Cycling: Carter up to Challenge

Aaron Carter, the founder and owner of sports events business Total Sport, is the new event director of the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge.

Finding a way for the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge to remain relevant in a crowded events market is just one of the challenges facing the event's new director.

Almost 7000 cyclists completed last year's Contact Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge.

The iconic event, now in its 40th year, has won a string of awards, is part of the UCI's Golden Bike Series and includes a variety of road, team and mountain bike options. But with major sponsor Contact stepping down at the end of the 2015 cycle challenge and declining numbers, changes are needed to ensure it retains its place as New Zealand's largest and best-known cycling event.

Enter newly-appointed event director Aaron Carter, a 44-year-old event manager of 20 years' experience, who is the owner of Total Sport, a company he founded 16 years ago and which runs more than 20 sport-related events on an annual basis.

Carter, wife Nicola and their two young children moved to Taupo last year and Carter said taking on more Taupo-based events and spending less time in Auckland - he currently travels most weeks to the Total Sport Auckland office where between six and 12 staff work depending on the time of year - was also a bonus. Now, his commute to the cycle challenge is simply a matter of walking down the hall of the Taupo town centre building they both share.

The Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge contract with Carter and Total Sport also includes a yet-to-be-appointed event manager, who will take over some of the operation of the event while Carter will look after more strategic event management and leadership.

Carter took on the new job last week and said he intended to spend the first couple of months getting involved in all of the different aspects of the cycle challenge. With two decades in sports events, he has run plenty of events and said it's now the more strategic stuff - planning, management, leadership and making sure an event functioned well, that interested him, as well as the opportunity to be involved with a large scale annual event.

"It's an event that fits with our whole philosophy as a business which is to inspire people to participate in great events in stunning locations. We're all about providing opportunities and providing a platform for people to connect and share these sort of things."

The challenge of reversing the cycle challenge's gradual decline in entry numbers also appealed, he said.

"I'm interested in what we can do to change that. It's still the biggest event in New Zealand ... maybe we need to do it differently and carry it differently and fit with the objectives of the [cycle challenge] trust.

"I'd say it's about growing the profile of the event again. The market is beyond saturated now, so how do you make it relevant, how do you do this differently, how do you get it to cut through and get people's attention?"

Carter said he was looking forward to seeing where the cycle challenge went in the years ahead.

"This is not a short-term thing for me. I'm in Taupo now and plan to be for a long time and it's going to be interesting to see how the cycle challenge looks on its 45th or 50th anniversaries. That's pretty exciting."

The cycle challenge has been awarded $250,000 from the government's Major Events Development Fund over the next three years to attract more international entrants and former cycle challenge event director Kay Brake has moved into a newly-formed position of project manager international marketing, focusing primarily on marketing the event to Australian riders.