Category: News

Dear messfam, dear ECMC 2025 participants,

In our last statement we shared information with you on a person who registered under the race number 1488, a number that is clearly linked with fascist and white supremacist ideology. This person was officially excluded from the ECMC 2025.

A number of participants informed the Orga and Awaremess team during the event that this person came to the ECMC despite their officially communicated exclusion and the reimbursement of their championship fee. For the Orga and Awaremess Team, this was a clear violation of decision that had been made. After talks between Awaremess, Orga and the IFBMA, the decision was made to communicate to this person that they are not welcome at this event and had to leave immediately. The person complied and was accompanied to the housing. Members from Orga and Awaremess made sure that they packed their stuff and left without causing any issues or further discomfort to the participants.

In our previous statement, we addressed the way we handled the situation and apologized for the way this decision had been communicated to the community by the Orga Team. In this statement we want to address this issue with the community and the participants of the ECMC Salzburg: In our view, clear guidelines need to be put in place for future championship organizers. If anything like this were to happen again, any decisions taken by the Orga need to be honored by all persons involved.

Additionally, handling of the registration process needs to account for the fact, that people who are excluded from any championship or event may disrespect that decision and turn up anyway. In this case, it needs to be up to event organizers and the Awaremess team to make consistent decisions and execute them based on the desires of the community. But the question remains on what information these decisions are based…

We do not have a conclusive take on the issue of information-based decisions. We would like to ask the IFBMA to discuss this and offer guidance to future championship organizers.

We thank you for your trust and attention to this matter and hope that situations like this can be avoided in the future.Sincerely,

The ECMC 2025 Awaremess-Team,
for the main organizers

Dear messfam,

The ECMC Salzburg is right around the corner. As we speak, the groupride is already underway, with the SUICMC St.Gallen still in your hearts and legs.

After long, and at times frustrating deliberation, we want to issue a statement on a topic that has been bothering us, as well as you the community, concerning this year’s ECMC. As some of you may have heard, we have barred a person from attending the event, due to their unreflected use of the race number 1488. We have gotten a lot of criticism for how we handled the situation and we sincerely want to apologize for this.

A lot of the people that gave us feedback would have liked more clear and transparent communication on our decision-making concerning this issue. It pains us to realize that some of you will not be coming to Salzburg because of this. And it pains us to realize that we have undermined some of your support for the ECMC Salzburg with the way we managed this. We understand and respect your individual and collective decisions and want you to know that we take your concerns seriously, even if it already is too late.

To be honest with all of you, we, that is the Orga-Crew for the ECMC, have been through a rough couple of months. This is mainly down to our team of organizers being too small to address all the topics and issues surrounding the ECMC with the attention they deserve. We acted as fast as we could, but we should have acted much faster on a topic with political significance to the community.

As such, we realize that people may want to hear a personal statement from those in the Orga-Team who were involved in the decision-making on this subject. We want to address this with you as part of the Open Forum.

The Awaremess coordination team is also aware of the controversies that have surrounded this event and has agreed to collect any additional feedback on neutral ground via awaremess@ecmc2025.com. This feedback will be collected and thoroughly discussed during and after the ECMC. We wish to issue a similar statement after the event, summarizing and sharing our learnings from this incident.

We want you to know that we have and are doing our best to make this an amazing, fun and memorable ECMC with the resources that we have. We hope to show all of you who are coming that Salzburg has what it takes to show the Messfam this city from its finest side, and we want everyone who will be here to feel welcome and comfortable!

And we want to make one thing very clear:

Facism, racism, sexism and homophobia of any kind have no place within our community, and have no place at the ECMC 2025!!!

Sincerely,

The ECMC 2025 Awaremess-Team,
for the main organizers