Cycling and Crowd Funding.

Cycling and crowd funding. Does it work?

It was a sad email this morning that set of a train of thought that has been stuck in my head like a splinter ion my mind. The email was from Lesli Cohen, know on Twitter as @CyclismasEditor. It was to let the many contributors to Cyclismas know that she was closing it down. You can read about it on the Cyclismas site here.

I am not going to go into the story behind it, but I will say that it frustrates me that a good egg like Lesli gets treated like this. I thought Cyclismas was a great idea. I also admit I was sucked in by the now infamous Aaron Brown aka @UCI_overlord. Basically, it is a shitty tale. Google it.

The part of the story I want to look at in this post is the Kimmage Defense fund. If you don’t know about it, these two articles paint a decent picture. Velonation or bicycling.com

I donated to the Kimmage Defense fund. Not a lot, but I did donate. That now, seems like money down the drain.

The other one that has left a bitter taste in my mouth and a slightly diminished PayPal account is the Kickstarter project The Commentator.

This from the website…

What is the project?

In 1976 Danish Filmmaker Jorgen Leth made the legendary sports and cycling film, A Sunday in Hell, about the Paris Roubaix cycling race. It defined a genre and helped put the Paris-Roubaix on the global sporting map. Leth now comments on the race for television.

We plan to follow Leth as he prepares for and comments on the race. We’ll be with him from his hotel in Paris until the end of the race at the Roubaix Velodrome. Along the way our team of photographers and filmmakers will shoot footage of the race, crowds and Leth himself caught up in the excitement of sport. We’ll capture the intense effort of contemporary pro racers, and will be sure to include stars from cycling’s past.

Sounded like a great idea. I was in. The documentary was of the 2012 Paris Roubaix, with delivery of the final product in August 2012. Myself and the other 530 backers are still waiting. The producer popped up on March 13th and said it is 80% done. Going of the current timeline, we still have another 6 months or more to wait. Surely this is not acceptable?

Hopefully the latest cycling project I backed isn’t such a bumpy road. The Fly-6 sure looks interesting. I have to say the rear light concerns me. But I figure I will keep my current 50 lumen blaster and run the camera as well. Fingers crossed.

Have you had any experience with crowd funded cycling projects? Let me know about them in the comments.