Pat Mc­Quaid, pres­i­dent of the Union Cy­cliste In­ter­na­tionale (UCI), the world gov­ern­ing body for cy­cling, in his first vis­it to T&T will wit­ness the sec­ond edi­tion of the To­ba­go Cy­cling Clas­sic from Oc­to­ber 2-7. Mc­Quaid is ex­pect­ed for three days and ac­cord­ing to the event chair­man and race or­gan­is­er, Jeff Charles, his pres­ence is a huge en­dorse­ment for the event and for the en­hance­ment of sports tourism as a grow­ing in­dus­try for To­ba­go. The Clas­sic will now be part of the in­ter­na­tion­al cy­cling cal­en­dar of the UCI. T&T is the first Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean is­land to have a na­tion­al cy­cling event list­ed in the cy­cling body's of­fi­cial pro­gramme of events. UCI of­fi­cials will be back again next month to take charge of the UCI-sanc­tioned tour of To­ba­go race.

The win­ning Aus­tri­an team of last year's event will be re­turn­ing to de­fend its crown af­ter an im­pres­sive per­for­mance in the in­au­gur­al UCI 1.2 Tour of To­ba­go In­ter­na­tion­al Road Race. In the lead up to the fea­ture race, there will be a four-stage in­ter­na­tion­al cy­cling com­pe­ti­tion to be held in dif­fer­ent parts of the is­land, which is open to in­ter­na­tion­al, re­gion­al and lo­cal cy­clists. This year, the Di­vi­sion One in­ter­na­tion­al event will fea­ture three UCI pro­fes­sion­al teams, sev­en in­ter­na­tion­al elite teams and four Caribbean teams, with cy­clists from Aus­tria, Ger­many, Switzer­land, Czech Re­pub­lic, Bel­gium, Den­mark, Eng­land, Isle of Man, Cana­da, USA, Co­lum­bia, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Guade­loupe, Aru­ba, St Vin­cent, St Lu­cia, Bar­ba­dos, Guyana, Ja­maica and T&T. The event gained in­creased vis­i­bil­i­ty and promi­nence through a new and dy­nam­ic al­liance with the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly-renowned Amer­i­can sport net­work gi­ant-ES­PN.

Last year, a 30-minute ES­PN pro­gramme on the event was broad­cast­ed to au­di­ences of more than 50 mil­lion view­ers in 40 coun­tries. How­ev­er, this year, it was an­nounced that ES­PN will be re­turn­ing with a larg­er crew to film even more ex­ten­sive cov­er­age for a full one-hour pro­gramme, which is planned to broad­cast over an ever wider cross-sec­tion of view­ship around the world. Charles went on to share that he is con­fi­dent that an­oth­er year of ex­cit­ing ac­tion in the To­ba­go Cy­cling Clas­sic is to come, and be­lieves that the event will po­si­tion To­ba­go as the fore­most Caribbean sport tourism des­ti­na­tion. Charles and his fel­low or­gan­is­ers have ac­knowl­edged the sup­port of part­ners in, the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny, the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) of T&T, along with bmo­bile, Caribbean Bot­tlers, Mi­con Mar­ket­ing ltd, Na­tion­al Lot­ter­ies Con­trol Board (NL­CB), Mag­dale­na Grand Re­sort, Caribbean Air­lines, John­ston Apart­ments, Crown Point Beach Ho­tel, British Air­ways, Stan­dard Dis­trib­u­tors, Suarez Cy­cling Ap­par­el, Econo Car Rentals, Bry­dens and Jade Dis­trib­u­tors ltd.