To our motocross community:
I would like to provide you all with a complete update as to where we are with our series for this summer. To begin, there has not been one personal situation or one professional occupation or business that has not been affected by COVID-19. We have been working and communicating constantly with our members, industry people, the MRC, the promoters, regional health authorities, and the MDR as well. Ever since this shutdown began, we have planned and planned again until we find ourselves at our present day. I want to thank the MDR for their help in directing us to gain the approvals we just recently acquired to allow us to go back to racing-more on that below. I want to thank Lawrence Hamm for his input, and I would like to thank the promoters for staying engaged with us to get us back on track with a series. And all of the riders and enthusiasts that I run into at various practice days that both understand the challenges we face and encourage us to stay with this thing.
I would like to hope that everyone in our community can appreciate that neither party that is responsible for putting on our series for this summer, are going to take any undo personal risk that would put us at odds with the Provincial Health Order. If we could not satisfy this most important component, we would not be going to be racing this summer. We all have families and professions that we are responsible for, and as much as we are all passionate about motocross, we would not put this passion ahead of the more important things in our lives. Having said that, we have not waved the white flag on the season because we believed strongly in doing everything we could do to see a motocross series go in some form or fashion, if it all possible. The easy thing to do would have been to pull the plug a month ago, wash our hands of it, and say sorry, nothing we could do. But we did not want to take the easy way out, and we hung on to the last possible minute, and we got rewarded for this patience.
We just finished a conference call tonight with the promoters after a very fruitful week of progress.
We proposed a set of protocols to return to racing after a great deal of communication with the Regional Health Authorities and their office was critical in helping to understand how we fall under the Provincial Health Order, and their office was supportive of our protocols to return to racing. Finally, the Regional Health Authority provided a letter that gave us permission to run our series under the protocols we put forward to them. And we also needed this letter so that we could insure our events-racing would not have happened otherwise. It has taken this long to arrive at this moment in time. If we had pulled the plug a month ago we would have lost the opportunity to go racing this summer.
To this end, we will execute a summer series very close to what we posted back about a month ago.
We will post and send this out by the end of the week. It is our goal to have an 8 week series, ending by August 30th as previously proposed. Obviously we have a great deal of work to do in the coming weeks to be ready for our first weekend that I can confirm will be July 4 & 5. Believe me, if we could have put this together sooner, we would have done it. It will be different, and we will have to adhere to these protocols to ensure successful events. These are the same protocols we have all come to accept and live with in order to get through this time as safely as possible. So whether you want to go out to dinner, buy some groceries, or heaven forbid go to Costco, we all have to abide by these rules to get back to normal sometime down the road.
Finally, I would like to say to those that have been sending angry and at times disrespectful emails to us, please pause and take the time to consider all of the challenges we have faced to get to this point. If you have decided that for some reason that you don't want to race the series we have worked tirelessly to put forward, your choice. I would like to point out to everyone that we will be the only Province racing this summer in Western Canada. Not one sport has continued on without being adversely affected, and sport is the last thing on many people's minds. I'm sorry we are not racing yet-we wish we were.
The fact that we are going to actually go racing this summer is a huge win, and I am really proud of the fact that we hung in to see this through to a positive end.
And I have often been reminded about why I got involved in motocross all those years ago, and that is because of all the really good people I enjoy hanging out with, riding with, and working with. It took an entire community to help us get to this point and we are immensely appreciative of this. And all of our communication with the good people in Government has been equally positive.
Sorry for the long post but this message had to get out.
Thanks everyone and we look forward to seeing everyone at the track real soon.
Sincerely,
Ken Bentley on behalf of 204GMoto
