The 30th annual Kinetics, which already was severely downsized last year, is slated for June 13. Like last year’s edition, the event — traditionally held at Boulder Reservoir — once again will remain on dry land.
Organizer Paul Bailey said he envisions this year’s Kinetics as a tour, not a race.
“It’s not going to be the same as it was in the past,” Bailey said Wednesday. “We’re just going to concentrate on having a tour. We’ll concentrate more on the participants, versus the show.
“This way the event may be more accessible to more people.”
City officials, however, aren’t sold on Bailey’s proposal to run a Kinetics tour along bike paths between the Gerald Stazio Softball Fields — running past Valmont City Park — and the Twisted Pine Brewing Co., 3201 Walnut St.
“I’m a bit concerned about the idea of having the Kinetic course along the bike paths,” Marni Ratzel, a Boulder transportation planner, wrote in an e-mail Bailey posted on Kineticists.org. “The paths are heavily used by the general public.”
Wednesday, city special events coordinator Mary McKeehan expressed similar concern
“Everybody has to share the creek path if they use it — no one has exclusive right to that path,” she said.
Bailey said “we’ll be sharing the space” with riders on the bike paths, which is why he’s pitching the event as a tour, not a closed-course race.
“We’ll take the sculptures and go around through the eastern part of the bikeway system, and ... wind up at some place where we can have an exhibit where everybody can look at the vehicles, the costumes,” Bailey said.
Kinetics almost collapsed after radio station KBCO (97.3 FM) pulled its nearly three-decade-long sponsorship of the event in 2007, citing decreased attendance and increased cost.
The race — which featured human-powered crafts of all varieties racing around and through Boulder Reservoir — long has been one of Boulder’s more unique traditions.
Last year, Bailey and some veteran kineticists pulled together a significantly smaller land version of the challenge at Twenty Ninth Street, backed by the Boulder Jaycees.
Bailey said this year’s race is still in the grassroots planning stages. His newly formed nonprofit group, Kineticist Inc., has submitted a special-events request to the city, and will meet with officials April 1.
McKeehan confirmed the meeting, but said the city has heard little concrete information from Bailey.
“We’re trying, as a special events group, to meet with him so we can bring everybody to the table,” she said. “He can present his event to this group and answer any questions or concerns we might have.”
For his part, Bailey said he and his friends simply want to keep a Boulder institution alive.
“There’s a core group of folks that are interested in the tradition,” Bailey said. “There are some people who are more into the athletic aspect, there are some people who are more into the artistic aspect, there are some people who are into the ‘Keep Boulder weird’ kind of thing.”