darkhorsetri wrote:
Before everyone gets their panties completely bunched up in a wad about course congestion, consider this: The Oly age group starts at 6AM. The PC race starts at 11:30 and the AG sprint race starts at 11:45. One quick look at the wave times from Cape Town (where they also had a four loop bike course for AG) this past weekend shows a 15-minute gap between waves starts, which seems in line with the PC race and the AG sprint race on the Chicago schedule. If you start the race at 6A and have a wave going off every 15 minutes until 11:15 for the Oly race, that allows 22 waves of participants spread over 5 hours and 15 minutes. WTC will put 22 waves into the water over the course of 80-85 minutes.
To me, and this is just speculation mind you, it seems like these worries about course congestion could be completely unfounded and that maybe the ITU put some forethought into how the race is organized.
That sounds a lot less congested than Hyvee. It was a longer course, but the wave starts created congestion and there were plenty of turns and not nearly as wide as city street. 2-3 lane roads can accommodate 4-5 bikes wide without issue. Overall it was stillit was manageable, and remember ALL of the people in your same age group have to race with the same restrictions. Navigating turns and traffic is part of bike racing. At least there aren't any real hills that I'm aware of. Hyvee had at least one downhill where I remember going at least 35mph with a tailwind passing folks doing just over 20... sitting up, probably using their brakes.
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