In Which I Contemplate the RAGBRAI Mess

Sunrise during RAGBRAI 2019. The last? Is it sunset now for RAGBRAI?

 No, I’m not jumping on the Iowa Ride bandwagon. I’m not sure why the Carson King story prompted the director of RAGBRAI and his whole staff to quit and start a competing ride—I suspect that there is more to the story than this one controversy.

As you no doubt know, King held up a beer sign at a football game, raised money for a hospital, had old racist tweets revealed by a paper, was courted and rejected by a beer company and had a day in his honor named by the governor of Iowa. The story has had more twists and turns than Dorothy’s house on the way to Oz. Along the way, RAGBRAI somehow got hit by the twister. I wrote about the media mess on one of my other blogs.

RAGBRAI had a long run. Is it over? It would make me sad, especially the way that it ended. The Register told its RAGBRAI director not to be making his own comments on the media storm engulfing The Register—in context, not an unusual move for a media company in the vortex of a storm. But he and his staff quit.

Of course, such “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies usually leak like a spaghetti sieve, and a better response may have been to work with the RAGBRAI staff on what to say. But the King story had little to do with biking in Iowa, and the Iowa Ride leaves me feeling cold.

Another image I made during RAGBRAI 2019. Typical RABRAI scene.

I’m an old newspaper journalist. I don’t worship the Register, but I’m old enough to recall it as the paper that Iowa once could depend upon. That it no longer is what it once was is partly due to unfortunate decisions it made along the way, but honestly, regardless of whether the paper retrenched in the distant past or waited until the current media economic storms forced the decision, I can’t see how The Register in 2020 had any hope of being the Register of the early 1970s when RAGBRAI was born.

Americans and Iowans are getting well over the newspaper reading habit. Based on the ignorance of our current politics, I can’t see that as a good thing, but it’s a thing nonetheless. And maybe a divorce between the summer bicycle ride and the fading media company that started it all has been in the cards for a while.

Still, the suddenness of the Iowa Ride movement leaves me queasy and uneasy. I don’t want to be a part of something that symbolically represents a repudiation of all that the Register was and is, and that rejects the watchdog role that newspaper journalism seeks to fulfill.

I don’t know what my plans for next summer are. I don’t know what RAGBRAI will be like now that all of its experienced hands have abandoned ship so suddenly.

But I am pretty that I won’t have anything to do with the Iowa Ride.