2025 DATEV Challenge ROTH
RaceRanger Drafting Report
NOTES
● The intention [motive] behind publishing the data is to encourage fair racing.
● On the whole, these results are considered quite typical when compared with other professional non-drafting races. The podium and pointy end of the field are generally racing very cleanly, leading by example.
● Data has been removed for the first 500m after T1, the last 500m before T2, and 8 sections of the course. 5 aid stations, plus the 3 major climbs where crowds are dense: Solar Hill, Kränzleinsberg & Kalvarienberg.
● Legal overtaking is not counted toward an athlete’s total illegal time. Athletes are allowed 25 seconds to make an overtake. i.e. if they take 30 seconds to pass, only 5 seconds are added to their total.
● Yo-Yos: where an athlete enters the draft zone and then backs out instead of completing the overtake, usually account for most of the illegal time recorded. For these manoeuvres all the time spent in the draft zone is added to the illegal time score with no allowance of 25 seconds.
HOW TO INTERPRET THE NUMBERS
Each row, across the page represents the data recorded for the athlete (John) in the left GREEN section (columns B & C)
D = The Total Illegal Drafting Time accumulated by John through the race. The higher the time, the more John drafted illegally.
E = Yo-Yos - a count of the number of times John entered the draft zone of a rider ahead, and then backed out instead of completing the overtake.
F, G, H = The athlete John followed the most overall through the race, and all the illegal time John accumulated behind them.
I, J, K, L = John’s single longest drafting event, who it was behind, and the time of day it happened.
M = The number of overtakes John completed.
N = The number of times John slotted into a gap between 2 riders where there wasn’t enough space to fit in legally.
Pro Tri News 'gram - see the comments
This is so awesome they are publishing this!
Amazing data. This really has the potential to make racing fair. Even if they never use it to impose sanctions during a race, if hthey simply release this data after every race it would almost certainly lead to a change in behavior, just to avoid the public shame.
It’s only one race and the sample sizes are different, but women’s racing sure looks a lot cleaner than men’s.
About two-thirds of the 51 male finishers spent 1.5 minutes or more in illegal time; nineteen of them were above three minutes; ten men were above five minutes. Only two of the nineteen female finishers crossed the 1.5-minute threshold. Almost half the women’s field (8/19) had no illegal time, only five men did.
With more athletes on the course, the men’s race may be more crowded and drafting harder to avoid, but it’s nonetheless a pretty stark contrast.
I assume this required a significant amount of manual effort to clean up the data, which I really appreciate. Posting the raw data without context would have been chaotic, in my opinion. The list of exclusions and assumptions at the top seems completely reasonable.
Going forward, if it takes a week or two to publish the data following a pro series race, I don’t believe the findings should alter the race results. The referees didn’t catch the infraction, the awards have been given out, and the event is concluded. Overturning results should be reserved for major infractions like doping. (I must admit, I’m not sure if there is anything in the rules describing what can overturn results).
This post race drafting data should instead be used by referees and race organizers to better understand when and how drafting occurs, how to more effectively detect it, and who the most frequent offenders are.
In the not so distant future, I’m sure this data clean up can happen in real time. At that point, it’s my opinion that there should be penalties applied to the athletes in T2 depending on the severity of the infraction. The rule is black and white, 12.0m, once you get a way to measure the infractions without judgement, the application of the rules has to be black and white as well.
Another infraction that’s black and white is the litter zone, just saying.
So just curious, what rules are black and white and what rules should “discretion” apply. Imo I think with understanding that this is all fluid and in a real world moving environment, I think we need some acceptance of time allowed. IE- if you are sitting at 12m and a gust of wind hits the front rider and you suddenly are now 3s in the 11.2m zone and quickly back out, for all intent purposes said athlete is doing the right thing that we want in a racer. He wasn’t purposely trying to draft even though by the “letter of the rules” he now has to pass; he can’t just back out.
I do think they’ll be able to eventually get it figured out how to do some type of real time infraction to at min give it on the run for someone with too much total time in the illegal zone. If you yo-yo 10 mins worth of time at some point, that’s going to have to get penalized. 1min21s of yo-yoing over a half or IM, I’m sure there will be some built in “allowance” on simply race dynamics understanding. I don’t think 0s will become the standard, I think they’ll eventually come to terms with some allowance. (The same way they do now with not penalizing drafting in certain areas, etc).
I think on the long-term, if these results keep getting published, the value is i knowing which athletes to target for ‘observation’ during a race, and which athletes could probably stand to get a warning.
Vincent Luis consistently has the highest time in draft? Stick a ref on him more often and hit him for small infractions
Matt Hanson consistently has a low time in draft? You’re probably fine letting him be, and if you see an infraction that could be judgement call one way or the other, you might just give him a warning
I’m curious if there were any stats on the women’s race being impacted by the men’s - e.g. a certain woman had a higher time in the draft of a man
dragged across
Agree - this is a combo of nudging good behaviour and targeting opportunity.
Lots of yo-yos implies athletes are content to sit in ‘blue’ (<14m) with the odd error + red flashing and then they don’t get on a pass.
