About Ride to Provide
Our grand event for 2005 will be the Ride to Provide, held on August 27th. This event will be a motorcycle poker run beginning at the world famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway. At the speedway all of the riders will have the opportunity to have their photograph taken at and on the track and meet several celebrity participants, including [to be determined]. They will receive a t-shirt or ride patch, and will take two laps around the track and across the famous Yard of Bricks. From there, the riders will travel south-east to the Grand Victoria Casino in Rising Sun, Indiana, along the way stopping at pre-determined locations to receive playing cards for the poker run. Once at the Grand Victoria Casino, each of the riders will have the opportunity to have their bike washed and dried by the [to be determined] and will be entered into a bike contest. A large portion of the Grand Victoria Casino parking lot will host a bike show and meet, which will feature vendors and manufacturers booths a caricature artist, silent auctions, bike contest, an Extreme Wheelie Machine, and many other fun attractions. That evening, the riders will also enjoy a banquet dinner and bike show awards ceremony in the Grand Victoria Casino’s main ballroom, followed by live music. In addition to the poker run award, riders will also be entered to win a number of extravagant door prizes and receive a $10.00 credit to be used aboard the Grand Victoria Casino Boat.
Toys for Tots run by ABATE of Indiana, a safety, educational, charitable and advocacy motorcyclist organization, makes an amazing difference in the lives of Indiana children that would not have had the joy of receiving a Christmas gift, but for this program.
In addition, the choice of the City of Loogootee was an easy one. This area has been hard hit with a growing drug problem in the surrounding comminutes, as they experience the same economic depression that Loogootee has begun to experience recently. As a small rural community the children have very little to occupy their free time. Skateboarding is a common and popular activity among the children and teens of Loogootee, though not a welcome sight for shop owners in the area and a safety concern on busy public streets. The children and teens are left few places to turn and little or none supervision in the areas they do turn to. There were over 16 million skateboarders in the US in 2002; up from 11 million in 2000. These skaters were welcomed by only 400 public skate parks. By comparison, there were only 9 million Little League baseball players in the US in 2002, welcomed by at least one baseball diamond in virtually every town in the country. Considering the jump of 5 million participants within a two year period and the introduction of skateboarding into the Olympics and becoming a regularly covered sport on popular television programming such as ESPN, no one can dispute the possibility of greater future growth in the sport. Skateboarding by nature requires that the participant be 100% alert 100% of the time. In fact, studies show that of children 14 years of age and younger that regularly visit skate parks, less than one percent use drugs. Building a public Skate park for these children is a perfect way to take a proactive approach to the growing drug problems in the surrounding areas and give these children a place to go that will offer greater supervision and the encouragement of a sport that would require that they stay off of drugs.