Theodore, Isabelle and organiser Holly Wright are all looking forward to the 2025 Mother’s Day Classic. Photo: Chris Roe.
The Mother’s Day Classic 5-km run will return to Wagga Wagga in 2025 with local organisers hoping to double participation in their second year.
The annual charity event has been held nationally since 1998 and raises funds to “stop breast and ovarian cancers in their tracks”.
This year’s run is scheduled for 11 May and organiser Holly Wright said they aim to build on last year’s success.
“We got overwhelmingly positive feedback to the first event,” she said.
“Last year we got 285 participants, which was great, and my goal this year is around 400, and I reckon that’s a reasonable target.”
With continuing support from Wagga City Council, the event will return to the Riverside Precinct, running south along the levee from the stage to the highway at Hammond Avenue and back again.
“We’re keeping a lot of things similar from last year; it’s pretty much the same course, although we won’t have to work around a sinkhole this year,” she said with a laugh, recalling the subsidence that occurred behind the ARCC Hall on Tarcutta Street.
“They fenced it off a few weeks before the event, so we had to change the course and put a detour in, which wasn’t ideal, but it’s all fixed now!
“People really enjoyed the course because it was so accessible and people came with prams and kids on scooters, and they loved all the entertainment along the way.”
Two hundred and eighty-five participants ran or walked the 5-km course for last year’s first Wagga Wagga Mother’s Day Classic. Photo: Supplied.
Events staged at around 80 locations across the country in 2024 raised $3.3 million on top of the tens of millions raised over the past two and a half decades.
The funds are donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation and last year the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation was also included.
Holly said the Wagga committee decided to announce the event’s return early to allow time to recruit volunteers and attract sponsors.
“We’ve got three tiers of sponsorship and we use that money to buy all those things that we need to make the event work,” she said.
“If they commit to that bronze, silver or gold level of sponsorship we plug them on our Facebook page, have their logos on our website and they are able to set up signage or a booth on the day.
“We’ll also have spot prizes to give away again, so we’re looking for local businesses to donate vouchers or any goods or services.”
The course from the Riverside to Marshalls Creek Bridge and back will remain the same in 2025. Photo: Supplied.
The committee is also hoping for more entertainment and an expansion of the festival vibe that surrounded last year’s run.
“We had the live music and we got a lot of people that dressed up and really made a fun event of it,” Holly said.
“We had lots of random pink, people dressed up as unicorns, people in fairy wings and we had one family where about 10 of them, including the kids, wore matching pink Hawaiian shirts, which was hilarious.
“We’re calling out for people to join us as performers, we are looking to have more involvement from food vendors and community groups and of course we need people who are prepared to volunteer their time.
Holly said anyone interested in getting involved should keep an eye on their Facebook page with the website set to go live on 14 February.
“We’re hoping that everyone who participated last year will come back again and bring more people with them and we want to get as many families as we can to sign up early, so kids will be able to enrol for free during February,” she said.
“It all goes towards the two joint recipients, the National Breast Cancer Foundation and the Australian Ovarian Cancer Foundation so we’re hoping people really get behind it again.”
Loading ...
