I was going to post this as part of my reply on another thread but rather than hijacking that thread decided to put it out here on its own.
At Kona this year I did not see any packs of riders breaking the drafting rule.
What I did see was that the pros were clearly riding in packs with legal distances between them. I interpreted this to mean that the pros clearly felt that they were getting a drafting benefit even while riding at legal distances from each other. Competitors who obtained a legal drafting benefit are not cheaters and deserve no criticism for competing as effectively as they can within the rules. But I really dislike the fact that the rule makers allow a rule to stand which is clearly failing to make the bike ride an entirely individual effort during an Ironman LIKE IT SHOULD BE.
Letting a rule stand that has the pros making a strategy decision as to whether they should go it alone or stay in a pack for the (legal) draft benefit is simply awful and disgusting as far as I am concerned.
They don’t need windtunnel test to measure the benefit of the draft, they simply have to look at what the pros are doing during the race and increase the distance for them until the pros stop doing this.
They don’t need windtunnel test to measure the benefit of the draft, they simply have to look at what the pros are doing during the race and increase the distance for them until the pros stop doing this.
Most of the pros I know would like to see the same thing.
Well articulated.
Does anyone know how the effect of the drafting distance change with speed?
It seems like the faster you go, the greater the benefit will be. The distance is 7m measured from front to front, the draft zone is about 5m. If you are going 40kph, you are going 11.11m/s and you are only 0.45s behind the guy ahead of you. At 30kph, it’s still a rather small 0.6s. I’m curious which provides the better power savings.
hate to tell you guys this but from the begining the pro’s wrote and voted to adopt their own set of rules and it will take a vote of the pros to change “Pro Rules” as written in the USAT Bylaws…at least that what I remember from the many USAT Officials recert clinics that I attended
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eric…you are wrong on that…we for the majority voted and asked for 10m and we dont understand why race organisation refuse to give it to us… as for usat…even if hawaii is suppose to be under there ruling…it s not really happening…the race decided of what ever rule they want and thats it.
i cant recall at the pro meeting one single pro saying no to 10m…so, it s really the organisation that is having a secret reason to force everyone to be in a pack???
Two races: Men Saturday, Women Sunday. Or Pros + Lotteries + Human Interest on Saturday, AG qualifiers on Sunday.
Instead of one 1700 person race, have two 1000 person races. Allow more lottery entrants or more AG qualifiers. More entrants = more money for WTC. Separating women pros from the AGs solves the problem of women pros getting stuck amongst competitive AGers. Separate races makes it easy to have separate drafting rules for pros vs AGers. Fewer entrants means less packs on the course. More human interest stories = more Emmys for their broadcast. Crowds for each race would be enormously larger with all the competitors of the other race becoming a spectator. Win, win, win, all around.
Could WTC pull off back-to-back world championship caliber races? Yes, but would they be willing to? I doubt it. They might actually have to pay people instead of relying on an all-volunteer army. Logistics like the bike transition area could be figured out.
As it is, Kona is already a weeklong event. Why not make a full weekend out of the racing?
It must be tough to ride a cleen .
Some think wave starts would fix some races.
I don’t think it would work in Kona seeing you all are around the same finish time for an AG.
It makes it tough for the swim safty crue being in the water longer
Carl, this is exactly what I did for the first 12 miles at Kona. I’d get passed and would have to drop back, and then get passed again and again and again. I figured what the hell, I may as well use the rest and save some juice for the energy lab on the run. But I can see for those wanting to hit 9:30, it would be very frustrating giving away bags of time right out of T1. The reality was that when someone passed me, I could immediatly tell that the guy would likely spank me by 20 min going into T2 and it would be crazy to try and pass them back. After 12 miles (20K), I was able to ride my own race in the vicinity of mere mortals going +/- 5 min of my bike split.