Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many organized rides have been cancelled or postponed. They include everything from local charity rides to European classics, rides with long histories and others that began in the past decade.
Now, "postpone" is a more elastic term than "cancel." That is why it's ludicrous to call the current Tokyo Olympiad the "2020 Olympics" or its official name, "Tokyo 2020." That allows the Olympic Movement (In the immortal words of Harry Shearer, "The Olympics are a movement. And we need one, every day!") to say, with a straight face, that the Games were "postponed" or merely rescheduled.
Such terms can be used more plausibly when the event is denoted, not with the year in which it's held, but with a Roman Numeral. The Super Bowl, which has never been postponed or cancelled, follows this practice. So, it turns out, does one of the largest and oldest organized bike tours in the United States.
Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (Say that three times fast!), better known as RAGBRAI, began in 1973, when John Karras, a copy editor at the Des Moines Register (and avid cyclist) and Don Kaul, a columnist at the newspaper, decided to ride across the state and write accounts of it. Don Benson, the newspaper's public relations director, coordinated the ride. There wasn't much advance publicity, so it's remarkable that about 300 people turned out for the ride.
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| From the RAGBRAI blog |
Somewhere along the way, RAGBRAI followed the Super Bowl's practice of denoting its rides with Roman Numerals. In a way, that makes sense, or at least for good publicity: Instead of saying that the 2020 ride was cancelled, ride organizers could postpone the start RAGBRAI XLVIII until this past Sunday.
Perhaps some year I'll make my way to it. In the meantime, I'm happy that something that could have just been a passing fancy of the 1970s North American Bike Boom has become enough of a tradition to be postponed, but not cancelled.
