What a way to get an affirmation of your character by none other than the Guru, the Steinbeck of Slowtwitch. I am printing it out so I can read it every morning.
I don’t know this gentleman from Adam. I just happen to read the thread and almost everyone was appologetic. I sucked that his 10:01 IM didn’t count especially since everyone else was doing it. I have a friend who was dinged for drafting going up Whiteface in IMLP. When the bike came by he looked at his speedometer and he was going 6 mph. Now tell me if that didn’t suck. But my friend has yet to complain and says, yes, he was too close.
By the way, Ken, I rode on the back of a quiet Honda Goldwing last year and it was amazing how many packs broke up when I came on them. Last year was a 3 minute standdown first, dq second. I think I had the only dq on the bike course last year.
The 5:00 guys and gals were under the watchful eye of the more experiences officials which would include Charlie Crawford. I would say most of those officials can be considered consistant.
Good point. As I wrote in my first post, I don’t know squat for sure (paraphrasing). What really caught my attention was that he didn’t find out about the DQ until the day after the race, and it seemed to surprise him. Even if the penalty was outside assistance, shouldn’t he know about it at the time the penalty is called? Why wait until the day afterwards to inform competitors about penalites? This does nothing to change behavior during the race, and leads to angry, confused, non-returnees- although IMFLA is clearly not short of potential participants, so maybe there’s no incentive for anyone to care…
You seem to have some information about the race and its officiating I haven’t seen/heard. I’d be interested in hearing more about what the specific problems were, mostly to have chance at avoiding them myself.
i do not know ken, but did race at imf. from reading the post on tno, ken said he did not draft on “purpose.” that makes me a little suspicious of his efforts to not draft.
during the pre-race meeting charlie crawford basically said with the course being flat each of us were going to have to work to not draft and right or wrong it is our own responsibility to not draft. in my mind, re-stated we had to purposefully NOT draft.
i am not trying to be hypocritical here, i am sure that if a ref was over my shoulder during the first 5-10 miles i would have gotten a drafting call. quite often trying to pass people on the left, the person i was trying to pass was caught in a log jam and i ended up on their wheel too long as there were a string of riders going 2-3 across. it was still crowded after that, but not impossible to not draft. often times not drafting required a good amount of effort with a bunch of yo-yoing.
regarding informing racers of penalties during the race, our tri club had a ref at a meeting a few months ago. in summary he let us now that penalties are not assigned until the refs review their proposed penalties with the head ref. there are occasions when penalties that were originally given during the race are reversed by the head ref due to the race course or other factors, crowds conditions, weather, safety etc.
so if a ref were to inform a racer that he was being assessed a penalty it may be pre-mature.
in any event i think the officials did a good job at imf, i just wish there was more of them on the course, including the swim.
I disagree that someone should be told about the drafting penalty they just received. Because that would make it an easy calculated risk to draft until you get the first penalty, and depending on how fast your pack travels you may even consider it worthwhile to possible draft until you get a second penalty. Drafting needs to be penalized harshly and without announcements, and yes it is horrible for those who get caught up in it innocently. As I said earlier, it was tricky to avoid getting caught up in those packs. But when the race reminds you more of the Tour De France versus an Ironman, something is wrong.
Herbert
Interesting about your experiences at the race, more than I can say of course, having never been there. When I mentioned inconsistencies, I was thinking more of the differences between small local events that don’t have many/any drafting penalties called (not because there isn’t any drafting!) and events like IMFLA where the combination of enforcement and crowding seems to have lead to relatively large numbers of penalties. I don’t mean to rehash long discussions gone by here, just a reminder that what is standard practice in one venue is unacceptable in another, so if the officials don’t tell me I’m in the wrong (lots of people seem to have this problem) I may not find out until I get my DQ after the race. My position is most people aren’t trying to cheat, and problems can be avoided by communication between officials and racers on the course. That’s all.
