Anyone running endurance events in Australia right now is seeing the same thing: people are entering later than they ever have.
Across the sport, the share of participants registering in the final days before an event is at its highest on record. And the trend isn’t easing. With cost-of-living pressure and busier, less predictable schedules, athletes are holding off on committing until the last possible moment.
It’s most pronounced at the shorter end. For events under the half marathon, the 5km, 10km and fun-run distances that bring in huge participant numbers, entries are landing extraordinarily late, often in the final week.
For organisers, that’s a genuine problem. Late entries make it hard to forecast numbers, lock in logistics, order the right amount of merch, brief volunteers, and — most importantly — manage cash flow when most of your costs are committed well before a single late entry comes through.
Cash flow is the hard part. Your costs are locked in months out, but the entries don’t show up until the last week. You can’t change human behaviour, so it comes down to who you partner with. You want partners with good terms, the right tech to handle a late surge, and people you can actually trust. That’s the difference between a stressful event and a smooth one.
— Bengy, Founder, Barefoot Sport
The behaviour isn’t going to reverse. So the question for organisers isn’t how to stop late entries, it’s how to build an event operation that absorbs them. That means surge-proof registration that won’t choke in the final week, clear real-time numbers so you can make decisions late, and partners whose terms work with your cash flow instead of against it.
That’s exactly the problem Barefoot was built to solve.