Ok, its Saturday morning and I am running with some great people from my running club and the subject of golf arose. I don’t play golf so I was not paying much attention to the conversation until one of the runners in our group started commenting how membership of golf clubs are declining because ‘cycling is the new golf’, I was intrigued as I consider myself a social cyclist! I have heard the term ‘mamil’ or middle-aged-men-in-lycra {see the wikipedia reference or an interesting article from the BBC on this subject} but did not spend much time dwelling on the subject seeing how I probably am a ‘mamil’ (although I don’t shave my legs). When it comes to cycling I prefer mountain biking so this article in TREAD magazine was worth the read “Why MTB is the new golf: Freedom vs frustration“. The scorecard at the end of the article I thought highlighted quite succinctly why MTB’ing is becoming so popular (relative to golf at least).
I have tried to quantify the numbers of cyclists versus golfers, but this looks like a task that will take more than the 5 minutes I gave myself. From a South African online article it would appear that there are approximately 500 000 golfers in South Africa but the numbers are static or slightly declining while for cycling it is estimate there are a million cyclists and growth in this market as more corporate entities get involved in the sport with sponsorship’s and corporate days. In the UK cycling is growing at 12% while golf appears static?
