SteelerHoo

agreed.

Colonelmom

What's missing is what started this crash.. the guy just stood up to sprint and lost control of his bike... what was worse.. is the guy on the yellow line.. "rubber necking" at the crash behind him.... he had plenty of time and space to move around the guy that's on the ground.. instead he plows right into the guy...
This was a CAT 5 race at the Richmond International Speedway, I was an official there... the pavement was as smooth as it gets... NOT sure what we could have / teams could have.. to teach you how to keep you bike up right when you apply too much power and the rear end of you bike slides out ...no one had bumped, hit #447

Greg180

People in any sporting venue do stupid things and get people hurt. Unless the sport is going to mandate more officiating, training and standards there is a slim hope that it will change much. But of course the previous suggestions will just add to the cost and bureaucracy.

I offer no solution except that is the risk of cycling. Each person makes the choice and accepts the consequences. IMO

patentcad

I would ban iPods from USA Cycling events.

thebchessl

Have someone other than the promoter certify the course as safe. I have been on some courses that have features taht are dangerous for a big field.

kudude

my first year racing I crashed a lot.
my second year I crashed once in a training crit
This year I've raced 10 times and had some (really) close calls. no wrecks.

I've been around a lot of wrecks, but not in them. Not sure why. The fact that there are plenty of p/1/2 wrecks blows a hole in most arguments about how to make racing safer. cdr, good luck. I don't know that what you have been tasked with is possible. I think the only way is to make racers fear that their stupidity will be called out and cost them $$$.

The guy in the e4 crit last weekend that basically tried to t-bone the pack after jumping onto and off the sidewalk should be suspended and fined. Instead, he was telling his teammates how awesome it was that he didn't crash and they were congratulating him on his awesome bike handling skills. I just wish there was a video of it

Colonelmom

They already are... the officials just need to enforce the rules...

kepst

You see people racing with ipods?

Pedaleur

Man, I would love to have a higher cat dude behind us barking at us for all the stupid things we do. Someone good and sarcastic, preferably.

Something like, "Gee, Pedaleur, did you really think it was a good idea to try to shoot that gap?"

I'd like to see movies of stupid things, too.

carpediemracing 

I like the idea of what makes a safe rider.

There are two aspects to the "safe racer" thing - one is for entry level, so when you have a bit of contact you don't go down. The other is a philosophy thing so that higher cat racers aren't taking each other out.

cdr

Creakyknees

Well I'm just pack fill in most of my races but I'm not shy about calling out stupid moves. And lately I've taken to pre-emptively calling out a developing situation - like a slow pack setting up 10 wide for a corner with guys diving inside.

carpediemracing 

On courses - although I tended to get nervous when I showed up at a course and found it pretty hairy, I found that the dangerous courses are the safe ones - everyone gets nervous. It's the long meandering straights that get you in trouble.

Hard turn descents, although a bit nerve wracking if you've never done that particular road before, tend to string out the pack (think hairpins on the descents). Ditto weird turns in crits - there was one in Tarrytown NY where you came down about a 10-15% grade hill, launched a bit over a level sewer grate, then slammed on the brakes when you landed. As soon as you got some brake you let go and dove into a tight right hand turn. After a lap or two everyone realized that, hey, there's only one way to hit this turn - brake on landing and then turn hard. No crashes (I got shelled). Similar crit in Norwich. Both were one time courses, held elsewhere or never again, but both were safe.

Go to a New Britain (it resembles a kidney bean) or Bethel (ditto) or find a long, straight descent, and you'll have all sorts of carnage. Riders get careless, assume things are okay, and then do weird things.

Not saying that a skinny road with 300 racers is a good thing. Just saying that sometimes a course will help determine pack shape, and a strung out pack is safer than a bunched up one.

cdr

sac02

First, I think you REALLY need to do a real root cause analysis, with some actual data gathering. It’s easy (and popular it seems) for everyone here to say that the cat5’s are the cause of all crashes, but are they? Find out the TRUE who, what, when, where, and how, and THEN figure out WHY. Yes, that sometimes involves a significant amount of work, but it is the only way you are truly going to make things safer. Starting with a (possibly) false assumption and making solutions based around it is going to be a waste of time for all involved, and not accomplish any real results.

