How do you organise an event involving tens of thousands of cyclists in the middle of one of the busiest cities on Earth? Cyclist finds out
Words Emma Cole Illustration John Devolle
RideLondon is Britain’s biggest cycling event. Each year more than 75,000 cyclists descend on the capital to take part in either a 30, 60 or 100-mile closed road sportive that heads into the Essex countryside, or to just ride round the car-free roads of Central London in the RideLondon FreeCycle. On top of that, there is a three-day women’s WorldTour stage race, the Ford RideLondon Classique. That’s a lot of cycling.
‘RideLondon is a legacy event from the 2012 Olympics,’ says Kevin Nash, RideLondon route director for organiser London Marathon Events. ‘Legacy event planning began when we won the Olympic bid back in 2007, and that’s when this event was dreamt up.
‘The capacity and style of the event has evolved over the years, but the principles remain the same in terms of making sure it’s inclusive, it’s got good diverse representation and it’s for all ages and abilities, as well as inspiring activity and demonstrating the benefits of cycling not just as a sport but as a mode of transport.’
Going with the flow
Managing the different events and thousands of cyclists requires pinpoint precision and coordination.
‘Sunday is our busiest day,’ says Nash. ‘Early morning, we release the 25,000 riders for the Ford RideLondon-Essex, we then quickly reconfigure Central London for the FreeCycle events, which about 50,000 people take part in, and then we reconfigure the streets again for the Classique, which happens for two hours and is live on TV. While all that’s going on we’ve got the 25,000 cyclists making their way through London, out into Essex, and back to London.’
To regulate the riders out on the course, the organisers have devised a comprehensive way to predict the flow of the peloton: ‘We do a lot of work with crowd modelling and flow modelling scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University, so we can predict how the event will spread out across the road. The densities of the people finishing is modelled, reviewed and monitored in real time in the control room. We monitor the release rate from the start and at several points across the course, and we have a very clever gentleman who sits in the control room telling us how we’re operating against our predictions.
‘We release riders over three and a half hours at a set rate based on the width of the start gan
