So the voting for our AGM closed last night and we had over 100 members vote on who they would like to represent them. Unlike our usual “hands-up” in the cafe after the ride, this time we had a proper online counted vote. This was quite fortunate since we had 9 nominees for the 7 general positions and the final position was down to just 3 votes. However, i am getting ahead of myself here.
Firstly, i would like to thank the outgoing committee for the work that they have done the past year. Of that committee, three people did not nominate for this year, so i would like to personally thank Belinda, Greg (mo) and Julian for the work that they have put in for not just last year, but in some cases multiple years of effort. Julian, for example has been on the committee since just after the clubs inception. Back then our biggest problem was what to call the second group on the road if the first group was called “fast”. Greg has been invaluable pulling together events like the Beverley and ToMR teams and moving forward he has set the standard to which we now need to live up to. Belinda has been battling on keeping the social aspects of the club alive in a time when we are struggling with engagement.
So to those three, I again would like to let you know just how much i appreciate your efforts, especially during a time in which I know I was not particularly well engaged.

On to this year and the nominees that the members had to choose from. With Julian standing down, Daniel had nominated for the Vice-Pres role which he had kind of been doing recently attending meetings on my behalf anyway. It was really a natural step. This left the Treasurers role vacant as according you our constitution you can’t hold 2 named roles. Daniel has been Treasurer for a number of years and it was always going to be a matter of releasing that control to someone he thought was capable.
Luckily Shirley has nominated for that role and has Daniel’s support to ensure a smooth transition. That just leaves the Secretary role that Amanda renominated for and the President’s role…and nobody wants that..so I nominated again.
As those roles need to be individually nominated for, voting was fairly straight forward with only 4 nominees, so all 4 have been elected.

The committee members that renominated for general committee positions (Rob, Greg, Dean, Steve and Andrew) still left places for 2 more and we luckily had 4 more first time nominees.
Mark is a fairly recent addition to SPR so it was good to see someone new wanting to help in the running of the club. Susie has been with SPR for years and nominated to hopefully give some representation to those that don’t ride in the faster groups. Nancy and Teneal are both fairly well known in the club and have both been instrumental in boosting women’s racing in the state.

However, the voting is up to the membership and who they want to represent them as we navigate the post-COVID landscape. The results of the vote on the general committee positions are shown below.

Unfortunately this means that Mark and Susie missed out on the general committee positions, however, there are opportunities in the race, training and social sub committees.

Our 2020 SPR Committee is now as follows –
President – Peter Mah
Vice-President – Daniel Harvey
Treasurer – Shirley Vine
Secretary – Amanda Nabi
General Committee positions –
Rob Ramsden
Greg Jones
Andrew Ballam
Steve Burns
Dean Roser
Nancy Tippaya
Teneal Attard

Congratulations to all that have been voted in. The most pressing matter will be how and when we resume club activities but as usual, there are other club tasks that are ongoing and will need attention.
The roles within the general committee positions get set at our first committee meeting, and the sub committee’s are then filled once a committee member is assigned to that area.

The President’s and Treasurer’s reports will be emailed out to those that requested them once they have been finalised. Any questions about those reports can be directed to the club email.

Questions answered

There were a number of questions asked of the club as part of the online form and i will attempt to answer them below.

Can’t all 9 nominees become Committee members? Seems strange to turn away volunteers!

In our constitution there are only 11 positions available. We can operate with less than that if we need to, but cannot have more. We will never turn away volunteers as there are other sub-committees that always need members to assist.

It still appears the club is heavily weighted to the Fast, One and Two groups I guess because these are most likely to compete. Am I wrong?

By heavily weighted, i am assuming that you are meaning in things like events etc that are promoted and discussed on the website. The club is organic. It grows to where the need is and that is what we tend to focus on. We also try to have a committee that is as diverse as the club, but it is also up to the members to vote in the people that will best represent them. As the club has grown, there are naturally going to form cliques of people that will want to do stuff together. However, I don’t feel that the club is that uninviting that people can’t move between groups to discuss issues. I will put this onto the new committee to ensure that there is more inclusion socially once we are up and running again, to ensure that everyone’s voices get heard.