Of course having just read Herbert’s post, I can see that a perhaps a more cynical view of my fellow athletes is in order. Yes, i can see how verbal penalities would allow some to push the boundaries. My thought would be that such people would find difficulty conforming to any rules which had reasonable exceptions for honest mistakes. I guess you have to decide where you want to draw the line.
"It would probably suck to be an official and have to listen to a bunch of crap for each penalty you call, much easier to pass out penalties in anonymity, leaving the competitor to find out after the fact what happened. But if the goal is a cleaner race, the officials should be making the calls (out loud) on the course. All the more reason for one warning, IMO. "
I was going to say the same thing but then I realized what if:
What if the officals call out the penalty on one person and everyone around him hears it?
Which would make you slow down faster on the freeway:
Sign that reads : Airborn radar monitors this road for speeding!
Watching that poor sucker just behind you get pulled over by a highway patrol man
some good points made there. I would also like to see some better etiquette in passing. Nothing worse than getting passed and then the rider slows down making you appear to be a drafter. Poor form. Or maybe worse yet the guy that swims 1:20, that seeds himself at the front of the swim. Etiquette and safety issue.
I too rode in the crowds at IM Fl and kept having to drop back (I’d sit up and ride the brakes for a while to let the pack get ahead) so I’d stay out of the way of any penalty or dq. The bottom line is that you are really cheating yourself. If I had joined in with a pack and ridden 4:55 instead of the 5:05 that I did, I may have won my age group, or gotten the dq next to my name but I sure wouldn’t have felt the same personal satisfaction of completing the race knowing that my results came as a result of being a wheelsucking cheater. I have a friend that I saw out there leading a pack for quite some time. They were about 4 minutes back of me on the out and back section and caught me (all 20 of them) on the bridge with 11 or 12 miles to go. My friend got dinged with a 4 minute penalty and I believe he was attempting to stay out in front of the group but because he wasn’t willing to back off and let them go the marshalls picked him out of the crowd at some point. I like the old style of stop and go penalty where the marshall pulls you over, marks your number and makes you wait until they decide to let you go again. That would certainly leave no doubt in your mind that you’d been caught. To make this work there would have to be a lot more marshalls on the course though since having them stopped for a minutes would limit the amount of viewing they could do.
Not sure why you think that people would take a “calculated risk to draft until you get a penalty”. I suspect that this would be the exception as opposed to the rule and these exceptions would draft in any circumstance, under any rule format. Most people don’t draft & more importantly (like me) don’t want to see a 4 min penalty beside their name. I would also say that I didn’t feel that “the race reminds you more of the Tour De France versus an Ironman”, yes there was drafting & yes there were some packs that formed but its pretty well the same in most IMs that I’ve been in…that’s what y’a get with 2000 people in a mass start.
My concern was that people should be told that they have been penalized when it happens. I don’t have an issue with the ref tagging me with a penalty…as I said, that’s a judgment call in the heat of the moment & maybe I was stupid and got too close or blocked. So I deserved a penalty.
But I truly feel that the ref should be accountable for the call (on the spot) to the athlete. This doesn’t have to be a stand-down (which I think creates a dangerous situation & monopolizes the refs time). It can simply be pointing at the athlete (or a group of athletes) & saying that they have been nabbed.
Some have suggested that telling people that they’ve received a penalty is a good idea. I wholeheartedly agree. Others have countered that doing so would lead to people taking a “calculated risk” by drafting until they got their first or second penalty. I have to disagree – not that people won’t do it, because they will, but that it would be a problem.
In thread after thread, we make a big deal about racing within the rules, and especially about instances where you can take advantage of the rules. Look back at some of the commentary about “drafting” while obeying the new stagger rule. Or about the discussions of drafting during the swim. These are cases where the rules allow you to take advantage of the position of other racers.
The same would be true if officials gave verbal announcements when penalties were assessed. Some people would take advantage of the announcements to draft for a while before they got their first penalty. But I’m sure the rule would say that the official doesn’t have to announce the penalty, and you don’t have to acknowledge receipt of the penalty for it to be valid. So it would be pretty risky to try to draft for a while and hope you heard the official when the penalty was assessed.
