Canning Bathurst boozers
October 9th 2010 07:25
:
Mount Panorama, Bathurst
Every year in October, the more refined, discerning and knowledgeable of Australia's sporting fans stay well away from an event known around the country simply as The Great Race.
For some, this is about saloon cars going very fast at an iconic track known as Mount Panorama. Think Le Mans in a family sedan covered in motor oil advertisements.
For others, it is a three-day celebration of inebriation.
This sub-group of fans saves money all year so they can travel to Bathurst in October and occupy The Mountain. One of the beauties of Mount Panorama is that the cars, while they go round and round, also go up and down. A long, twisty, tortuous way up, before screaming across the top of The Mountain and then coming down again via Conrod Straight, the scariest stretch of road in the known universe where cars approach the speed of sound.
Five people, including the great Denny Hulme, have died on Conrod Straight.
Across the top of The Mountain are about 35,000 spectators who come back year after year, occupying favourite spots, bringing with them small tents and large quantities of booze. Mostly beer - other forms of alcohol are carried only as emergency supplies.
If we ignore the periodic desruction of toilet blocks by explosives and, one year, the torching of an ice-cream van, the fans on The Mountain are most well-behaved. At least, authorities hope they are. No-one really knows. It's not the sort of place where authorities go. The Australian army might survive up there, if supported by plenty of attack helicopters, and it may be that the army is secretly put on standby each October. We don't know.
What we do know is that the authorities identified a weak point last year and moved, bravely, to exploit it. It is this: at the beginning of the weekend, The Mountain-bound fans are often reasonably sober and, secondly, every one of them has to pass through entry points actually to gain access to the circuit.
So the authorities decided to limit the amount of alcohol they could bring in for the weekend. This was a brave move indeed, but they did it, and it was announced this week that they are doing it again this year.
It's the same limit again: every person entering the Mount Panorama circuit is allowed to bring in no more than one case of full-strength beer or one cask of wine.
Per person.
Per day.
A case of beer contains 24 cans, so applying mathematics which even some of the fans on The Mountain have a chance of following, that means they are limited to one can of beer per hour for the weekend. Any time spent sleeping would provide a boost to per-hour averages - okay, sorry, getting complicated.
Has this initiative been responsible for a significant change in alcohol consumption levels and social behaviour patterns up at the top of Mount Panorama? We'll never know, unless they send the army in.
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