A rain-soaked September forced the postponement of Sunday’s Boost Juice Dubbo 300, with a new date for the event yet to be announced.
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The call to postpone the Dubbo leg of the Evocities MTB Series was made earlier this month, with Dubbo Regional Council meeting overnight to discuss a new date for the event.
But Dubbo MTB club president Craig Arms said it could take more than two weeks without rain to dry out the Geurie track.
“We had been watching the forecast...[and] five weeks out we could see that September was going to be very wet,” Arms said.
“The winter we’ve had through to September, it’s just far too wet for our tracks to be sustainably used.”
Dubbo received a whopping 141.8 millimetres of rain in the first 26 days of September, compared to just 6.8 mm for the whole of September 2015.
The decision to postpone the race was made in consultation with Dubbo Regional Council.
Mountain bikers that can’t mountain bike tend to be like caged lions but we’ve encouraged them very much to find other options.
- Dubbo MTB club president Craig Arms
Arms said the long-term sustainability of the track, as well as the safety of competitors, led to the decision.
“It becomes a safety issue when the track gets mushed up but what happens first is it becomes a maintenance issue,” he said.
“If you’re looking at 100 riders for six laps...it doesn’t take long for a wet section of track to become mush.
“That’s mush that the club, the volunteers have got to spend their own time repairing and you don’t always get it back to what it was.
“It’s about sustainable use and we’re very serious about it.”
Local riders have been encouraged to give the track a rest, with the club’s local series also affected by the wet weather.
“We’ve postponed one race already and we’ve got another one on October 9 but we’re expecting to postpone that as well,” Arms said.
“They’re very frustrated. Mountain bikers that can’t mountain bike tend to be like caged lions but we’ve encouraged them very much to find other options and that means riding on the road basically.
“They can’t wait to get on the single track. What we need is a good fortnight to three weeks [without rain] but it’s hard to imagine that happening at the moment.”
The Boost Juice Dubbo 300 was scheduled to be the fifth of the Evocities Series’ seven legs, Orange’s leg is the final one and is scheduled for Sunday, November 27.
The Evocities Series is heralded as being one of the richest MTB Series in Australia.
