Isle of Man cancels the TT 2021, but what about the future?

Last spring, the Manx government was criticized for waiting too long before canceling TT 2020. That announcement was finally made on March 16, barely two months before teams would have arrived. They won’t face such criticism this time. Manx Radio, covering the announcement live, concluded that “The early and logical decision has been taken to provide certainty and clarity for all those involved.”

COVID-free and keeping it that way

The Isle of Man is one of the few places in the western world where there’s effectively no community transmission of COVID-19. They had an initial flare-up last March and April, resulting in a couple of dozen fatalities (most of which were concentrated in a single retirement home). In late March, the Manx government closed its borders. Only essential travel has been permitted since then. Manx residents who return from the outside world are tested and held in quarantine until the results come in. This approach has allowed the island to operate otherwise normally since June. Schools are open, people go to pubs and restaurants and shop without masks.

They want to keep it that way. That’s understandable. And despite the optimistic news about vaccines, the Manx government clearly doesn’t feel it can vaccinate its entire population in time to hold the TT. Rescheduling the TT into the Manx GP/Classic TT August window was considered, but that would have thrown both events’ schedules into chaos.

Some wonder: Beginning of the end of the TT?

Skelly tried to reassure both fans and the Isle of Man’s beleaguered hotel owners.

“Be patient with us here. We are going to have a TT that will come back bigger and better than ever,” he said. He hoped most hotel and tour bookings could be rolled over until 2022, but that businesses that have to return deposits will have access to some government loans.

Reached by Manx Radio for comments, TT legend John McGuinness, who was hoping to make his 100th TT start in 2021, was quick to express a thought that many on the Isle of Man are keeping to themselves: Will the TT ever come back?

“If the Isle of Man doesn’t need the TT after two years, are they going to need it ever again?” McGuinness wondered.

The truth is that although most people on the Isle of Man support the TT, there’s always been a substantial minority who would be happy to see it go away forever. When I lived there, I spent many hours in the basement of the main library, reading old newspapers. I found scathing editorials against the races as early as 1911, the first year they raced over the Mountain course.

The TT was canceled for several years during the two world wars, but that was different; everything else was canceled, too. It came back bigger and better than ever in 1950s and ’60s, when the manufacture and export of motorcycles was an important British industry. The TT was the British Grand Prix and first among equals in the World Championship.

The next blow came in the early 1970s. Stars like Giacomo Agostini boycotted the TT because it was too dangerous, and it lost its Grand Prix status. “Should we run the TT at all?” became a hot-button political issue.

Run it did, until 1999. In 2000 it was canceled to protect the Manx farm economy from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that ravaged the UK livestock industry. There were predictions that the absence of a TT would devastate the economy, but the official numbers didn’t really bear that out.

In 2003, David Jeffries’ high-profile fatality rocked the event and sparked changes both to the organization and event operations. Some of those changes, like the elimination of morning practice, were clearly intended to calm outright opposition. At the time, there was a really strong desire to see the TT through its centenary, in 2007. I thought that once the Manx government had seen it through 100 years, it might gently let the TT go into that good night, but if anything the island seemed to recommit to its racing heritage.

Still, as the the Manx economy grows and diversifies, more than half the population is now from somewhere else. Since 2007, I’ve felt that the TT is one high-profile catastrophe away from a majority of the population looking at each other and suddenly agreeing, “Yeah, that was crazy.”

Maybe it won’t take a high-profile catastrophe. Maybe all it will take is a couple of years for the Isle of Man to realize that the TT is no longer the economic cornerstone that it once was. The government estimates that canceling TT 2020 resulted in £37 million pounds lost, which sounds like a chunk of change, but not compared to the Isle of Man’s GDP of about £5 billion. (The effect of the cancelation may be underreported because so much of the TT business is conducted in cash and off the books.) The government hopes that a vaccine will allow travel restrictions to be eased some time next summer and that hotels will be able to recoup some of their losses.

After the announcement, I caught part a Manx Radio phone-in show where at least one fan said, “Those who hate the TT are going to be all over this.” Another caller pointed out that for years the Manx road budget’s largely been spent keeping the TT course in shape. He hoped that a second cancelation would mean they’d finally start filling potholes on some of the island’s other roads!

Will the TT come back? And if so, in what form?

My gut feeling is that there will be a TT again in 2022.

Skelly sounded sincere as he promised that the Manx government remains committed to the races. The Steam Packet ferry, which is also owned by the Isle of Man, has already announced that it will begin accepting reservations for 2022, starting January 19, 2021.

But.

When you talk to people from the Isle of Man about the TT, one thing you hear all the time is, “You couldn’t do it now.”

Every year they don’t hold the TT, it becomes easier for locals to imagine that economic life would go on without it — to say nothing of the lives of racers, fans, and the occasional spectator.

So my advice is that if attending the TT is on your bucket list, you should make plans for 2022 and book that ferry crossing ASAP. Get your TT in because every year that they don’t hold it weakens its sacrosanct status. Although the organizers have taken steps to reduce fans’ risk exposure, the next time a motorcycle skittles into a crowd may be the end of the TT. Even another David Jeffries-style high-profile racer fatality might be enough to kill the whole event.

In the meantime, I expect to see further restrictions to the schedule. In recent years, more and more TT fans have come to see the first Superbike race, held on the first Saturday of race week, as the “blue riband” event. The Senior, which concludes the fortnight, is run for a smaller crowd as many fans leave over the course of that week.

In 2019, the normally bad spring weather on the Isle of Man was even worse than usual, wreaking havoc on the practice and race schedule. They ended up shortening races and running five in a single day. At the time, I thought they might have accidentally prototyped a TT that could be compressed into a single week, instead of stretching over two. I would not be surprised if, over the next few years, we see the traditional TT fortnight compressed even further, into something like the three-day schedule proposed for the Diamond Races on the Isle of Wight.

In the meantime, if you really can’t wait until 2022 to get your Mountain Course racing fix, there’s still hope that the Manx Grand Prix and Classic TT will be held in August. The Isle of Man government says it will make an announcement about those races by the end of March.