USA Pro Challenge bypasses Crested Butte next summer

Likely to return in future

The host cities for the 2015 USA Pro Challenge have been announced, and it looks like the race will not make its way to Crested Butte. Next summer’s race will start in Steamboat Springs, and includes stops at Arapahoe Basin, Copper Mountain Resort, Aspen, and Breckenridge before heading back to the Denver area.

“We had a pretty strong impression following last year’s race that the 2015 route would involve Steamboat in some way, shape or form,” said Local Organizing Committee member Aaron Huckstep. “We didn’t know it would be the overall start, but when the race organizers go that far north, it’s nearly impossible to craft a course that goes this far south.”
Stage 6 of the race has not yet been announced—race organizers are taking fan suggestions before determining its locations. But Huckstep thinks it would be a long shot for Crested Butte to snag the title.
“The racers don’t like to, after a day of racing, get on the bus for an hour or two and then go and do the same thing the next day,” he said. “I certainly would support throwing our hat in the ring in the future, and hope the community at large will support that.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Pro Challenge, along with events like the Ski Town Throwdown and Whatever, USA, have been earning Crested Butte a place on the map. Last month, Huckstep and two other members of the LOC—Dave Ochs and Karl Trujillo—reviewed the 2014 race with the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council, which donated funding and countless man-hours to the event.
 “The fundamental message here is that this was an event that you all should be proud of for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that it would not be happening without Mt. Crested Butte’s financial support,” Huckstep told the council.
The town of Mt. Crested Butte contributed $35,000 of the roughly $85,000 budget, and while it is difficult to measure the event’s exact economic impact, Huckstep said there are strong indicators that the race contributed to a busy and financially lucrative summer. During August, sales tax collection in Crested Butte was up 15.3 percent over August of 2013, and 35 percent in Mt. Crested Butte.
“We know that these kinds of changes can’t be attributed to the Pro Challenge 100 percent by any stretch of imagination,” Huckstep said. But he pointed toward economic analysis provided by the Pro Challenge to suggest that the race certainly played its part.
The race commissioned Sponsorship Science LLC to measure the race’s impact, and found that it contributed about $130 million to Colorado’s economy. That’s a 12 percent increase over the year before. The company also found that race spectators traveled in groups, with an average size of three people, and had an average hotel stay of 5.3 nights. Thirty-two percent of race spectators had a household income in excess of $120,000.
“These are the folks that we want to come year-round to our community,” Huckstep told the council. “They have the income and they can certainly come to Crested Butte to spend it.”
The race also garnered a significant amount of publicity for Crested Butte, in part because of the rainy weather and the race stoppage that occurred on the east side of Kebler Pass. According to Huckstep, that generated a lot of articles about Stage 2, and many of the accompanying images featured Crested Butte and the surrounding area.
Dave Ochs, director of the Crested Butte-Mt. Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce, said the area also received a lot of social media attention. Pro Challenge Facebook posts reached 127,000 during the race, and 64,000 social media impressions featured Crested Butte. A newsletter for the Crested Butte stage of the race reached 32,000 subscribers.
“There’s no doubt of the impact of this,” Ochs said. “It’s very broad and it’s out there.” He shared a story about one family who came from Italy to watch the race after seeing it on television last year. He said on a state and regional level, the buzz from the Pro Challenge and events like Whatever, USA and the Ski Town Throw Down seem to be driving visitors to Crested Butte.
“The chamber was slamming in September,” Ochs said. “When we questioned folks on where they came from, a lot were from the Front Range. They made comments like they had lived in Colorado for 25 years and had never been to Crested Butte. When we ask them why, it was the buzz. Crested Butte has been mentioned in the media quite a bit.”
All three LOC members thanked the council for its support. “This is a big effort, when you look at the hard dollars that we put in compared to other communities,” Huckstep said. “We are doing this on a shoestring, doing it as cheaply as we can. And that’s okay. We’re getting by, the locals and the visitors are having a lot of fun, and we’re getting a lot of good coverage.”
For its part, the Town Council expressed appreciation for the LOC’s efforts. Councilmember Danny D’Aquila said he hoped the race would return to the valley sooner rather than later. “Thank you all for your time and effort on this and if there are shortfalls, we need to discuss them so we can figure out how to make it better when it does come back,” he said.
Councilmember John Sale said he was also in support of the event but wanted to know what other communities spent on the race. Ochs noted that Aspen contributed $250,000 to its stage of the race, with more coming in from the chamber of commerce and other entities.
In Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, the LOC raised about $95,000 for the race. Government support accounted for $65,000, sponsorships and fundraising accounted for another $16,285, and beer and wine sales came in at around $7,800. Crested Butte Mountain Resort also contributed in-kind donations in the form of discounted room rates, meeting space rates, and personnel assistance.
“Do you know where you might spend extra money [if you had it]? Would it go to marketing?” Sale asked.
“That’s something we’ve discussed. Something we also discussed was hiring someone to help with fundraising,” Ochs said.
Ochs, Huckstep and Trujillo seemed open to those types of discussions in the future. For now, the message seems clear: the Town Council was undoubtedly in support of trying to get the race to return, and appreciated the LOC’s efforts to make the past races a success. And while there’s no guarantee that it will be 2016, one thing is clear to the LOC—the Pro Challenge organizers love Crested Butte.
“It’s not a matter of “if”, it’s “when” they will come back,” Trujillo told the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council.