furiousferret

I'll have to listen to that on my easy ride this weekend.

The winners are the loudest voice in the community, and that creates a problem because they only represent a small amount of the race community as a whole. The promoters don't go to the riders who struggle year after year (aka the majority) they ask the national champs and competitive Cat 1's what they want out of race day.

At Chico, they got rid of the 45+ 4/5's and told the racers to race 35+ 3/4. The next year those riders just didn't show up; attendance dropped in the lower cats but was up for the 1's and 2's. This is the same trend that happened in the SCNCA when they went to that format. The promoters and USAC still don't get it; every time I talk to one they cite external reasons; some of which are true but race day design is a big issue. They don't see a problem with the change because the 30 somethings farming wins rave about it. To be fair, a 35+ year old going from Cat 4 to having to race against Bahati and Monster Media is probably too big a jump as well.

A solution would be to combine races and score more groups separately. Let Women have masters groups, don't clump all Juniors in one group, etc. So what is someone is guaranteed a podium, at least that person feels they have an incentive to race. I'm not sure if that's legal or even viable though.