Bronte Harbour Classic

The event

The Bronte Harbour Classic is a chip-timed 5K road race with a Kids 1K Fun Run and an all-day post-race festival, held at Bronte Harbour Park in Oakville. The inaugural edition ran on Father’s Day, June 21, 2026.

I serve as Race Director, and co-directed that first event alongside Charles J. Sathmary, with Greg Pace as race advisor. Planning is underway for 2027, which expands the event to 1K, 5K and 10K distances with room for 1,500 runners.

What the site had to do

A first-year race has a specific problem: no history, no reputation, and a hard deadline. Every runner, sponsor, and vendor is being asked to trust something that has never happened before. The website is most of the answer to that.

So it had to carry registration, the course, festival details, sponsor and vendor information, and community outreach — and it had to look like an event that had been running for a decade.

The decision worth writing down

Most race websites are disposable. The event happens, the site is wiped, next year’s event starts from a blank page. Every result, every photo, every sponsor’s logo, every vendor’s listing — gone.

We did the opposite. Every sponsor and vendor gets a permanent page, and every race gets a permanent archive: results, photos, and the story of the day, kept at a stable URL indefinitely.

Two reasons. The obvious one is that it’s a better deal for sponsors — a local business that backs a first-year race gets a durable, indexed page rather than a logo that vanishes in October. The less obvious one is that it compounds. Year two starts with a year of indexed, linked, real content instead of nothing.

I wrote both decisions up: why we archived every race forever and why every sponsor and vendor gets a permanent web presence.

Build notes

Astro 5 and Tailwind on Vercel, with race photography served from Cloudflare R2 — a first-year race generates thousands of images, and the archive commitment means the storage decision has to be one you can live with for years.

How AI runs it

A small team runs this race, so the repetitive work goes to AI:

• Race photos. Google Vision reads the bib numbers on 1,843 photos (92% of bibs detected), so every runner finds their photos free, by bib or by name. How it works.
• Partner pages. Each of the 80 sponsors, vendors and organizers is researched and written up with AI, then published as a permanent page.
• Participant emails. Race Roster broadcasts are drafted from a house template, test-sent, and only sent on approval.
• Next year. The full 2027 registration event was set up with AI in one working session.

If you direct a race and want the same system, that’s what I build for race directors.