ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
PLUS CA CHANGE, PLUS LA MEME – PAS!

Back in the 1950’s, when French was the lingua franca of cycling, two or three times a year a road race would appear out of nowhere and whiz past my front gate in the village near Doncaster where I lived. Years later the old “amateur” Tour of Britain (no relation to the current professional event) would pass through the village whenever the route came through South Yorkshire, so as to bypass the centre of Doncaster. Now I read that one stage of next year’s Tour de Yorkshire is routed over many miles of narrow lanes in South Yorkshire that I used to ride regularly, coming right past my old front gate, and the stage is actually finishing right in the middle of Doncaster.

For someone of my generation (I became a cyclist on Saturday June 4th, 1960, in the bike shed at Bridlington Youth Hostel, but that’s another story) the change in status of bike racing – and cycling in general – in the UK is truly astounding, and is almost as unimaginable as the Tour of Alberta was when it was just a gleam in Alex Stieda’s eye.

Road cycling is also booming here in Alberta these days, with the growth of mass charity rides, gran fondos, spin classes etc. At the same time the participation in our own EMCC events has been declining. We peaked in 2005 with the World Masters Games, when membership went up to about 130 and we regularly got 30 or 40 or more riders out each week at both the midweek races and the Sunday rides. Now we have about half as many regular participants, most of whom are second-claim members of EMCC, so quite reasonably their first-claim club is probably the main focus of their involvement.

At the AGM on December 2nd, nobody stepped forward for any of the positions that were up for re-election, so all the current Executive agreed to stay on for one more year. While it’s true that we’ve had a couple of new and younger faces on the Executive for the last couple of years, and that quite half the current Executive are in fact second-claim members, in reality a small handful of people – mainly first-claim members of EMCC – have been running the Club for quite a few years now, and none of us are getting any younger. In fact some of us are of the age when we could very easily wake up on the brown side of the sod without warning any day now.

Every single position on the EMCC Executive will become vacant at the end of 2016, and unless five people – and they don’t have to be first-claim members – step forward by the next AGM it may well be the end of midweek masters racing in Edmonton. So if you want to be able to continue racing until you’re old and grey, over the coming season consider what you can do to help make that happen.

What else did we do at the AGM this year? EMCC membership fees for 2016 will stay the same as in 2015; the design of the new EMCC jerseys was finalised; the 2016 draft midweek program was approved – the additional event on July 13th will be the Graeme Dibbs Memorial (it will be ten years to the day since Graeme died) Road Bike Only TT, tentatively planned to use a new 18 km hilly course north of Stony Plain; a bunch of other interesting stuff was discussed.

— Peter H.