I think you could learn a lot, and apply some techniques, from looking at what other sanctioning bodies in other sports have done to increase safety. The first one that pops into my head as glaringly obvious is auto racing (I also happen to have a lot of experience here as well, hence why it was the first thing I thought of).

Auto racing crashed are potentially much more expensive and much more dangerous than bike racing, and so safety is (hopefully) rarely undervalued, like I feel it (often) is in bike racing. Looking at three perspectives:

#1) Auto racers must complete accredited racing schools before being allowed to race. Bike analogy: new riders must complete some sort of mandatory training, conducted by experienced riders with a good safety record, before being allowed to race. This has already been mentioned several times.

#2) Several auto club racing series use a version of the 13/13 rule: one incident gets you a 13 month probation, another during that probationary period get you 13 months suspension. Obviously you don’t need to use the same penalties, or time periods, but the idea is to enact penalties that matter to the racers, and make it known that you will implement them. Document exactly what the disciplinary procedure is, review it over the loudspeaker before the green flag, and most importantly USE it, and often. Be mean if you have to. Empty threats about suspensions carry no weight.

#3) Consider some sort of discipline for riders simply INVOLVED in a crash (24 hours of LeMons concept) – it’s interesting how the same cars seem to wind up with metal-to-metal contact over and over even when it’s “not their fault”. They just seem to always put themselves in harm’s way. If a rider gets caught up in two crashes where they were judged “not at fault”, they will henceforth be treated as an “at-fault” rider in all subsequent crashes. Basically, promote (and then penalize for the lack of) defensive riding.

#4) Don’t be above looking at yourself/your race organization/track. When someone dies in a car wreck, the responsibility isn’t always on the drivers to drive better, or the teams to build safer cars, sometimes the responsibility lays with the track – proper runoff room, “safe barriers”, these are things a track can do when things just go wrong. Maybe for bikes this means changing the course, or going to the expense of adding haybales or paying more course marshals…

SpongeDad

Maybe do it like the military - screw offs screw their teams, who then take care of the problem. For example -

1. No unattached riders in 1/2/3 (are there many? I have no idea).
2. Particularly bad riders get their entire team bounced.
3. Said teams will then exclude / not take on riders they don't trust.
4. Bad riders are unattached and can't race.
5. 4s and 5s who want to move up realize that being a tool is counterproductive.
6. 4s and 5s who don't want to move up are at least racing in a culture where the better riders expect and display safe behavior.

aicabsolut

I was in a W3/4 race last weekend with a lot of novice, unattached cat 4 women, so I'm going to use that as an example. This means they hadn't been schooled on racing by their teams. Some of them seemed to be pretty inexperienced on pack riding in general. For many it was their first race, and they hadn't even learned the rules prior to the chief official's instructions at the start line.

Then of course there are the unwritten "rules" that impact safety such as don't overlap wheels (a couple people did not get this at all--and it was not in a safe, shoulder-to-shoulder environment), don't call out "on your right" and then dive up the side presuming you have the right of way, be sure that you can hold your line if you look over your shoulder (goes hand in hand with the no overlapping rule), and--the most common violation I saw--actually LOOK over your shoulder before making a sudden lateral movement, or, preferably, don't make a sudden movement in the pack at all. Be smooth.

I heard a couple fellow 3s trying to politely teach some of these rules. I agree with sending new racers to bike school! If they can get it through clinics hosted by their teams, fine.

heckler

As a newer rider and 5/10 races in the 5s I feel that alot of the problems are new rider options for classes and clinics. I would love to do something like that and even though I am 15 min outside Philly ( a fairly populated area) I find it hard to find races and very difficult to find anything resembling a race clinic.

