Why your Brevet homologation name is important#
You know, I have this super long and complicated name:
“Francisco de Borja López Río”
With “Francisco de Borja” being my first name and “López Río” my last name (or surname, or family name, whatever).
Using multiple first names was quite common in spain a few years ago, when I was born. As it happens, it has caused me trouble several times through my life. Some times it is simply mispellt (one word or several), some times a mistake is made and they put only “Francisco” as the first name, some other times people think it is not long enough and add some more words to it…
Anyway, trouble one way or the other.
For a long time, I decided to stick with the full thing, as that is how my name appears officially in my ID card (called DNI/NIF in spain), but they are too many words, which raises the probabilities of errors. So in the end I decided to use the simpler version every time I’ve to sign up for anything: “Borja López Río”.
So, in order to pre-register yourself for PBP, first you have to open an account in the Audax Club Parisien website. There you provide some basic information, like full name, address, etc. I provided “Borja López Río” as my full name.
Then you can proceed with the pre-registration, which I already did back in february
Then you have to do the full Super Randonneur Series before a given date (some day at the start of July) to be able to confirm your registration.
For the ACP to check that you have done the needed Brevets, in order to confirm your registration, you have to look for them in their website, under your account. You can look for them by club or by Brevet homologation number, and once you find the Brevet data, you have to confirm it (clicking on a button).
Easy… isn’t it?
Maybe not so easy. They have some constraint set on the data, so even if you look for a Brevet by its homologation number, if the name in your ACP account does not match the name provided when doing the Brevet homologation, then you cannot confirm it as yours.
On every Brevet I signed up for in 2023, I’ve used the same short version of my name, “Borja López Río”, except in one case, the first 300 brevet of the season, the BRM 300 - Del Urogallo (my mistake there, I should have paid more attention).
And now that brevet is missing from my account data. I can find it by its homologation number, but it appears with first name “Francisco” and last name “de Borja Lopez Rio” (second mistake, last name should have been “López Río”).
Looking into data from previous years in my account at the ACP site, several brevets that appear there with the first name “Francisco de Borja” and the last name “Lopez Rio”, so I guess the constraint there is applied only to the last name.
Being a bit worried about all this, and how it may affect the requirements to finally confirm my registration to PBP, I dug a bit about how I could fix this Brevet homologation name, so I could have it under my account.
A few emails later with the representative of the ACP in spain (Randonneurs Catalunya) I discovered that I’d have to send by post the Brevet card for that Brevet and some writing in a paper telling what needed to be fixed. Then, this spanish representative would send it to the ACP in Paris and we would have to wait for them to fix it.
In the end, the good news is, I don’t need to do all that (even if I’d like to, really, to have my ACP profile complete) as this year I’ve been a bit ambitious since the start, and I’m aiming at doing 2 full Super-Randonneur series, instead of 1.
This means that even missing that 300 brevet, I’ve enough brevets to confirm my PBP pre-registration. But for someone without the time to do some extra Brevets, this could have caused some serious headaches.
So, remember kids: always, always, double check the name on your Brevet cards when you get them!