That’s a great idea. Or perhaps a less irritating bleep for just red flashing (ahead) winding to a higher frequency at 20 seconds plus. Battery longevity?
If we’re in invent anything land, just take the next step and wire it into the brakes. Drafting? Disc pad gets depressed.
That would just get the bloke behind straight in the red flashing; and a train crash. How can the auto-brake tell when it’s drafting and not a pass? After 25 seconds?
I was also thinking about this in relation to chip timing. I think it’s true that we initially tend to dismiss a technology as impractical. But at the same time, I’m not sure RR and chip timing are exactly the same.
In the case of chip timing, electronic devices replace people, which is a cost saving. Now that we use chips, RDs don’t need a bunch of timers and volunteers handing out popsicle sticks at the end of races. A small team can record, sort, and publish the timing data. I’ve volunteered to help run my kids’ track meets and there’s been times when we were pulling people out of the stands to serve as timers. It can require a lot of people to record finishing times by hand.
And while a RD must provide timing results, it’s easy (and costless) for a race to tolerate a fair amount of drafting in the AG ranks, which is what IM has largely done. As others pointed out upthread, it’s possible that IM really does not even want to know how much drafting is taking place because that makes it harder to ignore.
The question is not whether RR can get cheaper over time, but whether it can be implemented at a cost not much higher than simply ignoring the problem. Unless the RR system is set up in a way that only the most blatant cheaters are detected, it’s going to snag a lot of people, especially at first. This means that, aside from set up, someone is going to have to interpret all that data and adjudicate the cases. And you’d still want officials on course. How is that not more expensive than continuing with the status quo?
Despite what I’ve said, I think RR can work and I hope it goes forward. Perhaps blinking lights, and the possibility of getting caught, however remote, encourages a portion of racers to be more careful. Maybe RR could be work if it were set up as a ‘spot check’ system. Set it up only to record only the handful of sections of the course where drafting is least likely to be accidental, kind of the way timing mats are placed where people could most easily cut the course. If RR is rolled out in conjunction with changes in courses and starting procedures, that could increase the odds of success.
The best hope is that RR works at Challenge Wanaka and enough racers like it that people start basing their registration decisions on it; that would put pressure on everyone to use RR. Do people care that much about drafting? I’m not sure.
You’re not locking them up. Just losing a few watts with some pressure.
In an era of triathlon where everything that is apart of the sport is creating rising costs, I don’t necessarily think adding an “luxury” item like RR is going to be the answer. Obviously we are really talking min couple of years anyways cus it’s going to take that just in “AG trials” of this race now and then another 400 person race and then a 1200 person race, etc as a “trial” run. So we aren’t really talking anytime near term, we are talking probaly min. of 2-3 years before it truly would come to market of “yes or no” with RD’s.
So I’d be most curious how this technology would be kept at likely a $40/racer fee or less. Obviously if you bought it in bulk like IM could it would be cheaper, but if your the local 400 person race, are you going to increase your race fee by 15%-25% because of this technology? Again I think at the “local” level it’s not a problem. Hell even at the IM level it’s not really a problem. Waves of athletes aren’t leaving the sport because every IM has several packs of 30+ athletes “drafting” and cheating. It truly is a “1st world problem” that we are sorta making up to create a solution for. Even though it’s a kickass technology and solution.
RR for any race more than a few hundred would seemingly require the race to either pay for the man power to get the units on the bikes and/or more time before T1/race starts. Again if you do 1 min per bike, that’s 60 bikes per hour per person, if we are saying basic math of 1 per min. It’s not like this is just a sticker to slap on and off you go.
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Race ranger is only a problem for the elite age grouper, a term that shouldn’t really exist. If your first place matters so much that the event should put tens of thousands of dollars in resources into it, you need to be pro. From a cost perspective there shouldn’t be any resources from age groupers put into making sure one segment of the race is a little more fair – and even as we’ve seen people STILL complain in droves when this tech is used.
I’d still like to try a race with it, but I’m interested in the tech novelty.
I can see a world where race ranger disrupts the timing mat companies by expanding their offering at some point to cover the entire race with live gps tracking and the bike monitoring just becomes one component of the total package.
But who knows if that’s really a possibilityn as I’ve never paid much attention to the timing mat business.
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I’ve seen way too many age group women draft the living dickens out of males to qualify for and then compete at Kona to feel that it would make things only a little more fair. Certainly the same thing happens regularly in the men’s field. One now deceased, high level competitor comes to mine who was famous for using their mirror to watch for the official’s motos coming so he could back up a good long ways from the wheel he was too closely following.
YMMV
Hugh
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When I first started using the garmin varia, I thought it was a “game changer”. Obviously I always said, “look if the driver is literally on their phone texting your going to end up dead in the ditch regardless”, but I thought it was really cool technology to at min allow the rider to “get right” on the road.
In that aspect, I think it would be cool as hell for the sport to finally know what 12m / 20m / (whatever draft length) and everyone knows the score.