It seems that the 2 trains of thought are, develop new riders, or get rid of them entirely (DQing and fining 5s seems like it would put off new riders let alone some of Spongedads ideas). From my perspective it is a very beginner unfriendly sport. I think boosting development is the way to go. Getting the information out seems like the bottleneck to me. Team websites are generally pretty crappy. Even state/regional websites aren't that great and it never seems like the Associations (marba, nebra, njba, etc) have much incentive to spend their limited funds on something that generally falls to teams (training), but teams don't seem to spend their limited funds educating cyclists that aren't on their team. This leads to brand new cyclists joining teams and "racing" before they ever learn how.

I think it would be to the benefit of everyone to have all 5s be unattached. Then development falls to all teams for new riders (since this is the pool of talent that they will be rising up to them). And at the same time the intro to the sport is more gradual and you get to meet teams and decide for reasons other than it being the "thing to do".

By the same token "masters" races seem like just another way for the old guard to distance themselves from the newbs. Out of Sight out of mind. Till a new 4 that sucks at racing joins their race and gets yelled at for not doing things he was never taught. It may be extreme, but if you eliminated 35+ (maybe even 45+) I bet more mentoring and training would go on in the masters own self interest.

My other gripe being a undeveloped newb is I don't see the point of 5s if all the races are 4/5s in my populated areas anyway.

Good Luck cdr

streetspirit

I'm a pretty new racer (first season, 10 mass start races so far), and my experience has been that joining a team is invaluable to a new racer, and is probably one of the best ways to learn the ropes. It gives you the opportunity to do many team rides to gain confidence following wheels smoothly, receive constructive on- and off-the-bike criticism/advice from veteran teammates, and participate in team skills clinics and camps.

Having said that, I think that an instructional video that focuses on race safety for new racers, available on the USAC website, would probably net the most benefit to improving safety, considering the growing popularity of the sport in recent years. It'd probably speed the learning curve for beginners, especially unattached riders that don't have as much of a knowledge base at their disposal. The video should have plenty of instructional race footage / helmet cam footage to help a complete beginner visualize the dynamics of racing in a pack, and really get into the details of various safe and unsafe practices. No need for it to be compulsory (or short, for that matter), I think most 5s would seek out videos like that.

carpediemracing 

I think that it makes sense to see what causes accidents. As a promoter who marshals frequently, I've seen a lot of crashes. When I watch races I gravitate towards the course features where I think it'll be hairy. Although I'm not looking for crashes per se, I know that the decisive points are here or there or wherever, and when you mix "decisive" and "racing", you end up with some interesting moves. I planted myself in specific spots at the Harlem Crit and the Las Vegas Interbike crit - both times riders slid into the barriers at my feet. So, at least for the pros, I seem to be able to pick them.

I also think proactive is good. The goal is not to punish new riders. The problem is that if you write rules for the experienced ones, the new ones could get penalized. Or, if you write rules for inexperienced riders, it lets experienced ones get away with a lot.

So my idea is threefold: Philosophy, Basic Rules, and Bike Handling.

In the 4s and 5s all too often I see crashes happen due to mechanicals or two people touching and losing balance. It'd be comical in any other situation but it's not when someone crashes. In the 3s it's more squeezing 4 riders into a 3 rider space. In the P12s it's going way too fast. This is not counting intentional crashes.

NEBRA is begging to spend money on this stuff. I'm supposed to come up with how we can use some of it.

I appreciate all the ideas, suggestions. It's gotten me thinking a lot.

cdr

heckler

Let us know how it turns out. If you implement some courses your brothers to the south might be willing to join you .

DrWJODonnell

You want to make it safe? Put a camera on the lead car and the trailing car. Person who causes a crash is liable for everyone's repair bills.

Justleaning

Well I'm a cat 5 soon to be 4 once I'm recovered from my crash (no race related ) and this is my opinion. Around here we do mostly cat 4/5 races and I think that is a big mistake. I think 5s should be completely separate and im all for some sort of racing clinic. Fortunatley around here we have some great group rides that may as well be races so you can build up experience very quickly before entering a race.

Voodoo76

This is a really good observation, causes tending to change. Although a number of riders still get thru 5s, even 4s and are still sketchey about any kind of contact.

Let me guess Dr, you sell liability insurance on the side.

badhat

holy crap if i was in a race and looked over and saw an ipod

kudude

i just the whole thing?

longbeachgary

The word is safer