This article is the sixth in a series profiling the varied and amazing nominees for the 2009 Alice B. Toeclips Awards, which will be presented to five winners at the Alice Awards & Auction on March 7th. You can also read the list of nominees online. This profile was written by BTA correspondent John McLaren.
Porter Childs heads Good Sport Promotion (GSP), an organization that runs a dozen annual bike rides in the Portland area. Last year, GSP rides attracted 14,500 participants and raised $391,000 for nonprofits. They draw cyclists from 16 states and three nations, suggesting that GSP is becoming a significant visitor attraction for the area. It is no coincidence that the City of Portland and Travel Oregon, also interested in stimulating the visitor trade, have recently formed “strategic partnerships” with GSP.
Childs founded GSP 10 years ago. He can take some of the credit for putting Portland and Oregon on the map as a cyclists’ destination with events like Worst Day of the Year Ride, the Night Ride, Mountain Bike Oregon, the Portland Century, Tour de Lab and the Hottest Day Ride.
New on the GSP calendar this year is Jackson’s Ride the Gorge, a fund-raiser for the NW Sarcoma Foundation. The July 18th event honors the memory of Jackson Hill, a bicycling enthusiast who was only 12 when he died of osteosarcoma, a malignant bone cancer.
Most of GSP’s rides are in the spring and summer, but their best known event may be the Worst Day of the Year ride, which took place on February 15th of this year. It attracts nearly 3,000 riders, many of whom are theatrically costumed for wet weather, and it has quickly become a quirky annual tradition. GSP also puts on a big-time race, the Twilight Criterium, which usually draws about 15,000 spectators to thrill to a surreal vision of bike racers flying around Portland’s small downtown blocks.
“We go over the top with support.” Childs says of the comforts provided on most of his rides, for which registration costs $25 to $60 (kids 10 and under ride free). “We’re masters at planning the details, dreaming up the ideas, scouting the course, marking the routes, making the maps and planning the food for bike rides, races, running events, street fairs and community events.”
GSP surveys all the riders who take part in their events, and Childs says the average approval rating is 97 percent. He has five full-time staffers and three part-timers. They all work out of their homes but meet once a week at Childs’ house, where equipment for the events is kept. During the peak summer season they bring on another half-dozen people. But volunteers, some 1,100 of them, are key to the success of this enterprise.
Childs also helped establish ORbike.com five years ago, a statewide calendar of recreational cycling events with a twice-monthly newsletter going to 90,000 people.
Among the organizations that benefit from the success of GSP events are the Community Cycling Center, the BTA, the American Lung Association, the Dove Lewis animal hospital and Hands on Greater Portland. But GSP also accrues an incredible benefit to bicycling in Portland, an effect which is becoming more tangible with every passing year – by organizing great rides that are accessible to less confident cyclists, right through the heart of the city, GSP and Childs have brought thousands of people around to the idea, if not also the practice, of using a bike for transportation as well as fun.
