021. “Specifically, the quarantine restrictions that include COVID made it very tough to draw the very best worldwide riders.”
Once more, the hope was for the race to return in 2023 however these plans, too, have now been deserted.
CyclingTips understands that the contract to run the Solar Tour, held by GTR Occasions lately, expired through the pandemic and was not renewed.
The Solar Tour was held yearly from its first version in 1952 proper by means of till 2009 however has been held much less persistently since. The 2010 race wasn’t held because of a conflict with that 12 months’s Street World Championships in Geelong and the 2012 version wasn’t held both, as organisers labored to maneuver the race from its conventional October timeslot to February. The race returned in 2013 however was solely a domestic-level occasion, earlier than returning to the worldwide calendar in 2014.
The Solar Tour ran yearly from 2013 by means of to 2020, with worldwide stars like Chris Froome, Esteban Chaves, and Dylan van Baarle taking total victories, however hasn’t been held since 2020. Race organisers hope the occasion will return in 2024. “Our focus will now flip to the long run and planning for the 2024 version of Australia’s oldest stage race which proudly lists Olympians and Grand Tour winners amongst its honour roll,” Salom mentioned.
In different information on the Australian summer time of racing, Race Torquay, the one-day race for ladies and men held within the days earlier than the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Street Race, additionally doesn’t seem to have survived the COVID pandemic. The race’s solely version was held in 2020 (with Brodie Chapman and Sam Bennett taking wins) however after being cancelled alongside Cadel’s Race in 2021 and 2022 as a result of pandemic, Race Torquay hasn’t returned.
There’s extra optimistic information to be discovered elsewhere on the Australian summer time racing calendar, although. After two years because the domestic-level Santos Pageant of Biking, the Tour Down Beneath returns in 2023. For the primary time ever, the ladies’s occasion will be part of the lads’s TDU as a WorldTour-level occasion. Cadel’s Race, too, returns after a two-year absence.
Supply hyperlink