Festival expands beyond the outlaw biker image
Motorcycle celebration has grown into a massive, organized and even family-friendly event
The term “biker” usually conjures images of burly, bearded, tattooed men donning sleeveless shirts and leather jackets. And for a while, that was the typical demographic of visitors to Daytona Bike Week.
But that only represents a fraction of the walks of life represented within motorcycle culture, something that’s been woven into the fabric of American life for more than a century.
Though the festival’s identity has changed over the years, Daytona Bike Week is almost as old as the tradition of motorcycling itself. Now celebrating its 80th year during the event March 5-14, longtime organizers, business owners and visitors are reflecting on where the event has been, where it is now and where it’s going.
“People want to get out, they want to ride that motorcycle,” said Janet Kersey, one of the main organizers behind Bike Week. “It’s that freedom of the road, that feeling they get and that group they can be a part of that understands the real joy of motorcycling.”
Every year, riders from as far away as
Vermont and Alaska make the pilgrimage to sunny Daytona Beach to escape the cold and to celebrate motorcycle everything. Some of the hundreds of thousands of annual visitors even represent various corners of the globe including Russia, Germany, Tasmania and Scotland.
What has now grown to become a massive, organized and even family-friendly event of international recognition started with humble beginnings in beach racing.
“The fact pattern is simply just too clear to avoid. Give campaign contribution big dollars, get special access to vaccines.”
Nikki Fried, agriculture commissioner
have come from a hospital system. The Keys Weekly newspaper reported on Jan. 21 that Baptist Health South Florida had offered vaccines to senior Ocean Reef residents, in a story that focused on the frustration of other area seniors in trying to get shots.
The Herald reported Thursday that by Jan. 19, Baptist Health announced that it was canceling all vaccination appointments booked for Jan. 20 and later and no new appointments would be taken.
A spokeswoman for Monroe County said that like all early vaccines, the doses received by Baptist Health were allocated to the hospital group by the state because it met the state’s criteria, and the hospital then decided how to distribute them.
Ocean Reef Medical Center is aligned in cooperation with Baptist Medical, and “they received the vaccines as part of the Governor’s program to vaccinate communities with a population of 65+ with a homeowner’s association and onsite medical center with the ability to administer the vaccines,” Kristen Livengood said in a written statement.
“Communities like The Villages also received the same,” she said. “The allocations were coordinated through Baptist and the State of Florida, not through Monroe County. We were aware they received them, but they were not FDOH-Monroe County allocations.”
Baptist Health and Ocean Reef did not return calls for comment Thursday.
The Herald report comes after weeks of controversy over whether the wealthy communities targeted by the DeSantis’ vaccine “pods” were influenced by political considerations.
Three communities in Charlotte, Manatee and Sarasota counties developed by Republican fundraiser Pat Neal were chosen by DeSantis for pop-up sites. Neal contributed $125,000 to DeSantis in 2018 and 2019.
Only two ZIP codes were eligible at the Manatee site, and County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh included herself and the development’s CEO on a VIP list.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist and agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried, both potential Democratic challengers to DeSantis in 2022, have called for investigations of potential political pay-forplay.
Fried called Thursday for FBI’s public corruption unit to investigate Florida’s vaccine distribution, saying it’s not a coincidence that DeSantis’ political donors have gotten special access to the vaccine.
“I don’t need a law degree from Harvard to know that when there is smoke, there is fire,” she said at a news conference at the Florida Capitol. “The fact pattern is simply just too clear to avoid. Give campaign contribution big dollars, get special access to vaccines — ahead of seniors, ahead of our teachers, ahead of our farmworkers and so many of our residents here in the state of Florida who are scared and are wanting these vaccines.”
“Ifthisisn’tpubliccorruption, I don’t know what is,” Fried said.
DeSantis stressed that Ocean Reef was not a pod vaccination location, calling the Herald story a “poorly executed hit piece.”
“That was not a site that we were involved in, in the Keys,” DeSantis said. “That was one of the South Florida hospital systems [that] went to this community of seniors, I think that’s great. I want seniors to get shots, I think they did a good job of doing that. We just weren’t involved with it in any way, shape, or form.”
DeSantis said hospitals “were getting the lion’s share of the vaccine” for the first few weeks. But most of those doses went toward vaccinating frontline medical workers.
“We had nursing homes, we had hospitals, some of the county health department started to get them at the end of December,” DeSantis said. “But we really didn’t see the big push even in the counties until January.”
DeSantis also defended Baptist Health going into Ocean Reef. “It’s the age, not the income, that shows the risk,” he said. “... I think it was good that they did it. I support the hospital’s doing that. And really being proactive and trying to reach as many seniors as possible.”