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Be really careful about handling payments properly - specifically, make sure you wait a while after the race day before transferring money to the organizers. Or only transfer money to them if you've actually met and verified them.

Otherwise you expose your company (make sure you are incorporated!) to significant financial risk. See the discussion here, which relates to why Paypal hates conference organizers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491485

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Great suggestions. I've thought a lot about this area and feel I've struck a good balance for risk vs. low barrier to entry. People don't think about it but third party payment aggregation is extremely risky from a fraud perspective and many times that cost gets passed on to the users.

Unfortunately I don't think I can hold off on payment collection until after the race because organizers need the registration money to actually pay for the race facilities. Any suggestions there?

One idea would be to pay the race facilities directly, rather than paying the organizers. Now someone trying to rob you will need to set up 2 identities to do it...

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