Ottawa Race Weekend cancelled
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the cancellation of Tamarack Ottawa Race Weekend.
Run Ottawa, the not-for-profit organization behind race weekend, announced Monday that the six-race event scheduled for May 23-24 has been dropped, and not just postponed, principally because of uncertainty about how long effects of the novel coronavirus and measures imposed by governments and health agencies to combat it would last.
“It’s not like we’re cancelling a Grade 7 bake sale here and trying to postpone it. We rely heavily on all the city services to come together to be able to put this thing on, and ought we to be considering that from a moral standpoint, considering what’s going on?” said Ian Fraser, Run Ottawa’s executive director and race director for the May events. “I think we need to be really mindful about what our needs are and potentially what the city is able to deliver.”
The cancellation of Ottawa’s race weekend adds to a lengthy list of road racing events already affected by COVID -19, headlined by postponements of the Boston and London Marathons from April to mid-September and early October, respectively.
Also postponed are half- or full marathons in Halifax, Montreal, Madrid, Rotterdam, Prague, Barcelona, Jerusalem, Paris and the Big Sur region of California, plus the 30-kilometre Around the Bay race in Hamilton. Other cancellations have included spring marathons in Toronto, Rome, Cyprus, Vienna, Copenhagen and Fredericton, half-marathons in New York and Whistler, B.C., and the Vancouver Sun Run, North America’s largest 10K.
The Tokyo Marathon was held March 1, but with only 64 elite competitors. Public participation was nixed.
Besides doubt about the availability of municipal and emergency services, including the status of a satellite site The Ottawa Hospital set up for race weekend in the Cartier Square Drill Hall with 250 medical volunteers, a postponement until later in the year would have caused additional difficulty for Run Ottawa in organizing a corps of 2,500 volunteers and in recruiting elite international competitors for the 46th Scotiabank Ottawa Marathon.
“It would have been a very complicated process,” Fraser said. “Every cancelled event of our stature and size that was to take place in the spring has been migrated to some proposed date in the fall at this point, and that would have put huge pressure on our ability to get a quality elite field at any cost.”
Fraser said 18,000 people had registered for race weekend before that process was halted on March 16. An estimated total of 33,000 were expected.
Entry fees are non-refundable, but those individuals already signed up will be offered 50 per cent discounts for next year and free entry into a “virtual” 2020 race weekend, for which registration will reopen later this week. Participants will receive the customary race weekend T-shirts and medals — already purchased — plus virtual bib numbers and finish-line experiences. They won’t race on the normal closed courses, but on routes of their own choosing, and they’ll record the race times on an online results portal.
“Refunds were not an option and not part of our terms of service. Moving everybody to a following year creates its own set of financial difficulties,” said Fraser, who succeeded John Halvorsen as executive director and race director last September. “So we wanted to be able to create a sort of best-value picture and also stabilize our own existence down the road. So, if people want a viable and a fantastic Tamarack Ottawa Race Weekend in 2021 and 2022, this is what we have to do to be able to safeguard that ability to execute, or there won’t be an event. I don’t think that’s in anybody’s interest.”
Last year’s total enrolment was just shy of 30,000: as few as seven for the 10K division for visually impaired competitors, but as many as 8,753 for the half-marathon, with another 6,988 people in the 10K and 3,519 in the 42.195-kilometre marathon. Enrolment peaked at 41,224 in 2015, when organizers marked the 40th anniversary of the first Ottawa Marathon and both the 10K and half-marathon attracted more than 11,000.
Earlier this year, Run Ottawa announced significant changes to the 10K, saying it had relinquished the Gold Label designation from World Athletics and would no longer recruit elite international racers, although it would maintain Gold Label certification for the marathon.
Financial rewards for leading homegrown performers in the Athletics Canada 10-kilometre road race championships were enhanced, with cash prizes for the top Canadian woman and man doubled to $6,000 and payouts extended through 10th place ($125), rather than stopping at eighth ($200 in 2019). Overall top prizes would have been $1,000, regardless of nationality.
Men’s and women’s marathon winners were to receive $30,000. Top Canadians would have earned $5,000. Normally there would also be additional bonuses for event-record times.
Athletics Canada recently cancelled its under-16, under-18 and under-20 indoor championships and temporarily closed its Ottawa headquarters because of COVID -19, thus creating additional uncertainty about the Ottawa 10K.