Sensible athletes will aim to ride on the amber side of the amber/blue threshold ie 14m - 17m. Think the men in a train will have more of a challenge with this as they know that if they leave it at amber in front, there’s a danger of being perfectly legally passed and pulled ahead (not cutting in). If they have it on blue they can wave their arms and gesticulate (as well as saying ‘nf cutting in mate’).
A significant proportion of these yo-yos will be concertinaring into corners. But the RR data has location as a data element and by analysis can see if some specific corners/180s might be best excluded (noone’s getting advantage ‘drafting’ at 11m into a corner).
The data does show each athlete’s ‘favorite wheel’, so presumably if a woman spent a significant amount of time drafting a male pro it would show up. If she drafted a AGer, it would not appear since he would not have a Race Ranger.
dragged across
What I’m most curious about is that I just read that T100 allows “yo-yo” according to PTN (which Jamie Riddle 1st replied “I didn’t know that”), so I was kinda curious that was allowed. Which then made me wonder what is the allowance of that?
In my opinion, the less ‘discretion’ based rules, the better.
The drafting rule needs to be revisited now that we have a more precise way to measure infractions. I agree that we should allow some lenience for micro infractions, and a 0 second standard is probably too strict, as you pointed out. What’s to stop someone from brake checking competitors to give them a penalty?
I come from a motorsports background, where rules are pushed to their limits, so it’s second nature for me to look for loopholes. Wherever possible, I prefer well written, clear, measurable, zero tolerance rules. It feels like with the Race Ranger tool, we could get to that point with drafting .
Let’s say the new standard becomes: “more than 1 minute of draft time results in a penalty, excluding X, Y, Z situations”. This would replace the current 0 second threshold. Athletes will, and arguably should, push right up to that limit. But then we’ll see debates on a Slowtwitch forum in 2027 like: “My favorite athlete got a penalty for 61 seconds in the draft zone, while the winner was in it for 59. Is 2 seconds really that big of a deal?”
And my stance would be: “yes, it is.” If the rule is 60 seconds, then 61 is over the line.
I think the biggest thing is that RR can actually get us to what we’ve always wanted from day 1. It is the “eye in the sky” to what current rules are. Currently you’re only drafting if you get caught by on course official. We now have the opportunity to “correct” any misses by the in course officials, so now you have to essentially race to the rules at all times basically (whether that moto official is near you or not, or atleast now your RR data is going to make you look a certain way even if you can’t get penalized for it *yet). So that’s what I really am looking forward to, how are they going to eventually add RR to some post T2 type of correction penalty to athletes. That to me will be a game changer in all of this.
If the data is accurate enough they really just need to set the draft legal zones in advance (transition, certain narrows or climbs etc), and then award 2min legal draft time per race.
Drop the moto draft officials entirely and save that money/effort and then simply issue penalties when the athletes arrive in T1. Make the penalty 3x the amount of time they drafted over 2 minutes.
For 70.3s make that one minute.
Still think this is jumping the gun. Let’s see how education, targetting and peer pressure can improve things. But let’s keep the data flowing so we can see this, or not.
Dragging across
None to Pros afaik.
To back up an earlier comment (dragged across), here’s the Challenge Roth graphic on the 'gram:
And here’s their longer analysis:
Pleased they have made the effort to compare the data with 2024. Though a 5% reduction in the average time spent in draft zone is fairly small beer.
I wonder if using median would be better than mean.
Of course the ‘winners’ had a zero score: Philipp rode up and past all ahead of her in the swim and rode by herself. The other top women Siffert and Thek mostly rode alone or with one other for a short period. In a pair, controlling distance is ‘easier’ with no concern about slotting in potential.
Laidlow rode at the front of the small chase pack before riding off alone ‘in the lead’ so he thought. Schomburg rode alone all the way. Stratmann was in that chase group the whole way just as Luis was: the contrast is stark. In a multi rider pack, the effort to deter slotting in by staying in the blue means greater risk of yo-yoing.
1990 YOYOs, 0 penalties and the problem is the yoyoers 
Maybe (probably) I don’t understand the numbers
Jesse Hinrichs 01:12 total illegal time 44 yoyos
Do the 44 yoyos get included in the 1m12 illegal time ?
Yes, ALL the time he spent in the draft zone, illegally (ie yo-yoing) is 1:12 so he averaged <2 seconds a time.
Compare this yo-yo average (mean) time with:
Luis - 15 secs
Royle - 5 secs
Olij - 14 secs
Shaffield - 11 secs
Schoeman - 10 secs
I note in the women the different behaviours of two riders who spent hours together:
Bartlett and Mathieux
Bartlett: total in red = 1:25 (14 yo-yos, mean = 6 secs)
Mathieux: total in red = 9:19 (84 yo-yos, mean = 7 secs)
Guess it may reflect that Mathieux was the weaker and wheel 2 most of the time.
6-7 secs is: riding in blue, slip into red, notice, react (move hands to brakes) and get back to blue or (better) amber.