flatout wrote:The fact that you could be doing exactly the same route at exactly the same speed, with the same level of enjoyment says more about the power of marketing and it’s ability to change the mindset and/or perception of the individual.
Rather more than that. I've now ridden a good few sportives after many years of Audax and an otherwise mixed cycling portfolio. I happen to have reached the age when I enjoy (and, I sometimes tell myself, deserve) a bit of cossetting. To be able to relax and concentrate just on the riding, without lurking anxieties about route-finding or where I'm going to find something to eat, is not to be sniffed at. I find my fellow participants, too, to be a pretty diverse bunch with diverse expectations, and by no means dominated by the 'wannabe idiots' referred to in another post (although they're undoubtedly there and inevitably all too visible).
As for marketing - most sportives, with the obvious exceptions of a few of the bigger ones, are promoted by small companies working to tight margins, without significant marketing budgets. Such marketing as there is is the most effective kind of all - word of mouth, or rather these days word of social media. The remarkable growth would not be happening unless a previously unmet need were being addressed. The downsides mentioned here are now familiar, and indeed deplorable and lamentable: but I prefer to celebrate the sportive phenomenon as a glass half full rather than reject it as a glass half empty, and an opportunity to be seized and built upon. To dismiss it with the implied contempt often expressed when the subject crops up here risks, once again, the narrow sectarianism which has so often held back cycling in this country, and that I find disappointing.