Until next year...

Here's a final observation about the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race before I move on to other things.

My opinion is not unbiased, of course, but I simply can't imagine a better event for the city of Memphis.

When it comes to things like tourism and entertainment and culture and so on, it seems that our city too often tries to swing for the fences.  In the downtown area alone in the last fifteen years, the city, which does not have a particularly wealthy tax base, has built an arena to lure a pro sports team, given millions in tax breaks and subsidies to persuade a large retailer to convert the old arena to a destination store, and financed an incompetently-managed, colossally over-budget construction project on the riverfront to serve large passenger riverboats.

I'm not here to make provocative political statements, and I'm willing to say yes, pro sports teams and destination retail stores and big capital projects can be good for a city.  But the point I'd like to make here is that all the millions of dollars in the world cannot create the sort of community spirit I saw down on the riverfront on Saturday.

No event happens for free, and a good bit of money got spent to make the OICK race happen (no small portion of it on fees levied by the city bureaucracy).  But it was the people, not the amenities, that made the event.  And those people were participants in a joyfully healthy endeavor: propelling human-powered craft down the city's greatest natural resource, the grandest river in North America.

The event brings together subsets of the canoe and kayak racing population who don't often see one another.  Surf ski racers tend to gravitate toward open-water venues near the coast.  Marathon canoeists have their own races on small, mostly flat rivers.  Wildwater racers prefer... wild water (i.e., whitewater on mountain streams).  But the OICK race has hosted all these types of racers, and more.

And all these racers get to mingle with a slice of the Memphis population that doesn't even race except this one time each year, when they drag their canoes out of their backyards to spend a beautiful June morning paddling, socializing, cheering, and laughing down on the riverfront.

I'm not suggesting that the city should bankroll events like the OICK race; on the contrary, I think that would diminish their grassroots spirit.  But it would be nice if our leaders would show a bit more appreciation of their value, and perhaps remove a few of the hoops that organizers have to jump through to put them on.  To put it another way, I'd like to see the city and its business elites trust us to entertain ourselves.  We sure had a blast doing it last Saturday.

Here's a look at this year's race tee shirt:

At least in my opinion, it's delightfully un-fancy.  Very basic.  As my friend Joe, who happened to be the race director last weekend, put it, "The tee shirt doesn't make the event.  The event makes the tee shirt."  I'll be wearing mine proudly not because of its pizazz but because of the quality event it represents.

As a general rule, the OICK race takes place the day before Father's Day each year.  That means you can at least pencil it in for June 17, 2017.