Beer Bike planning lacks required foresight

By Staff Editorial     3/25/10 7:00pm

Even the best-laid plans for outdoor events can be derailed by weather. However, plans for Beer Bike were not as well-laid as they could have been, and on Saturday a day of frigid showers threw the event into chaos.Although weather forecasts days in advance all but guaranteed rain for the event, as of Saturday morning, Beer Bike was scheduled to occur as planned. It was not until thousands of drunken, shivering college students arrived at the Beer Bike track that the campus-wide coordinators announced that the men's, women's and exhibition races would be rescheduled. Massive supplies of food that were ordered in advance had to be reshuffled, and hundreds of pizzas were left unclaimed, advertised only by some e-mail listservs, in the Rice Memorial Center that afternoon while students at the tracks and at their colleges went hungry. Why not leave the food at the tracks for the duration of the event or at the colleges?

Then, for days after Saturday's debacle, students were left in the dark about when the rescheduled races would occur. Even college Beer Bike coordinators were left out of the loop, until rumors started to spread that the races would occur this Sunday at 2 p.m. (see story, page 1)

With the knowledge that March rains are commonplace in Houston, confirmed by the weekend's forecasts and this year's erratic cold spells, Beer Bike coordinators should have taken time to formulate - and publicize - rainy day plans. Had a better contingency plan and cancellation policy been active, Saturday's confusion could have been all but eliminated. By the time hangovers wore off and the student body was defrosted, every student should have known exactly when the races would actually occur. Again, had these plans been fully thought-through ahead of time, we would have no issue to complain about. But with mere days of advance warning, students - particularly those who are on the bike and chug teams - must drop their weekend plans if they want to attend Beer Bike 2010.

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With all of the discussion of alternate Beer Bike parades and race configurations that were put out in the past few months, we are appalled to think that not one of our campus Beer Bike coordinators seriously considered the chance of spring showers and made plans with bikers and participants accordingly. We hope that future coordinators will consider this possibility and plan accordingly. But most of all, we hope for sunshine this Sunday.

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