Dig in at the Dock (21st Feb '16) - Entry opens on 8th Dec
Dig in at the Dock cyclocross race (sponsored by Pedal Power) will open entries for the 2016 edition at 7pm on Tuesday the 8th of December via Entry Central. The race is the hottest ticket for cyclocross riders in Scotland and tends to sell out in a matter of minutes. If you want to enter the race then it’s strongly advised that you put this date and time in your diary. You'll kick yourself if you miss out on the race on 21st February 2016!
180 first-come first serve places and then…
There will be a total of 230 places available in total across 2 races. Riders will be placed into either the A or the B race dependent on their past performances.
The first 180 entries will be available on a first-come first-serve basis. After this further entries will go into a waiting list. The last 50 places will be invited into the race from this list by the organisers Dave Hamill and Pete Ward.
Hamill explained the reason for this approach and why he’s announcing it so far in advance.
“Organising this race is amazingly rewarding, but it comes with some headaches we create for ourselves by making the event so popular. One of those is the fact that the race sells out really quickly. This in turn leads to a lot of people contacting us to say they missed the announcement, lost their Wifi connection, their dog ate their homework and so on. We want to make sure we give everyone a good chance of getting an entry. But we also recognise that the race won’t stay popular by accident. We have to nurture it.
There are people who give up a lot of time to make cyclocross happen in Scotland. I don’t want to risk shutting them out of our race. Pete and I need to say thank you to those people for putting on races for us and giving back to them is the best way we can do this. We want them in our race.
There are also top riders who give the race some prestige and make it a spectacle for the locals to watch. We’re very mindful of the fact that most of the people standing watching the race are locals not cyclists and we put a lot of effort into getting them down to the dockside. We also want to positively discriminate to the benefit of female entrants and those who raced in previous rounds of the Super Quaich series.
But if your name’s not on that waiting list then you ain’t getting invited in, so get your name in there on Entry Central and there’s every chance you’ll get to ride. It’s not over until I start singing. It’s OK I won’t sing, but you get what I mean.”
The Super Quaich series
This year the race completes the new four-round Super Quaich Cyclocross series which has shot an extra level of positivity into the arm of cyclocross racing in Scotland. The series is a step away from age category races; instead it puts all riders of similar ability into the same race. The result is more competitive and close racing from the top of the field right down to the bottom.
You can find out more about the Super Quaich at www.superquaich.cx and for regular updates you can follow Dig in at The Dock on Facebook and Twitter.