USAT's rankings and results is still down and has been for months. This is yet another example of how, when it come to the essential functions of a governing body, the USAT is failing its members.

Just curious: Why is it an "essential function"? Nice to satisfy one's ego? Yes. Essential, I'm not sure. And I have been a USAT member for many years.

It is actually quite useful for race strategy if you are a pointy-end-of-the-arrow age-grouper. So yes, I look at ranking and results as an essential USAT service as opposed to discounts or race insurance which the free market could handle.

Keeping track of one's progress relative to others in your AG? That's not ego. That's competitive sports. To me, the essential functions of a governing body are establishing/enforcing the rules and tracking/ranking the results. USAT, in my opinion, has forgotten that and is doing a disservice to its loyal, dues paying, constituents.

I agree: a key national governing body function: gathering and publishing results (in one place) and using those data to generate then publish rankings with a timely and frequent refresh rate. Perhaps they could take a leaf out of the PTO book and use their Rankings algorithm? Might be a lot 'fairer'.

Here is a fair comparision. Another governing body that I'm familar with is the United States Golf Association (USGA). One of the essential functions of the USGA is to mantain a nationwide handicapping index. (Many horrible golfers track their handicap to measure their progress, so I really don't think this is an issue of ego.) Golf's handicap index is run on the GHIN coputer system (Golf Handicap Information Network). I can tell you that if the GHIN network was down for a day, the members of the USGA would be screaming bloody murder. What puzzles me is that our rankings system has been down for a couple of months and no one seems to care. We should expect more.

In what way are you planning your races with this feature? I have even won a national championship and other national podiums and yet never have bothered to check my ranking. Periodically I get some sticker that says all american or whatever, but that still has nothing to do with how I race, who I race, or where I race.

I routinely look at the starting roster of races I'm competing in, and then look up the records of the guys who I expect to finish with. It's especially helpful in determing who I'm going to be swimming with that day. So, at least for me, the USAT system being down definetly impacts my race day strategy. But that's not nearly as important as not being able to track my progress, or lack of progress, over the course of a season.

^^^^^^^^Agreed. As far as the comment of using ranking in picking races, we used to call that cherry picking. Ranking in no way affects one's fitness or race strategy.

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Kiwami Racing Team

That's a great point and I agree. Rankings and general governing body perks should be givens. The rankings/athlete results is a hot mess as of late.

Normally I'll only check it once or twice a year to see how I'm stacking up or how races are scored. Last year in a triathlon FB group I'm a member of there was a 'check your rankings' suggestion from someone... I checked and I was listed but not credited with AA although I had an AA level score. Queue the e-mails to the rankings e-mail as suggested on that page if you see issues.

Short summary from the next few months is that they said the system had issues and over various fixes I'm not even in the results anymore for scoring. Supposedly I'll be getting my AA stuff in the mail and they were going to manually add me back in... not holding my breath for either based on the last couple of months.

Just to be clear, I don't use ranking to pick races, so there isn't any "cherry picking" going on. But I do use the rankings to look at the field I'm competing with. I suspect many others do as well.

Yep, totally agree. Rankings, standings, stats, etc. are a huge part of competitive sports.

USAT should have the rankings updated by the day after each race. I really don't understand why this can't happen.

Edit: I just checked and the rankings and results site works just fine for me.

When I was competitive, I did the same.

I do the same. It’s not cherry-picking races. It’s looking participant lists for races you are ALREADY signed up for. Seeing who your competition is and how you stack up. People with similar scores, I’ll dig in deeper to their race results and see what their strengths and weaknesses are. It does have an impact on how it will race them, especially in draft legal races.

It’s also good to use for comparing yourself against yourself from previous years. It’s not about ego.

I used it to for years to measure my rate of growth compared to my peers. Although the system is not perfect, it is a pretty good way to see if you are growing and the rate of change of that growth too. In a world where so much is subjective or coaches blow smoke, it is nice to have data points that are more objective. YMMV

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My understanding is that the delays are mostly due to how long race directors/timing companies sit on results before sending them to USAT. In the past, I've had some races where there were up within a week and others where it took multiple months.


Edit: I stand corrected. Looks like there's still a lot of delay on the USAT side based on comments in this thread.

What is bothersome, sort of like my complaints on the athlete tracker years ago, which still haven't been implemented/fixed, is that what would it cost to keep the system up and running as-is. Not saying you need to update it, but just keep what is there up.

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Just because you won a national championship (nice humble brag) and YOU don’t check it that means no one else should?

You raced a national championship race to measure yourself against others as we all do week and week out.

We have a ranking system in place and it doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for it to work.

You don’t check? Good for you! But others do!

This is my understanding as well, but USAT should make timely submission of results easy for race directors and require it as part of being a sanctioned race. Every race has results posted on their chosen platform within day of the race (most even update live now). Maybe USAT can integrate the rankings system with these platforms? I'm not sure in what format results have to be submitted to USAT, but it should be pretty simple to convert existing results to that format and really it should be automated. It's 2022, make it happen!

It's not even just a problem with recent race results.

Even the freaking servers that the USAT scores has been so slow that during main hours, you can't even pull down your old results. Not sure why the results from old races now take so long to come up, but it seems they have reduced server capacity as well, not just a manpower issue. Unfortunate, as old results should be easily retrievable in a totally automated method and unaffected by loss of manpower.

As far as I can see, there appears to be no 2022 results. That does not appear to be a "race director" issue.

I see 2022 results but definitely not all of them. Still having a problem searching.

I agree with what has been said about looking up competitors. I'm not trying to find races I can win -- I'm trying to get a feel for who I'll be racing against. It's frustrating to go several months without getting a score. This should happen a lot faster than it does.

Race Directors can be the hold up sometimes. But this issue has bugged me long enough that I've emailed both USAT and RDs regarding past races. Based upon those expirences, I know that it often takes USAT months to post results after receiving the results from the RDs. In fact, I've looked over state-wide lists of past races and when results are posted, and I suspect a 2-3 month delay is the norm. But in those cases where it is the fault of the RD, the solution is easy. The USAT can just post when the results were received or that they are still awaiting results. But again, this all relates to my past complaints. My current complaint is that NOTHING is being posted. I suppose if I keep complaining, they'll do away with rankings altogether.

Maybe user error, but I am getting no 2022 Triathlon rankings for any age group.