We are very sorry to be getting in touch with the news that the HUUB Triathlon Relays are cancelled for 2020. It’s our 30th anniversary year and we were delighted to get the go ahead to put the event on after long season of no events. However, the event hasn’t attracted anywhere near the number of entries that we expected it might.
It’s hard to believe that our original event will not happen this year. The Relays are part of the sport’s history and it will be sad not to stage them this year. Due to Covid-19, a lot of our costs increased and the number of teams we could accept decreased. We were happy to go ahead regardless of this, but with entries well down on our expectations, the event simply wouldn’t have enough teams to have that special Relays atmosphere.
We usually have a capacity field, with over 400 teams, but this year’s event attracted less than 120. The reality of the current environment seems to be that getting teams organised was possibly too challenging this year compared to entering individual events. Perhaps if we had waited longer, entries might have come in, but we had to make a call before incurring more costs.
We are very grateful to all of those teams that have shown their commitment to the Triathlon Relays, and, very sorry that we can’t deliver a great day of ‘organised chaos’ for you this year. Your entries will now automatically roll over to 2021. This is what we said we would do in the event of cancellation, but we hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to do it. We’d like to thank you for entering, and we promise to focus on making 2021 bigger and better.
Message from event sponsors, HUUB
The pandemic has hit directly and indirectly, leaving race organisers like Tri Society to implement drastic changes to events. It’s understandable that the triathlon community has been cautious to decide later whether to race or not, but this has huge commercial impact. We applaud the Tri Society team and their leadership under Teresa and Iain to try to put the Relays on, and then make such a tough call to cancel it. Their desire, like ours, is to ensure the future health of our sport and we will be here to support the Relays in 2021 and beyond. We look forward to seeing you all then, if not before.