Again it still trips me out the rules by which non-draft is. What 10m to you, is going to be different than 10m to me, vs 10m to the official, while riding at 20mph, yet that’s been how we’ve officiated and behaved in races for almost 40 years. I mean no duh that’s the only way we can do it (if we want to have non-draft rules), but this technology atleast finally tells us “wow my 10m was always off by 0.2m, Lurker’s 10m was better than me, etc”.
So I think it’s really cool technology, I just don’t know how it can actually work on a large scale. It literally absolutely should be in pro racing and then if your RD wants to have the novelty of it, go for it. I don’t see how/why IM would want to do it…it sorta unearths skeletons that don’t necessarily need to be unearthed.
I once measure and marked off 12 meters in a very successful age group triathlete friend’s condominium. Over the years she has done Kona more than a dozen times as well as hundreds of other non draft events. When she viewed the marked off distance her first remark was something like " yeah, nobody including me is following at anywhere near that distance". Getting some real feedback would be eye opening for many if not most athletes.
This phenomenon drives me nuts but I kinda get it too. If you’re doing ~8:30/4:00 races you can win AG at most non-pro races, or finish bottom half in pro races and also not be allowed to race AG-only events. You’re not anywhere near the money and not getting the glory of winning the B-race. But you get that sweet strava chevron and get a place in the big show.
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Ya, and I’m not saying they “must” go pro. Although, maybe someone can make the case that there are certain times or placements that should typically bump someone into the pro field.
But I’m just saying if you’re racing for the front of the race and so upset that you didn’t get that 1st place in the 36AG because of some drafters… well, you’re racing an AG race. You can’t expect a ton of resources to ensure 100% compliance.
The pros, it’s entirely reasonable for them to complain about poor enforcement.
Blockquote The colored lights would be good for sure. I would also try my hardest to figure out the algorithm for the lights and when a penalty is triggered. Say it’s 10 min in zone 5-10 meters, 5 min in zone 1-5 meters, and 1 min in zone under 1 meter. That lays out specifically how much I am allowed to draft.
If RR is going to run like it does for the pros there isn’t an overall time allotment. It’s you enter the draft zone and you have X seconds to complete the pass and the overtaken athlete has X seconds to drop back out of the draft zone. Not sure why we’d want to complicate this for AG fields.
Just enforce the rules that are currently on the books automatically and take the referees out of it. I bet once competitive AG’ers start getting automatic penalties for multiple drafting infractions that cost them podiums or KQ spots you won’t see massive draft packs anymore. This also may have the effect on how bike courses are laid out and how waves are started.
What I’m curious about as RR expands in the Pro ranks is to see if athletes start changing tactics as a result. Let’s say you have two athletes evenly matched on the bike but one is a stronger runner. Does the weaker runner pick points on the course where they can surge on the bike and potentially force their rival into a drafting penalty? For example hammer it to the base of a climb and then let off slightly and hope the trail biker drifts into the zone then pick up the effort to force them to use more energy to make the pass?
I’m sure there are always tactics but I also think there is wasted energy within those tactics at times. In your example, the strong runner doens’t need to do anything. IE Lange in '24 Kona. Once you’ve made the group as the best runner, you sit back, yawn and just wave at the guys to let them know your still there and thank them for the pull when you pass them at mile 10 of the run. There biggest worry is slipping into the draft zone (which can now be seen/data collected) by someone playing a game of “brake check” gimmick.
I think it/s easier said than done to just hang and wave at everyone in the group. Lange’s bike was one of fighting hard to stay in that pack. As evidenced by how trashed everyone was on the bike. Kanute didn’t survive it. Look at Lange’s splts in the app. It’s a constant march of him getting passed. He goes from #2 to hanging off the back fighting for his life. Not “sitting in”. We can deduce that because Kanute, Weiss, Appleton, Baekkegard all fell off and didn’t just hang on. There were others too. If they could just sit back and wave they would have done so surely, right?
We seem to pretend that once you make the group you’re good, but that ignores all the other people who don’t surive it. Look back at Sanders in StG 2022. He knows those roads well, and he didn’t just sit in with the group because there are a lot of surges and attacks going on. Back to Kona - Especially if you recall when Ditlev came by, I think we had 3 members of that group get out and try to follow (no doubt hoping to sit in) and only KB managed to get close and then spilled his guts all over the highway in a failed attempt to sit in.
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Yes but you missed my point. When your the runner and you made the group you need to make, it’s now on others to play tactics, not you. You obviously have to then respond to that and make decisions (didn’t Lange let a few go hang themselves in pursuit of SL right?), so I was responding to the idea that an runner would try and play tactics against the weaker runner (when both are equal bikers). That would be stupid.
