Road closures during the annual Ironman 70.3 Muskoka have been a bone of contention with community members, in particular the 2020 route which closed part of Brunel Road for several hours on event day.
Town staff have worked with event organizers to adapt the route for 2022 so that no major roads will need to be closed.
For this year’s race, to be held on July 10, the only full road closure will be Park Drive which extends from Brunel Road adjacent to the Huntsville High School to Brunel Road at Muskoka Heritage Place. Park Drive is used by athletes entering and leaving the race transition area in the high school parking lot.
All other roads included as part of the race route will experience only temporary, partial road closures or share-the-road scenarios.
Greg Pilling, manager of facility operations, sales and customer service for the Town, presented a report to Huntsville’s general committee on March 30 confirming the 2022 race route, as pictured in the images below.
The staff report also notes that the $25,000 licensing fee for the event will be paid by the Town of Huntsville’s portion of the Huntsville Municipal Accommodation Tax fund. The MAT is a mandatory four per cent tax which applies to all accommodation hotel, motel, lodge, inn, short-term rental (STR), and bed and breakfast stays. Funds are used for promoting tourism, including sports and cultural events, enhanced attractions, and outdoor activities.
Huntsville has had a long tradition of triathlons, beginning in the 1990s with both national and world championship races, the Subaru Chase series in the 2000s, and the homegrown TriMuskokan which launched in 2015.
Huntsville hosted its first Ironman 70.3—a 113-km half-Ironman consisting of a 1.9-km swim, 90-km bike, and 21.1-km run—in September 2008 at Deerhurst Resort, where it remained for nine years. The event was moved to the Canada Summit Centre in 2017, and has been hosted at that venue since, with the exception of a 2020 cancellation due to the pandemic.
The municipality also hosted a single, full Ironman in 2015, which was cancelled for subsequent years after losing about $100,000 due to a variety of factors, among them the challenging course nicknamed ‘beauty and the beast’ that attracted fewer athletes than expected.
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