1. What’s the plan with the club van? It appears to be underutilised. 2. What’s the strategic plan of the club in the next 5 years with AusCycling in the radar?

The initial intent of the club van was to get all the club gear out of my garage so i could buy more bikes for the kids. It also allowed a central spot for anyone that required any of that equipment and meant that a tow-bar wasn’t required. It is underutilised especially compared to how much we used to attend races. I put this down to some of the lack of engagement that we have been seeing over the last year and hopefully, once we are up and running again, there will be more enthusiasm to be doing what we have been missing. If the current storage location is an issue, we can look around for an alternative arrangement.
As for the strategic plan, there was a meeting that Daniel and myself attended yesterday to discuss the path forward in respect to WestCycle and AusCycling. Neither direction was without it’s own issues but we are working towards what is the best solution for the majority of people within clubs in WA. Will it be awesome for everyone? No, but hopefully there are enough good bits to temper the not so good bits. This is definitely still a work in progress.

Bike Maintenance skills session

This is definitely something that is easy to organise on a purely amateur basis. The professional’s are generally not that keen to take business off themselves by teaching you all their tricks. I have run some in the past and covered the basics, like how to clean and adjust things. We can certainly see who is available to run these sessions.
Suggestions like this don’t have to wait till and AGM. Just bring items like this forward to a committee member and they can table it with the committee for discussion.

The club excels from the pure athletic point of view with organisation of social rides and race events. However, It is my believe that a cycling club without a mechanical support is like a body without an arm or a leg. I would be personally happy to pay an additional fee provided that the club could reach an agreement with a local bike mechanic for at least an annual labour free bike maintenance. It would be also great if the committee could work in the direction of obtaining agreements with on line services for discounts in parts and clothing. I understand that an attempt for the last one was provided for the cycliq cameras and this was highly appreciated. My question is whether the committee is really interested in focusing on this.

We have done this in the past for certain items (helmets from TBE) but the take up was not always that good. People all have personal preferences and getting a discount on a particular product was not to everyone’s taste. It is an area that we can look into again, but it is a lot of leg work and we are at the mercy of what shops want to give us. I doubt that we could secure a free bike service, without it costing the members quite a bit. But we will see what we can get.

one of the side effects of the coronavirus lockdown is that we missed our AGM this year. the date was set and we had already called for nominations, but the ban on gatherings and then the closure of the hospitality industry left us with no option than to cancel. the media keeps using the term “unprecedented times” and we certainly feel like we are living through that now. the closure of business, sporting clubs and schools certainly highlights to us that it is something we haven’t had to deal with before. although the club is not running group rides or events, there are certain things that need to be discussed at the committee level. primarily amongst that is the reopening of the club and the resumption of group rides. we could just continue on with the current committee and the state government has given all clubs a 6 month extension to any official activities. however, we feel that any decision that the club makes, should be owned by the new committee moving forward. as such, we have decided to hold an AGM albeit one with a slightly different format.

• firstly there will be no physical meeting or gathering of members. that was always going to be a given under the current state laws.
• secondly there will not be a “zoom/webex/teams/skype” meeting where we can virtually meet. we don’t see this as being viable and we don’t think that we will get a good uptake.
• thirdly, we want to give as many people that opportunity to vote as possible.

so, how do we do this?

well, each year, at the start of the AGM all positions are declared vacant. we do this to stop any potential power-play within the club and to allow members an opportunity for change. so this year, on the 16th of may, we will declare the AGM open and all positions are vacated. members will then have access to a link where they can vote for a new committee. this will be left open for a week and when you register and vote, you will be sent the president’s and treasurer’s reports. if any member has a question that it wants to ask the club, these can be also be submitted. at the end of the week, the votes will be tallied, positions announced and any questions answered.

to kick off this process, we will again be asking for nominations. although people had nominated previously, their circumstances may have changed so we want to give people the opportunity to reconsider or consider standing. there are four standing positions within the club (pres, vice-pres, treas, sec) and these must be nominated for specifically. all other positions are general positions and the actual scope of those roles gets decided at the first committee meeting. so if you wish to nominate, please email the club with what position you want to stand for and a couple of sentences about why people should vote for you (this will be used for the online voting).

