YMCA

ZeCanon, no reason to piss on Botto's truth.

I've been a cat1 for 12 years and haven't had real results since '03.
Without USAC telling us to downgrade, the cat1 population has grown to the size of a small city.

When I upgraded in '97 I figured it would just last until I was not getting results, or retired.
Guess the 200 max rule stopped being enforced?

txvintage

The number of license holders is what, very conservativley twice what it was 20 years or so ago? There are more races, deeper fields, advances in training, nutrition, and recovery we never dreamed of in the late 80's and early 90's.

Even if USAC took the ranking system and went back to the Top XXX riders, after adjusting to reflect the same percentage of licenses that the 200 used to represent, my bet is todays 1's wouldn't suffer too badly against my day's 1's.

Remember back in the 80's and early 90's? How many coaches were there to go to? A heck of a lot less than today. Not all of them are necessarily a good choice, but the availabiity of quality training today dwarfs what was once available.

MDcatV

nm

txvintage

NM, as well.

waterrockets 

When you Cat 1s go back to do battle in the 90s, don't forget your time travel cheat sheet:

botto 

wanders

b, you're so 19th century.

MDcatV

Oh, that's easy. Well, you go down by the museum, and stuff, it's like... it's like by the museum... sort of by... well actually not really, more like on the street you go umm... wait let me start over. Okay, you know where the time machine is?

Creakyknees

Kent Bostick
Steve Tilford
Tinker Juarez
Dave Wiens
John Howard
Chris Hipp (RIP)

yeah these guys were never all that fast anyway. / sarcasm

Enthalpic

You’re bringing down the average so much that the category has gotten weaker?

“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
-Groucho Marx

ZeCanon

So did people get kicked out then brought back in a regular basis? I've been as high as the mid 60's on the ranking charts earlier in the season, but then got injured and now I'm sitting 400somethingth. Would they boot me back to the 2's, just so I could win a bunch of crits in a row again and pop right back up? That would get really annoying.

YMCA

I don't think the rule was ever enforced.
At the time, cat1's were still a rare breed, but the idea was to keep it that way.
Now there's like 600? or so.
And many like me aren't even competing, or very rarely.

umd

With more people competing, how does the number compare, proportionally?

wanders

fwiw

crit

returns 1160 results/riders

road

returns 1069 results/riders

click "GO" to get link to work

txvintage

I tried earlier today to work that out and failed. I couldn't come up with a solid number of licensed racers from say 88-92 for an arbitrary number.

I think it's safe to say that to represent a proportional number of Cat 1 racers in realtion to the number of licenes today the number would sognificantly higher than 200.

Today's fields are very deep. The deepest fields I ever raced in were in SoCal and to some degree the NE. I think the Southwest and Southeast are much much deeper now than back in the 80's when I raced them as well. The Pac NW was just.....different but I have no idea about that reion these days.

I suspect that you can take the top of any region, and put it in a field in any other region, and have one massivley strong field today.

obra3

Current USAC database reads:

327 Pros (USPRO)
1,781 Cat 1's
4,418 Cat 2's
9,539 Cat 3's
13,896 Cat 4's
13,451 Cat 5's

+/-1 rider in each category.

YMCA

The BS thing about this is that so many cat1's never really earned that upgrade.
Same in other categories as well, but 1781 cat1's???

NomadVW 

naivety.... but how does one get to Cat 1 without earning Cat 1?

YMCA

1) befriend local rep
2) fudge results
3) be seen

happens all the time

wanders

Damn, Coach Carl totally skipped that part.

YMCA

Coach Carl skipped a lot of stuff.

NomadVW 

Seems like more work than actually racing.

obra3

All Cat 1 upgrades go through the Membership Field Staff at USAC. (Not local reps- but the field staff do talk to local reps for info).

https://www.usacycling.org/news/user/story.php?id=171

(Staff listing- not the procedure)

YMCA

Which has helped in the "legitimacy" arena, but it still happens and I'm not naming names.

ZeCanon

Around here it is notoriously more difficult to get the 1 upgrade than any other. They made me provide a host of extra info on the races (to make sure they met distance and field size requirements) and since I had exactly 30 points they also asks for a coaches recommendation. Not sure if it is the same elsewhere though.

I wonder how many of those 1700 are really active?