Taking time to reflect

Lindsay Jordan, Lyn Randall and Steve Canny at the AGM

I am sometimes prone to hyperbole. Being in a sporting organization that delivers a huge number of top class events and showcases some of the south’s finest athletes in every age group, you can excuse the odd moment of exaggeration.

Even for me, using the word celebration in the same sentence as Annual General Meeting is probably going a little too far, but Cycling Southland’s AGM on Thursday night did, to my way of thinking, represent a number of things our organisation can be very proud of.

It represented a lot of hard work. Too often we don’t take the time to reflect on a job well done. With increased profile and more riders than ever involved in our events and our club road and track racing and programmes, it’s been a satisfying twelve months. The launch of our Learn to Ride KiwiSport programme and the start of our Roller Racing Ride-offs in schools mean we are teaching students how to ride and how to have a blast doing it.

The AGM also represented the incredible levels of support we receive. To deliver increased activities, increased year-on-year revenues and deliver an operational surplus in the current sports funding environment is no mean feat. I wish that was the stuff that made newspaper headlines.

Thanks to the huge amount of work that has gone in to our organization over many years means that we are in the financial position to put up to $100,000 of our Club’s own funds in to the Junior World Track Cycling Champs next month. The first chunk of that was expensed in our 2011-12 financial accounts. I guess you can write two headlines to that story. One about a club that works hard and puts its own money where its mouth is, (along with the outstanding local and national funding support,) to bring a World Championship to Southland. Or you can write a headline about another loss for a sporting organization. No surprise to guess which one I would write.

But enough of the glass half empty stuff. All of those who have contributed to Cycling Southland over a great many years can share in the success story of this little club of ours when the world comes to ride in a little over three weeks. It is on the back of all of their hard work that a crazy idea four years ago to have a crack at hosting a World event has become reality.

And it is with this sentiment in mind where I touch on the best part of last week’s AGM; the awarding of a Life Membership to Lyn Randall. Lyn is a man who gave a tremendous amount to the sport on a local and national level and was instrumental in the changes which lead to Cycling Southland and BikeNZ in their current forms. He will be with us at Junior Worlds, celebrating the role he played in getting us there and I know, like mine, his glass will be half full.