Ski to Sea brought nearly 3,900 participants and thousands of supporters, spectators and festival attendees to Whatcom County on a rainy and chilly Sunday.
Event organizers and 500 volunteers navigated near-constant precipitation and a few timing glitches to pull off Bellingham’s multisport relay race in its 51st year.
Race director Anna Rankin said on Monday, May 27 that it may have been the smoothest Ski to Sea of her tenure. While a few canoeists and kayakers had to be rescued after capsizing in the river or bay, she didn’t hear of a single racer who was treated or transported for injury.
“If the weather had been good, I might even have called it the perfect day,” she said.
Rankin expressed gratitude for law enforcement and Search & Rescue teams who patrol the course, and the 30-plus people who make up the race leg committees — many of whom had the unenviable job of breakdown after the party ended, a duty that volunteers are less than chipper about.
A couple of factors caused errors and delays in the live results for some of the race legs on Sunday. Marc Blake owns Pacific Multisports, the race timing company that handles registration and results for most races in the area. Blake said the company’s goal is always to provide live, accurate results, but with so many moving parts and such high racer volume, Ski to Sea is the most complex event on the schedule.
To accommodate that volume, the company rents additional timing equipment for Ski to Sea. The first glitch happened because two of the rented decoders were set to an incorrect time zone, Blake explained. That resulted in timing chip reads at the run/road bike transition that were nine hours off. While the road bike leg results weren’t available in real time, the team fixed the decoder at the cyclocross/kayak transition in time to catch all but the top four racers.
The second issue came about when early release chips were distributed in a way that triggered invalid reads. (Early releases are for racers whose teammates won’t finish their legs within a certain time frame.) Blake said he plans to incorporate more staff training and equipment checks in the future to avoid similar issues. Final results are now posted on the Pacific Multisports website.
“Every glitch has a downstream effect, and I am proud of our team’s ability to problem solve on the fly and deliver the results,” Blake said.
Gallery: Top moments from Ski to Sea 2024
Despite the timing challenges, Rankin said that Sunday’s race felt calmer than past events have. For the first time in her eight-year tenure, she had the luxury of just standing at the finish line in Marine Park for a few minutes, watching the excited onlookers as racers streamed in.
“I got to look around and really enjoy that experience,” she said. “That was a landmark moment for me.”
Even visitors with zero interest in the race had plenty to entertain themselves with at the Fairhaven Festival, which has been dubbed “Bellingham’s Biggest Street Fair.” Fairhaven Association Executive Director Heather Carter said when it comes to event planning on rainy days, her motto is “it is what it is.”
“Where we live in Bellingham, we’re used to this weather,” Carter said during the festival. “We’ve had a great attendance today. Super lively, with the live music, lots of great arts and crafts vendors … it’s so fun to see everyone out. Lots of dogs, too! That always makes me happy.”
Read CDN’s live coverage of the event or race recap. Registration for the 2025 Ski to Sea will be here before you know it.
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
