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Hi everyone,
Like most of you, we have been following the unfolding Coronavirus/Covid-19 situation for the past few days, wondering what effect it would have on our event this Sunday.
In circumstances like these, we take our lead from Scottish Cycling, our governing body, who in turn follow the recommendations made by government. This has been updated this afternoon - see here.
At the moment, our intention is to go ahead with Sunday's event as planned - however, we must advise everyone that this position could still change at any point ahead of the event getting underway.
With other sports' governing bodies taking their own decisions to cancel events this weekend, this has not been the easiest decision to take and we'd like to share our thinking behind our decision to proceed.
- Our first aid provider has confirmed that they are ready and capable of covering our event;
- 400 of you have entered online - adding this number to the event volunteers, spectators, friends/family etc probably takes us close to the 500 person figure specified by the Scottish Government (albeit coming into effect from Monday), but the nature of our events makes it highly unlikely that everyone attending is either on-site, or in the same place at the same time;
- The nature of a cross-country mountain bike race means those attending and competing do not spend extended periods of time in close proximity to one another, and the entire event takes place outside over a large, unconfined area.
We understand entirely if, taking everything into consideration, you would prefer not to attend and - to support your personal decision making - we're prepared to offer a refund of 75% of your entrance fee, similar to our refund policy in the event of a race being cancelled by circumstances beyond our control, providing you let us know by 5pm tomorrow.
Sound fair? These are unprecedented circumstances and we hope you can see that we're really trying to balance everything out and take the most sensible approach we can.
Obviously, we'd ask that you follow NHS guidelines on hand-washing and symptoms of illness and act sensibly - we'll provide hand sanitiser as best we can and ask that you bear with us. We may have to implement some changes at short notice to the way we handle sign-on.
Should anything change, we'll update everyone via our social media channels as soon as possible, so please keep an eye out.
Happy hand-washing, and we'll hopefully see you Sunday!
Thanks
Your SXC team