current situation – at our virtual committee meeting, we also discussed the current situation. although people can ride in groups of 10, the way our club group rides are structured having 100+ people meet at coode st falls outside what is currently allowed. even if it was broken into groups of 10, the initial gathering would not be a good look for the club or the sport. as i discussed previously, there are a lot of people that are upset that they cannot do the things that they want, so when they see us riding or worse, meeting in large numbers, it would not be a big stretch to see someone reporting the club to the authorities. feel free to organise smaller groups amongst yourselves, but don’t put open invitations on any of our social media platforms where numbers of attendees cannot be controlled.

zwift rides – due to the relaxation of riding restrictions and the continuing nice weather, the current uptake on the zwift meetups has diminished somewhat over the past week. as such the decision has been made to suspend meetups until the rules tighten or the weather turns bad. if, however, you are smitten by the virtual world or have a need to race, then make sure you sign up to zwift power in order to show your club support. rob has put together a little blog on what it is about and how to sign up and it can be found on the previous post.

final words – some people have reduced their riding during these times, others have ramped up their virtual kilometers. however, you decide to play this game please stay safe and within the bounds of any current restrictions.

it has been a couple of weeks since we shut down the spr rides and i thought that it was a good time to check in to see where we are up to. the rules have been constantly changing but i think that we are all well aware that they are being done for the right reason. we have had china, italy, spain, france and now the usa as a fair warning for just how bad this can be. we have also had japan, south korea, singapore and nz as potentially the right way to be dealing with it.

so, as cyclists, there have also been a few changes.  a couple of weeks ago, cycling aust, the state and federal gov went rapidly from groups of 10, to groups of 5 to pairs to solo riding only. luckily for us, the solo riding was reversed and people are allowed to ride in pairs as long as they abide by social distancing measures (see facebook post here). what this means is ride side-by-side, don’t draft and if you have to go single file, allow plenty of space. also be observant of spitting and snotting especially around built up areas. when you do stop, keep your distance and make sure that you don’t touch each others bikes. there is a caveat where riders from the same family can still ride together, so those that ride as couples can still force their significant other to the front to do the work.

however, there is a bit of kick-back that i have seen and heard about from the general public. riders being honked at, squirted or even spat at as they rode by. i personally think that this has a lot to do with people feeling that they have not been treated fairly. what i mean by this is there are a lot of people upset that they can’t watch the footy and go to the pub and when they see that we can still do the things we love, they lash out. fortunately not everyone out there is like that as we had a driver stop and help tighten a bottle cage bolt last weekend while riding around death valley. i guess we take the good with the bad.

there are some coffeeshops still open, but just be aware that although they are doing takeaways, there are still some common touch surfaces that do present a risk. if you pull out a chair to sit down, who else has previously touched that chair and where are your hands going next.

social media has meant that we can stay more connected and show people what we are up to. however, this can also have a negative affect as well. i do know of some people that have turned their strava profile to private as they were sick of the abuse they received from other riders. some people have taken the attitude that if they decide to go above and beyond the current rules and don’t ride outside anymore, then anyone who does ride outside is not socially responsible. everyone needs to act responsibility within the rules. don’t ride in more than pairs and adhere to social distancing measures. if you decide that because you have a potentially vulnerable relative and don’t want to risk any outside contact, then that is up to you. by riding solo or within the rules you can still manage the risks as well as managing your mental well being.

as for those that do want more indoor social riding contact, there are a number of zwift rides being setup each week. currently we do not have a regular “event” that you can join but there are “meetups” being held on tuesday, thursday and staurday. if you put spr after your name and look up rob ramsden within zwift, he can add you to the ride list. there is also talk of a race series where we piggy back on another race series and just pull the spr results out.  keep an eye out for that.

so, this is our new normal for now. in my opinion, this will be the normal for quite a while. until they develop a vaccine, i really can’t see how they can relax many of the social distancing rules without risking kicking off a new outbreak.

selfishly, this is really just about cycling, but i know that there are many out there where cycling is the last thing on their mind. they may have lost jobs or businesses or might be feeling other stresses brought on by our current situation. make sure you reach out to your social circle to check on each other (i hear that coffee via zoom is the new thing nowadays). but ride while we can and look after each other.