Statewide Iowa — The director of the Register’s Great Annual Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, or RAGBRAI, says he has growing confidence that the 2021 edition of the cross-state bicycle ride will happen as a full-scale ride, according to information posted Tuesday afternoon on the ride’s social media page.
The 2020 edition of RAGBRAI was canceled due to concerns generated by the coronavirus pandemic, with organizers initially planning to hold the ride over the same route, with the same overnight host towns, as had been planned for the 2020 ride. Earlier this year, two of the ride’s overnight host towns had bowed out of taking part in the 2021 event due to uncertainty over it’s safety in the face of the continuing pandemic.
Since then, RAGBRAI organizers have secured new overnight host towns to replace the original towns that opted out this year. RAGBRAI 2021 will take place July 25th through 31st, with riders and support personnel starting in Le Mars, with overnight stops in Sac City, Fort Dodge, Iowa Falls, Waterloo, Anamosa and DeWitt before reaching their ultimate destination in Clinton.
Meanwhile, the future of the Hawkeye State’s other cross-state bicycle ride, Iowa’s Ride, is still up in the air, with organizers of last year’s scheduled inaugural ride, having taken other jobs and in at least one case, moved out of state. Iowa’s Ride is scheduled to be held the week before RAGBRAI, with riders crossing the state from west to east, just in time to participate in RAGBRAI when it departs Le Mars. However, as time goes by, committees in many of the scheduled overnight host towns for Iowa’s Ride are less and less convinced that ride will actually happen.
