Only the weather is sadly lacking.
The smoke you're blowing is nice, I'll take that for the team, thank you
However, the weather — yep, we've had a run of four or five with somewhat out-of-the-ordinary weather conditions, unfortunately; I'm currently trying to find another supplier.
I don`t understand how The Brian Chapman can be run under an AUK banner, but not to the same standard. If the organiser wants to run it under his own terms, maybe he should go alone.
BCM is an incredibly popular and wildly over-subscribed event. I think he takes 140 entries, but could probably take twice that. On one of my earliest write-ups I made the note that all members should ride BCM at least once. Then I did the maths and worked out that I'd only get to ride it every 30 years or so if that were the case.
Ritchie and his family and volunteers do an astonishing amount of work to set up and run King's YHA, Menai Scout Hut and Aberhafesp Village Hall for the event. Unfortunately King's is the limiting factor, as it's already creaking at the seams. And so he chooses to filter entries to AUK-only, and, for him, he finds the way is to take postal entries and return any stray non-members who didn't read the entry conditions. Could he do that electronically? Probably, but then he'd get even more non-entries to return, and I suspect he's had one or two bad experiences in the past that is less likely in the paper-based world.
It's his prerogative, and given that it's the only event I think he has the energy to run in any single year, I'm not surprised he's chosen his own way of doing it and sticks to it. And yet he still fills all the places year after year, so market theory says there's no real imperative for him to change.
Anyway, if you're looking for inclusiveness to draw in new audaxers, then picking on the foibles of one of the very oldest, biggest, and longest annual events is still missing the point. It's at the other end of the distances — the BPs and short BRs — that the differences are felt for newcomers. And that is exactly why we do make the effort to provide the good descriptions, the enticement, the assurance, the photos and the GPS files, the hospitality and compassion, the flowers on the tables, and the noteworthy caik
Not forgetting, of course, that to the outsider every event looks like an AUK-run event, but really it's more of a franchise model: individual organisers are responsible for everything for their own event except entries (and even some take that on themselves), brevet printing, validation, homologation and insurance. So all 100-odd orgs have to somehow be able to do everything — that's a big ask! Clearly some organisers have more time, and some have more talent, but we're all volunteers, and most of us busy with other stuff too.