See above for context of discussion, I interpreted Monty's comment as a "slow day" at Oceanside - he wrote "relatively slow bike day" not "slow course"

Ok guys, I fucked up!!! I clicked what I though was oceanside results and apparently it was Texas..I bow down to your forgiveness and hope I can continue on here as the plebe that I am....

Awww, Monty! I'll buy you a beer at Wildflower LOL

There was a ton of drafting in the MOP at the end of the race, but it was so crowded it couldn't be avoided.

I think that I should be buying the beers, I will have my RV fridge stocked..

At the very least we got a discussion going about the race and peoples experiences at different points in it. But man, go look at the AG splits of Texas, then overlay them onto here, you can see why I was so surprised!(and wrong)

Looks to me like it was both. I’d expect Lionel to still be under 2:05 on a slow course.

He's done it four times, only broke 2:05 once by 14 seconds

Being out there in the middle/front, I did witness a fair bit of drafting, particularly in the final hour. It's actually a pretty hilly course (much hillier than I remembered!), so that tends to keep it fair until you hit the flats with a bit of headwind. There were groups of 7-20 that I watched ride by me or kept reeling me back in after I worked my butt off to get away from them for 10 minutes. It's frustrating, but unfortunately inevitable with such large fields. It would be good to concentrate the officials in the highest risk areas like those final 15 miles. The officials seemed particularly nice at this race as they seemed to be giving out warnings when they obviously should have busted some people. I didn't see anyone in a penalty tent when I passed them. One gal in particular was drafting in a ridiculous manner (like 2 feet off the wheel) for over an hour just contently holding 4th position in the pack (off of my husband and 20 other guys) and he remembered her number to see how she did in the race. She won. So much for karma!!

I saw some drafting as well. I usually expect it but some of the blatancy I saw was mind blowing and looked dangerous. I would not feel safe riding 3-4 dude's wheels in front of me on a TT bike when I have no clue how they're going to handle themselves in aero.

A pack of some dudes passed me early in the bike and the first guy said "here we come". I passed them later on and said "stop f***ing drafting"

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https://www.strava.com/athletes/4391866

The weather was perfect in my opinion. My Garmin was 55.96.
I was far from the leaders, but did see some groups that seemed to be riding together. Not blatant drafting, but certainly could have gotten drafting calls. So a couple bike lengths and when the back guy recovered, he would move past everyone. OK, maybe blatant, but they would argue.

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Team Zoot So Cal

Time to set up some random hidden cameras with hidden chip trackers out in the middle of the bike course.

I've read your edit :)

Just wanted to add the main 70.3 in my area with around 2000 competitors, about 50% of the top 20 bikers would be AGers, the rest pros. There are a few ex pro cyclists in their 30s, 40s and 50s that are knocking off 2.05, 2.06 times, beating a whole bunch of pros. And I would have thought guys at that level wouldn't have anyone to draft off? i.e the pros are long gone before they hop on their bike

I saw that group too - they were being blatantly obvious about drafting and the marshal kept riding next to them and they didn’t bat an eye! At least 2, maybe 3 wide several deep too I saw. I even had someone drafting right off me for a few minutes which was pretty lame :-/!