I have changed the colours of this blog to make it easier for readers.

Thanks to Yogi in Oz for making me see sense!

Happy Sunday everybody ....

... back in the real world, no championship I was at started on time, not one, not even Sydney - which was, on the whole, very tightly scheduled.

... so anyway ... in conclusion ...

It is neither desirable nor feasible to lay down specific rules for messenger races - either in general, or for those at CMWCs.

It is however possible, and maybe even necessary, to state the general principles upon which particular CMWC organisers and messenger race designers should do their work :

1. The messeger race should be a simulation of messenger work.

2. It should be open to any messenger or ex messenger who wants to take part, and also to "amateurs" if they are up to the challenge and if there is space available.

3. It should be a good test of messenger skills - urban cycling, planning, orientation and navigation - it should be more than a mindless race to cross an arbitary line on the road. In practice, this means striving to construct the "ideal messenger race" in which:

3.1. there would be open qualification over two days and then on the third day a final for those with the best times;

3.2. the course would be complex interesting and attractive, and fully staffed with well trained checkpoint people, traffic marshals, "police" and so forth, from just after breakfast until just before teatime;

3.3. the qualifying manifests would be as different for as many racers as possible, they would involve thinking as well as cycling, and would take the quickest racers at least 45 minutes to complete;

3.4. the final manifests would take the quickest racers at least two hours to complete;

3.5. there would be some random element built into the design.

It is also possible, and certainly desirable, to state the responsibilities of racers :

4. In one-way traffic, ride only in the direction of the flow. Keep moving and do not stop. Use your time at checkpoints to think out your route. If you are stupid enough to drop a package or your manifest, you have to go round again to pick it up. Likewise, if you miss a checkpoint, go round again.

5. Behave yourself at checkpoints. Act as you would at a reception desk, stand in line and remain calm and courteous.

6. Respect other racers, their bikes and equipment. Cycle safely, wear a helmet and indicate your intentions to the surrounding traffic.

7. You are free to use any bike you want.

It might turn out to be necessary, at some point in the future, to specify more precisely what a "messenger race" in principle is, so that this can be claimed - by patent, or copyright, or some other form of intellectual property right - for the messenger community as a whole, and thereby protected from exploitation by corporate interests.

It would also be a good idea for the IFBMA to solicit more suggestions, tips and advice from previous championship organisers and race designers. This with a view to publishing at the IFBMA website a further guidebook for championship organisers.

It would seem in the first instance sensible that such a guidebook should clarify the different logistical demands of a large event (like New York) as compared to a small one (like Sydney), and of an event which takes place entirely at one location (like Warsaw was and Toronto is promising to be) as compared to one spread over several locations (like Sydney and New York).

I must have forgotten something .....

... indeed Neal, it would start on time.

There would also be open qualification over two days and then on the third a final for those with the best times.

The course would be complex interesting and attractive, and fully staffed with well trained checkpoint people, traffic marshals, police, and so forth from just after breakfast until teatime.

The qualifying manifests would be as different for as many racers as possible, they would involve thinking as well as cycling, and would take the quickest racers at least 45 minutes to complete.

There would be some random element built into the design. In New York, one checkpoint simply involved letting down your tyre, pulling out the valve and pumping it up again. In Warsaw, there was a very large young man dishing out fines randomly "because this is Poland". At the Open Dutch two weeks ago I told checkpoint staff to make the most of their roles as security guard, receptionist or secretary, and to be as easy or as difficult on the racers as they wanted to be.

There should be clarity about the rules and what happens to those who break them.

... anything else?

Imagine we have unlimited resources - a willing army of volunteer labour, time and a big box of money, we have chosen a location that has been fully approved and lisenced by all municipal authorities, and we have paid off the cops.

So what then would a championship messenger race look like?

To be honest I can't get much further than this.

Apart from some ideas about how to ensure that a championship messenger race does indeed simulate messenger work and will in fact properly test the skills of participants - most of which are pretty technical - I do not know really what sort of "rules" are required other than those set out by specific race designers. And these things are usually quite explicitly described in the blurb that is given out during registration ....

.... the responsibility of the IFBMA is to this extent perhaps limited to ensuring that whatever the messenger race looks like at any particular CMCW, it is constructed and raced in the right spirit and to the highest standards.

In which case there would be two rules for participants:

1. read the fucking manifest,

2. don't be a dickhead.

