Are We Putting on Events or Building Public Infrastructure? 10 Lessons from Chris Robb

Chris has been making this argument for years, and it hit harder than ever in this conversation. We call our events "races," our participants "runners," our leaders "race directors." But that framing undersells what we actually do by an enormous margin. Lagos, Nigeria just showed the world what it looks like when a government truly understands our industry: 20,000 participants, zero entry fees, all funded by the state, because the president recognized that mass participation is preventative health care.

The Brussels Marathon lost its permit after 20 years. That doesn't happen to public health infrastructure. It happens to events that haven't told their story well enough. The narrative shift starts with us.

Chris used the phrase provocatively and intentionally. Record numbers. Fastest sell-outs. Ballot announcements. There's a fixation on growth for the sake of growth that he finds genuinely worrying — not because growth is bad, but because operational expertise hasn't kept pace with marketing ambition. COVID wiped out a generation of experienced race directors. Young, digitally-skilled operators came in. That's largely a good thing — but is operational depth keeping up?

The answer isn't to slow down. It's to grow responsibly — use crowd scientists, invest in safety protocols, build financial reserves, and never cram in 5,000 more entries just to hit a record.

COVID forced our industry to collaborate like never before. Open books. Shared operations plans. Alliances formed in Australia, Sweden, the UK, Canada. And then, as quickly as the crisis passed, so did some of the spirit that drove it. Chris described a race organizer in Asia whose posture had shifted to "cards close to the chest — protecting my own rice bowl rather than building a bigger rice bowl for everybody."

A disaster at one poorly-run event creates ripple effects for every well-run event in the industry. Collaboration in good times is what protects the industry in bad ones.

When Chris consulted for the Istanbul Marathon, he didn't start with a tourism brochure. He started with a question: where is your biggest diaspora? The answer was Germany. So the recommendation was to take an expo stand at the Berlin Marathon and engage the Turkish community living overseas — people who hadn't been home in a decade and might make a marathon the reason to go back.

For the Maldives event, 44 nationalities were represented — yet almost all participants were local. One of the world's most iconic destinations, and no structured tourism engine. Chris's point was blunt: you're probably sitting on the same missed opportunity and don't know it yet.

Chris described what he called the nine-month silence problem: entries open, participants register, get minimal communication, race day happens, and then complete silence until the same process starts again the following year. No nurturing. No pathway. No stickability.

His alternative: build a connected ecosystem of 5Ks, 10Ks, and half marathons that funnel toward your marquee event. Share databases. Collaborate with other events rather than treating them as competitors. Back in the pre-digital days, Chris would literally stand at finish lines handing out flyers for his upcoming race. The principle was simple — cross-pollinate audiences. Today we have better tools. We just aren't using them.

Early in his Singapore days, Chris started running sponsor workshops — bringing all his partners into the same room to share their planned activations. The initial reaction was resistance: why would I tell my competitor what I'm doing? His answer: you're category exclusive, you have nothing to lose.

What happened instead was remarkable. Two, three, sometimes four partners would look at each other's ideas and say: let's co-own that. Pool budgets. Build something bigger. The result was activations that none of them could have funded alone — including a National Safe Cycling Day born from five sponsors spontaneously deciding to do it together in the workshop.

This was one of the sharpest insights in the whole conversation. We design everything for the participant: the corral, the medals, the finish line, the post-race nutrition. But who designs the experience for the partner who didn't run their long run this weekend because they were supporting? The kids who were pulled away from football to come cheer? The family who traveled across the country?

Chris's vision: when participants register, collect data on their supporters too. What do they like? What are their interests? Then use that data to create a fan experience — a coffee shop at mile 10 for the partner who loves coffee, a pet-friendly zone for the family with a dog, partnerships with local businesses that activate specifically for the spectator crowd.

When asked the one mistake large-scale events repeatedly make, Chris went straight to volunteers. Not because we don't value them — but because we haven't built a real strategy around them. Younger generations are less inclined to volunteer. Recruiting is getting harder. And yet most events treat volunteers as a logistical requirement rather than a community-building engine.

Chicago's experience with their 13.1 expansion showed that new communities don't always enter as runners — they enter as spectators, then volunteers, and eventually as participants. The progression is real, and it has to be designed for.

Chris was candid about his own mistake here. At the Singapore Marathon, the kids dash grew to 5,000 participants — and his team treated it as a revenue add-on. Come run. Leave. No ongoing engagement. No pathway. No follow-up. He called it out directly: "I put both hands in the air."

The missed opportunity was enormous. Every child comes with one or two parents. Every parent is a potential runner. Every engaged kid is a future marathoner. Programs like the UBS Athletics Kids Club — 240,000 kids participating in their second year across India and Switzerland — show what's possible when youth engagement is treated as a strategy, not a side event.

This was the moment in the conversation that caught me most off guard — and stuck with me longest. At the Africa Running Conference, Dr. Paul Tergat offered a line that Chris described as a new aha moment. Before organized running, before marathons and majors and timing chips, Africans ran on the paths between villages. Sometimes to deliver messages. Mostly for the joy of it.

Chris grew up that way in Zimbabwe — single tracks through the bush, an old Seiko stopwatch, nothing in his ears, just the environment and the movement. And his question, sitting in a world of digital boards and personalized playlists and fan engagement data, was a genuinely important one: are we sometimes over-complicating the most simple and powerful thing we do? Technology should amplify the experience. It should never replace it. And sometimes, the best version of your event is the one that gets out of the way and lets people remember why they fell in love with this in the first place.