I know why you don't vote in the USAT board elections. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three, or two hundred thousand, little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. (Someday I'll understand that.)

Point taken.

Yes, triathlon doesn't rate with the really important world issues, like starving people in Africa, enslaved people in autocratic regimes, or your pocketbook (and mine). But it would be wrong to think your vote doesn't have a direct influence on whether you will or won't have a race to enter three years from now.

So, while I usually don't get involved in triathlon's democatic process, except to vote and to urge you to, this year is different. There is one race in which there is one clear choice. It's in the Central Region, and the person who's running is Lew Kidder.

Before I talk about why you need to vote for him, I'm going to list those states he'll represent, and how many annual (voting) members are currently in each of these states.

Arkansas - 207
Iowa - 300
Illinois - 2478
Indiana - 732
Kansas - 322
Kentucky - 351
Louisiana - 1034
Michigan - 1026
Minnesota - 885
Missouri - 591
North Dakota - 14
Nebraska - 84
Ohio - 1110
Oklahoma - 319
South Dakota - 34
Texas - 5477
Wisconsin - 637

If you add this up, you get just over 15,000 people. Each of them has purchased, for $30, an annual USA Triathlon membership. If you come from one of these states and you're an annual member (which means you don't have to buy $9 one-day memberships) then you are included in the above totals.

My concern is that although we've had an impressive run-up in participation in triathlon over the past few years, I see signs of it topping out. The question now is, can we catch a breather and then continue to grow? Can we at least keep the totals we have? Or will we decline again as we did in the late 80s and early 90s, creating a climate in which there were entire states which used to have a calendar of great races, but receded to the point where virtually all those races disappeared?

Lew Kidder remembers those times. He served on the Tri-Fed board in the 80s, he started the magazine you now know as Inside Triathlon, and he was a founder of triathlon's world governing body. He wrote many of the rules under which you now compete. He is responsible for a lot of the races in Michigan being in existence. He understands not only the age-group mindset, but also what initiatives this sport must undertake to find Olympic talent (he found the world's third-ranked female, Sheila Taormina).

I am less interested in all that, however, than I am in the fact that Kidder has recognized the same looming concern that I do. Our sport is warehousing one-day and annual license revenues at a record pace — millions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, the sport is leveling in attendance. In other words, we've begun to price people out of the sport. This is precisely what happened in the early 90s, when so many people simply could not afford to race.

It is curious that at the same time that people can't come up with the money to compete more than three or four times a year, money cascades into USAT's bank. (Well, your bank, because you as an annual member own the federation.)

What ought we do to as a governing body? I can't say it better than Kidder says it himself:

"I would favor a significant program to identify new or neglected venues for the sport, to find communities or organizations capable of staging events in those venues, and then providing a substantial level of support for newly-created events."

Yes, I hope you'll help elect Lew Kidder from the Central Region. But I'm going to ask more of you than simply casting your vote. There would be a small amount of elbow grease involved, about an hour or two per each of you. What I'd like you to do is contact Lew Kidder for the details.

You can contact him at 734-662-1000 (day or evening) or lew@cooltri.com, or send mail to Lew Kidder, 1768 Kestrel Way, Ann Arbor, MI 48103.