The unfortunate consequence however of any responsibility that the IFBMA might claim would be a requirement that CMWC race designers submit the documentation of their races (maps, manifests, rules, etc) to some sort of IFBMA committee for approval ...

... yeah right ...

CMWCs are the only events that the IFBMA requires officially to sanction, but this requirement should not involve interferng in race design. Apart from the substantial political issues that would be raised, how would that be possible?

Just imagine: it is April 2008. The IFBMA council gets an email containing the documentation for the messenger race at Toronto. We discover that it contains fatal flaws and fails to meet official standards of excellence. We rush into action, assemble a crack team of elite race designers and experienced racers, and dispatch them from all corners of the earth to Toronto to fix the fatal flaws and redesign the race according to official criteria. In starring roles: Brad Pitt as AZ/DC, Liam Neeson as Cliffy, Robert de Niro as Bill Chidley ...

... all the IFBMA can say is that a messenger race of good quality should be the main event at any CMWC, that there should be side events - fixie stuff, tooth pulling, bunny hop, (gold)sprints, polo, Texas Twins, tricks and trials, and so forth - and that there should be two Open Fora - one to lay out the issues at the beginning, and the other for voting and decisions at the end.

wonderful photos by Selim

Another rule that always appears in the blurb dished out at championships is the one about not being able to take part in the race if you are pissed ... erm ... drunk not angry.

Yeah right ...

... most messengers I know can be falling over, unable to walk, incapable of coherently stringing words together into a comprehensible sentence, and still manage to get on their bikes and make it home in one piece ... with the possible exception of Finbar from Amsterdam who at CMWC2002 drank a bottle of tequila, went for a run on his bike and then left it inexplicably unlocked leaning against a traffic post on his way back to the camping ground in Christiania, knowing somehow that it would still be there when he came to collect it ... the next night, after he had sobered up, and disappointed that his substantial hangover had kept him busy with vomiting, sleeping, groaning and being grumpy while he should really have been racing in the qualifier, he turned the alleycat (something to do with teams of four and collecting postcards, I seem to remember) into a random and extremely fast chase through the streets of Copenhagen in a peloton of about forty or fifty ... nobody had any idea where we were going ... fucking awesome ...

... where was I?

...oh yes .... drunkenness ... was anybody ever prevented from racing because they were drunk?

... I am a little drunk myself now .... ng

I guess there are three things about a messenger race that everybody would agree with:

1. The messeger race should be a simulation of messenger work.

2. It should be open to any messenger or ex messenger who wants to take part, and also to "amateurs" if they are up to the challenge and if there is space available.

3. It should be a good test of messenger skills - urban cycling, planning, orientation and navigation.

Almost without exception, championship races have taken place on a closed, one-way circuit of loops and junctions. Since there have been exceptions however, it does not seem for the moment sensible to say that this should be a standard form. Certainly, poloco style races should not be excluded from the definition of messenger race, even if they are not really suitable for CMWCs, since they have often been succesfully used at national championships. There is also no reason why a messenger race should always take place inside a predefined circuit of loops and junctions if a suitable location is available - the Open Dutch in Arnhem in 2006 is an excellent example of this.

Whatever the physical location of the course or the complexity of the cicruit, checkpoints are strategically positioned along the way, between which racers carry real or fictional packages in order to complete the jobs described on a (series of) manifest(s). The precise form of the circuit and the manfests is entirely up to the creativity and ingenuity of race designers.

For this reason perhaps, the rules of any particular race must in the first instance be defined by the race designer by the jobs set forth in the race manifests. There are nevertheless a number of general principles that would apply to all messenger races that take place on a closed circuit:

4. In one-way traffic, ride only in the direction of the flow. Keep moving and do not stop. Use your time at checkpoints to think out your route. If you are stupid enough to drop a package or your manifest, you have to go round again to pick it up. Likewise, if you miss a checkpoint, go round again.

5. Behave yourself at checkpoints. Act as you would at a reception desk, stand in line and remain calm and courteous.

6. Respect other racers, their bikes and equipment. Cycle safely, wear a helmet and indicate your intentions to the surrounding traffic.

Over the years these principles have been emphasised by race designers, but they remain in practice the subject of controversy, for in the heat of the moment and the fire of testosterone, racers have been known to forget them ...

... the problem for any rulebook at this point would be specifying the sanctions to be taken against those who forget.