However, announcements would help those people who let their minds wander or find themselves in situations where they’re reluctant to ease up when being passed and get penalized, but who are not specifically trying to draft for advantage. Those people would have the opportunity to be extra vigillant for the remainder of the race so they didn’t get another penalty.
Would announcing penalties change the race dynamics? A little, yes. But right now the race dynamics are broken, and the penalties are a lot more arbitrary than they should be, and some kind of change is needed to make it better.
I agree with you that it can become a self fullfilling prophecy. However, I still keep coming back to the fact that at certain times, there are too many cyclists, on too narrow a road in too short a period of time. It’s a very simple question of physics and time.
Years ago this was not a problem. Races were smaller. There was more variation in the fitness from athlete to athlete. It was less competitive.The rules worked very well back then. What we are seeing now is larger race fields. Less varition in fitness and much more competitive. However, the rules are more or less the same. Something has to change.
Just a thought, but what about stiffening the penalty for drafting? So much so, that it will almost certainly knock you out of contention for the podium. For example 15 or 20 minutes?
What I would like to see and what I would propose is some form of universalization of the rules. Clearly, there is a great deal of confusion about what constitutes drafting and I think in part much of that confusion comes from variable rules from race to race.
Borrowing from Biathlon( the ski and shoot sport), I have thought all along that the fairest way to penalize would be some form of extra distance that would need to be run at the start of the run leg. The distance run would be geared to the length of the event - longer penalty runs for longer events. etc . . I have had my suspicions that the sin-bin time at the end of the bike, may have actually helped some and for others it was a forced welcome break!
How do people feel about wave starts? Perhaps this would at least alleviate the problem. I plan on doing my first IM next year and I don’t know why its the only race w/out waves. Is it b/c the purists want to keep IM the same when it started back in '78? Is it not to give weather advantages to earlier waves? Even if it was a 5 minute differential, wouldn’t that help out with a course like PCB?
Wave Starts: Many competitors prefer to get a finish line photo with the time showing above. Wave starts would make that a bit difficult. Having the women start separately from the men would require two separate finish lines with separate clocks showing, a possibility. However, I prefer a mass start with a limited field (size to be controlled by the race course’s constraints) and one finish line as is the norm in large marathons.
Calling Penalties: Having officials note potential drafting infractions and quietly take them back to the head official to later decide is idiotic. If the onsite official is not qualified to make the call on the spot, train him better until he can make that call. In my mind, nothing reminds competitors more about adhering to rules than biking past an official marking a biker’s race number with a big red slash. (The other thing that breaks up packs is a few loud Harley riders, sans officials, cruising the course, but that is not the fairest means of motivating competitors.)
Penalty Severity: It is apparent to me that four-minute penalties are insufficient to deter drafting. If one assumes that there are people who draft and do not get caught for the whole race (that has got to be the objective of some who draft), what is the time advantage that they could gain? I am for increasing the time penalty.
Fifth Discipline: What is missing from IMFL is a bike course with some challenging hills that can separate the competitors. As I competitor, I want to devote my efforts to getting to the finish line as soon as possible. It seems unreasonable to me that I should get my aerodynamic wheels, my aerodynamic skinsuit, my lightweight aerodynamic bike, et al, just so that when someone passes who is bit faster, I have to ease my pace to get out of the draft zone. I do not want to worry about staying out of the draft. I want to go as fast as my 61-year-old will let me. Yet, the almost flat course and the number of competitors at IMFL seems to make the race consist of five disciplines: swim, bike, run, nutrition, avoiding penalty. I for one will avoid racing at IMFL and at any other mass-start race that does not have a means of allowing all competitors to race to their full potential and not simply be concerned with avoiding the draft (didn’t we have enough of that during the '60s and Vietnam?). If there are plans to move the race to South Carolina in 2005, I hope IMNA finds some challenging hills and some wide roads and some means to let competitors RACE.
