The controversy over the 2026 Belikin La Ruta Maya continues and participants and founders of the event continue to express disappointment over the route that the event has taken.
At its inception, the race was intended to promote fluvial health and the protection of the Belize River waterway, but now critics say it's a commercialized event that puts profits over its purpose.
This morning on SUNUP Vice President of the Belize Canoe Association, Elvin Penner and Co-Founder of the race, Luis Garcia, elaborated on their stance of what they call a "dying race"
Luis Garcia, Co-founder of La Ruta Maya Belize River Challenge
"We pretty much built the La Ruta Maya, the route and everything, with a historic aspect of it that would depict the history, culture and environment of the river with a development of a tourism product on the river, an expanded tourism product that already existed in Cayo."
"So that was the aim of the race, or as we, the members who sat down on that and prior and other meetings. And in 1998, we tested the race. It was a very interesting race. We finished actually at the Baron Bliss grave. That was the finishing of the race on the first year, which was chaotic actually at the swing bridge. And it was very chaotic because of safety and we couldn't get stuff out. A lot of paddlers lost their stuff."
"So the second year, it was decided to bring it back to the Belcan. So that is where we went to for safety purposes. But the race itself was to focus on the history of what the river means, has done, and the importance it has for Belize, the culture that existed, and we wanted to bring back a lot of the Boom and Chime culture that has been lost in Belize, and we wanted to depict the environment as how important the Belize River is and how the risk can bring out to light what the effects are and then gather groups that we can actually go back to the river and during the year and get things done, either cleaning campaigns or reforesting, whatever we had to do."
Elvin Penner, Vice President
"This whole thing is going to really affect the long-term outcome of the race. Now the paddlers feel very hurt. The sponsors feel hurt."
"The fans feel betrayed. That is 95% of the paddling community. How can you ignore 95%? I did a little bit of a survey on all the social media posts that have been happening about this, and I found 272 no's and six yes."
"That gives them less than 3% approval. How can you in your right mind make such a critical change with only 3% of the approval of the players of this race? That's ridiculous. Obviously, now we can only assume that they don't care about us."
"They don't care about the paddlers. They don't even care about the race. My prediction is the race is going to die."
On social media, many participants have expressed that if the race does end at the Haulover, they will not be participating.