There are basically two options it seems to me: either to leave all such matters to the discrection of race designers, or to outline some sort of table of penalties for assorted misdemeanours.

A third possibility would of course be if everybody just agreed to play the game according to the rules defined. Not to play the game of playing the game, but simply to play the game. To accept from the start that what has to be done has to be done within the parameters set by the race designers and described on the race manifests. To not simply set out to win by whatever means, and if necesary to break the rules inconspicuously.

It would be nice if we could all just shake hands, hug each other and agree to take this third option, for it would save a whole lot of stress bullshit and recrimination.

Whatever else happens at this bit of a rulebook, we would also probably all agree that in a messenger race:

7. You are free to use any bike you want.

while thinking about these things I remember the international championships I have attended and the messenger races I have enjoyed.

(For anybody who wants to know, the list is as follows: Graz 1998, Zurich 1999, Freiburg 2000, Rotterdam 2001, Copenhagen 2002, London and Seattle 2003, Warsaw 2004, New York and Basel 2005, Helsinki and Sydney 2006, Oslo and Dublin 2007. I was also at the Dutch championships in Amsterdam 2004, Eindhoven 2005, and Arnhem 2006. Last week I designed the messenger race at the 2007 Dutch championship here in Utrecht.)

All of these were very different, and it is not easy to find common elements.

But there was something special about Warsaw.

The messenger race was truly awesome. The racecourse was perfect. The people worked hard and there was plentiful good cheap food and beer. The weather was brilliant and it was the weekend I decided to take to a fixie.

I am wondering whether Warsaw would serve as a standard ...

There have been calls from within the messenger community to sharpen up the procedures and regulations for international events and world championships.

The many reasons for these calls are for the moment less important than the fact that it is indeed necessary that the IFBMA make available some sort of comprehensive manual for championship organisers and race designers.

It is after all the responsibility of the IFBMA to ensure that CMWCs are properly supported and that the messenger race at any CMWC is of a sufficiently high standard to enable the winners to call themselves world champions. The council of the IFBMA was moreover specifically asked at the open forum in Sydney in 2006 to work on a "rulebook" or "set of guidelines" or somesuch that will assist event organisers and race designers.

Apart from opening up the many issues for debate, these remarks (as well as those that will follow and the reactions they inspire) will perhaps belatedly serve as notes and sketches for the sort of rulebook that was sought in Sydney.

There is a document available at the IFBMA site for use by potential race designers and event organisers. Albeit replete with useful tips and anecdotes, this is in fact no more than a catalogue of useful tips and anecdotes written by a handful of event organisers and race designers. This is obviously a valuable document and it should certainly not be overwritten nor cast aside, but it has no general overview and is often contradictory. It does not state systematically the most crucial elements and principles of messenger races and then work forward, and it often allows more general questions of event organisation to become confused with the specific problems of dealing with particular municipal authorities, police, politicians, traffic management systems and the vagiaries of fate.

Of course, the most exciting element of any messenger race is precisely this, that it is absolutely unique, that it takes place at a unique event on a unique course, and that it is designed by a local messenger who, for whatever reason, is prepared to work hard unpaid hours, long into the night for several months before the race takes place, never knowing until it is actually underway whether or not it will work. Which points inevitably to the essence of the messemger race, that it is not just a rush to cross a line on the road, but a simulation of messenger work. This is not a sport. At least not in the same sense that tennis or football or chess are sports. Tennis players do not for example occupy themselves when they are not playing tennis doing something of which tennis is a simulation. There is no work that involves hitting a small furry ball back and forth over a net using tightly strung snowshoes.

The work of producing a comprehensive guidebook for messengers races in particular and CMWCs in general is actually an enormous challenge. Not least because what is necessary is to establish principles that are specific enough to clarify the responsibilities of both racers and designers, as well as the volunteers who staff checkpoints and police the course, while leaving plenty of room for creativity, and allowing the specific character of the messenger community that is hosting the event to express itself fully.

But we have to face that challenge.

There are rumours that filthy evil corporate sponsors would like to hijack the idea of a messenger race and turn it into some sort of spectator sport, just as they have hijacked the clothes we wear, the bags we carry and the bikes we ride, and turned these into fashion accessories.

I have my doubts personally if any such thing will happen, but it does seem important that if there are to be messenger races, then these should be always defined organised and adjudicated by messengers. And that if we are going to say that there are world champion messengers we should be sure that they have been properly tested.