“As I competitor, I want to devote my efforts to getting to the finish line as soon as possible. It seems unreasonable to me that I should get my aerodynamic wheels, my aerodynamic skinsuit, my lightweight aerodynamic bike, et al, just so that when someone passes who is bit faster, I have to ease my pace to get out of the draft zone. I do not want to worry about staying out of the draft. I want to go as fast as my 61-year-old will let me.”
For me you are starting to get to the root of what the real philosophical challenge is in triathlon bike riding today, particularly in crowded and competitive events.
What IS the bike leg of a triathlon? Is it an ITT, with all emphasis, as you say, from getting from A to B the fastest, using all aerodynmic tools available? . . . well not really. Is it a bike road race where you are racing head to head . . well sort of. In reality it is this weird hybrid style of bike riding that no one ever really practices. It’s a wave/graded start, based on swim prowess, ridden with ITT style equipment and effort, but in reality racing head to head out on the road just as in a road race, but with strict rules in place as to how close you can be to your fellow competitors. Did you get all that? Who rides like this in training. Very few that I know. People seem to ride either on their own or in a group.
The first time that I confronted this was in at the USTS Championships at Hilton Head in 1988. For the first time ever in a triathlon in 5 years of competition I had to use my brakes to moderate speed other than for a corner or slowing down at the end of the bike leg - I had to use them to get out of the draft zone quickly on a flat section of road. It seemed absurd to me. I thought I was in an ITT. You don’t use your brakes in an ITT unless you absolutly have to! And so it goes - Triathlon’s great debate.
Mike Plumb was correct we don’t issue warnings, why? If we see an infraction then it gets written up period.
Why dont we tell people that we just gave them a penalty? It is because we didn’t. A race official observes what it perceived to be an infraction and writes down all the pertent information. the official on the motorcyle does not “issue penalties”. ].
If the official on the Motorcycle doesn’t issue a penalty then who does: Only the HEAD REFEREE may issue a penalty.
At the end of the race the HEAD Referee reviews the reports written by the assistant referees, the Head Ref will ask questions to each ref regarding each infraction and then if the Head Ref is statisfied that a penalty occured then and only then is a penalty assessed.
all penalties will be posted with the results and the head ref will be there to answer questions. The head ref will also be at the awards ceremony to answer questions. The Head Ref is the only person that can reverse a penalty at a race.
I understand what you are saying about the head referee giving penalties, but what I think most of us are suggesting is that the officials, even if they officially don’t give penalties, could certainly write numbers on a white board or simply yell out, indicating that the person in question is having a penalty “called” on them (even if the Head Referee must actually inflict the penalty after the meeting). The point is to make cheaters aware that they’ve been caught, even if it isn’t official until later.
I understand the safety issues involved in stand-downs, and why that is not practical, but most of us are simply looking for ways of breaking up the blatant cheaters.
I should also add here something that a good friend of mine told me. He raced and trained in Germany for a while, and he said that his training partners would routinely say “if you haven’t received at least one drafting penalty in a race, then you really aren’t racing”. Apparently, some of them view drafting the same way we view fouls in basketball; you have a couple to play with, so take full advantage of them. Perfectly legal, although to me it completely violates the spirit of the event. However, they are within the rules to draft until they’ve been caught three times, which should show that rest of us that perhaps there are some cultural differences in how the US racers view this event. At any rate, it shows that we need to ramp up enforcement (or increase the penalties) and nail these guys if they plan to draft right from the get go. And the race marshalls need to know that there are a number of people racing who are going to draft intentionally until you nail them twice.
Also, please, please, please ban helmet mirrors!!!
on your point about warnings. great except the rules state that no penalty has been given. All the referee has done is note what they perceive to be a penalty. so warning about what?
Secondly a proportion of the write ups are tossed out by the Head Referee for various reasons.
So I warn someone, they stress out, go too hard too to make up time, they blow up on the run, or drop out or whatever. I have affected their race, now I go in for the review of my calls and the Head Ref says “nope I don’t agree with you, I’m not assessing a penalty”.
So by my actions in giving a warning I screwed up someones race for absolutlely no reason.