As for the longer term, Sunderland said that was less obvious.

“It’s just the amount of bureaucracy that we’ve got to sit through to get the approvals for the event,” Sunderland said.

“Being on a public road we have to go through Cycling NSW, Cycling Australia for affiliation of the event, so that we’re covered by all the insurances throught the Cycling Federation.

“Then we have to apply to the NSW Police and RMS, along with all the local government bodies to get approval to run the event on the road. 

“That whole process is fairly protracted and we actually employ someone to do that because it’s a very specialist sort of a thing.”

Sunderland said the current committee, that had organised the race for the last four years had stood down.

“The amount of work that has to go into an event, it’s very hard to get a committee to form,” he said.

“The other thing there is sponsors. We failed to fill our major sponsorship role for this year’s event, which left a fairly big hole in our budget.”

Sunderland said the race firstly needed some sort of management in place, which would have to secure enough sponsorship to run the event.

“We’ve had a stakeholders meeting in Grafton last week which was all positive, and a good sign out of that was that the Cycling NSW chief executive officer attended that and the co-ordinator of the Australian Road Series phoned into that,” he said.

“It’s the first time we’ve actually gotten those two bodies to the table for this race.

“A little bit of pressure has been exerted on those two bodies, which is what the mayor was alluding to in his statements about the federations of the sport needing to get off their bums and sort it out.”