(Please note I was sorta being silly with my “yawn and wave” point. But the point remains, it’s not the runners who need to make moves, it’s the other around them to put the runners in the hurt locker…I sorta knew that over simplistic, over dramatic characterization would cause someone to push back obviously…but the overall point remains…when your the runner and you’ve made the group, you are in the cat bird seat, you now hold the advantage by simply having to do nothing but sitting there)…Lange sitting in when he needed to and I believe let some “go” and easily caught everyone by what 10mi into the run, shows you the “runner” doesn’t need to play tactics. They can race smart if they’ve generally gotten to the front of the field.
No duh it is going to take an effort, to stay with a front group, but that was the beauty in Lange’s race. He was basically at the front of the field or with the group he needed to be in out of the water. He didn’t need to waste any energy “chasing”. That was what was so brilliant with that race, he basically spooked everyone from the start of T1 cus he was essentally in “yawn and wave at them” from mile 0. Vs being 75s down and having to chase them for 1st 2 hours of bike like in other years when he won (and would famously got roasted for having “teammates” pull him to the front).
I think we’re overthinking the enforcement piece.
In a perfect world, every bike has a RR on it and would have an auto print out of everyone’s draft zone (above legal time), and then you’d serve some math equation derived penalty world.
What RR is (at present), is a tool to better assist the RDs as they fly by every so often as they see thousands of athletes. So what it needs is another coloured light, one which shows that you’ve already gone over some threshold. E.g. a giant red light that says to the RD that you’re spending way too much time in zone. Then the RD can park themselves on the person (or sneak up) and give them a penalty next time they see one.
Sometimes the RD is willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but if you roll up to a group of athletes, all blinking red because they’re drafting, then you can safely discount benefit of the doubt. Everyone can now see that you’re been bending the rules while no one is watching. See a small infraction? Drop the hammer.
The best part is that if you’re still following the rules but your unit malfunctions is that the ref still needs to see something.
True, but the primary benefit of RR is to give athletes an accurate insight to the gap they have to the rider ahead and the deterrent knowledge that any red flashing lights are conspicuous to others behind and to the race motorefs from a long way in rear. Now the latter can use those distant observations to target their attention.
This deters illegal drafting.
The idea RR can be rolled out to many hundreds in one race seems pie in the sky to me. It’d be a cost, both financial and organisational, with minimal practical benefit. Potentially I can see merit in a targeted set of amateur athletes (besides every pro field) being equipped with RR, in the context of IMWCQ or 70.3WCQ. How one would target that is worth a chat.
The fact that some riders have RR and some haven’t close together doesn’t matter, really: the basic rules continue to apply.
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So we are overthinking it because suddenly now there is going to be a bunch of “data” on people that we or may no really want. And so what are they going to do with that data? Now obviously I don’t see any way they ever start creating data driven essentially post race penalties. That is simply a bridge too far. I think at most they would do is start to “target” athletes if suddenly the same guy has 15 mins worth of drafting at *every race he does. The practical and most logical step is this simply will help on course officials (+ athlete) actually know who is and who isn’t riding correctly.
It reminds me of the “tiktok ban”, and one of the podcasts I listen to was joking “dude they have data on all of us, no matter what we do”.
Now I do hope they can add real time “data driven” penalities in the pros because that’s probaly going to be needed. And with such a small sample size, that data can probaly be purged and the athletes determined to have “drafted” to serve a run penalty 2km from the finish, etc. I think doing that at the AG level would imo be too “invasive” of a step, but again that data is there regardless.
It goes back to the MLB 20 years ago and they wanted to do annoymous drug testing…the players screamed “hell no” cus what do you know, suddenly names started getting leaked of who popped, even though it was suppose to be secret. So with any data collection there is always that worry of a “data breach” and the fall out of that. Especially if they don’t use data collected penalties, then you start to sorta truly get into “integrity” issues, etc. and actually knowing who is an isn’t cheating. Right now we only basically have the legendary pics from races with 30 athletes in them as “proof” of who is and isn’t racing fair. This pathway will basically be a “marker” for every single person now, whether we want it that way or not. So what happens if it gets leaked that the winner “cheated” by spending 18 mins drafting, #2 only spent 12 mins drafting but the story was that only #1 “cheated”? We really have no way of knowing what they will or won’t do with the data. And with pretty much any “data”, it’s almost always going to leak.
Will we now have an increase in tri club on tri club “crime” or coaching groups paying off races to get data on other coaching group athletes to prove they cheated? It brings in all kinds of fascinating plot twists.
In the short to medium term I don’t think the data is relevant.
It’s too delayed to get to and too cumbersome and fraught with errors to go back to make deductions.
What RR is, is precisely what was said above, it’s a tool for the athletes to police themselves with AND a legitimate justification for a no-mercy approach to enforcement by the on course officials.
Yes, the officials could just start handing out penalty after penalty now, but I do think they try to have a bit of a heart and not ruin everyone’s race who might not be the best at judging distance (still doesn’t explain why they let clear draft packs carry on and focus on bizarre technicalities instead).
For the foreseeable future, I suspect all this technology can be used for is as a drafting zone calibrator by the athletes and an impartial bad-cop to immediately point to by the officials.