The Wanaka race is purely a “test” to see how it goes in a real world age group situation ,with a small field. Personally I can’t see RR becoming standard in large Tri’s and predict a lot of blowback from “just want to finish” age groupers who get penalties.
To me, this is the huge opportunity with triathlon. If you want to qualify for championship slots and age group placing, pay extra and get the race ranger and start in a Championship mass wave. If you want to race with a friend and be in the finisher crowd and still be ranked according to your placement, but not be eligible for awards or championship slots, then join the Finisher AG waves.
The race gets to do a couple things – one charge a premium for the demanding, needy, competitive racers and give them the experience they want like mass starts, drafting enforcement, championship style racing/slots etc.
And two they can also market to the finisher crowd to go and race with a friend and they over look the drafting and riding side by side, etc that goes on in the back. Let that group have fun. Actively encourage them to signup and race with a buddy through some incentives. Grow the sport at both ends.
The benefit of this is the bottom of the pyramid, will see that clear differentiation in the faster championship style racing at the top of the pyramid and some of the athletes will have a clear path to self-select and “move up”.
Leveling up is definitely a factor in customer retention. Keep that group of racers who is predisposed to want more more more engaged. And likewise, protect and nurture that group of finishers who is in it for the camaraderie and fitness fun.
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What would we put the over/under on actual “drafting” issues as a whole for an average IM? Over/under 60% of athletes would in fact be “drafting” by the letter of the law?
(And I’m counting the blantant drafters + the “rode into the draft zone and sat at X distance without blantant drafting but didn’t pass either”)
A strict reading of the letter of the law where you penalize everyone that entered into a draft zone but did not make a pass, failed to pass in 25 seconds, or failed to exit a drafting zone 25 seconds after being passed? I bet it is over 60 percent, even if you exclude sections of the course like aid stations, u-turns, etc. I’d take the over.
But in my experience, most of the drafting consists of minor infractions like people sitting at 8-9 meters instead of 12 or entering well into a draft zone but then dropping back. I have never seen a large group of drafters or anything resembling a pack, although every race I’ve done I’ve seen 1-2 that are blatantly cheating.
I’d be happy if RR could get the incidental drafters to be a little more careful and punish the true cheaters.
Two of my squad got 3min penalties at the Tauranga Half last weekend (RR on Pro and Open field only). Both for drafting in a long (2km) no overtaking zone where they were literally sat up soft pedalling behind much slower riders, neither rider would have been troubling the podium.
This has however provided massive entertainment for the rest of the squad this week at swimming, the club TT, queuing for coffees, etc etc… My point being similar to above, we don’t need to be paranoid about RR being too mechanical and not being able to replace humans, as in reality RR should have this zone deactivated and humans can do dumb stuff too. Just need RR to be less dumb less often than humans.
I think 60% is being kind but most of them are “incidental” drafters. I think maybe 15% are sneaky cheats.
When the Sin Bins for drafting first started here in Oz in the 90’s the general rule was, you draft like a Pro Tour guy until you get your first penalty and then back off to avoid being DQ’ed. The logic was that time spent in the Sin Bin was far less than the time gained by drafting.
Most likely what you’ll get is RR doing dumb things and humans doing dumb things with RR. You’ll crack down on some problems at the margin here and create other problems at the margin over there (like giving Paula Findlay and Flora Duffy drafting penalties).
I agree that this is probably the end state of where the tech is going.
Though I’m not sure how this aligns with the other threads on women’s racing and IMWC uptake. You’ll likely always find enough men to race the IMWC, but if you’re trying to grow the women’s side of the sport. If the overall concern is that it will take time to fill out a 2nd day and build up the base of eligible athletes, the last thing you need to do is put in another barrier - and this one’s at registration, which is the worst place to put it!
There’s probably also some qualms about having non-RR athletes being able to offer a draft to RR athletes - with more impact on the women’s side, and amongst the older cohorts. Some of the KQ, especially the older AGs, are still finishing 15+ hrs! Making the M18-54 group take on RR is probably fine, but other AGs would still be mixed in with non RR athletes.
Maybe if you combined the rear pod with a live GPS beacon, you could justify giving everyone the rear pod, and then force the WCQ crowd to buy into the front sensors?
Is there any update / anecdotal feedback on how it went? I believe the race was the weekend just gone by 15 Feb
The problem we’re most likely going to see is how the data from RR is interpreted and policed. The system could log millions of points of data for every individual athlete on course, but it’s going to be up to someone to interpret the results of that data and affirm it how they see fit.
Look at the state of football and VAR. You’ve got experienced refs reviewing footage against defined rules of the game, and yet the inconsistency of decisions between games (and even the same game) is unreal. If the ball touches a hand then it’s handball right? right…?
GTN had a short piece on this including a (audio) description of experience by a top amateur (Dave Atkinson). From 16:04
An RR insta:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DGH9KquvoSr/
Scroll to last image for a great little video!
@Ironmandad 's article from a few hours ago:
and the tri247 article (by Jon Turner, likewise based on Elvery’s post Wanaka report widely shared):
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Challenge Wanaka have pushed out an analysis
RaceRanger: Changing the Game – What the Data Reveals
which is teasingly short of detail.
https://www.challenge-wanaka.com/2025/03/20/raceranger-changing-the-game-what-the-data-reveals/
Edit: ‘An hour lateer’ . . ST Article here with far more detail and analysis:
Challenge Wanaka in February featured a mass experiment with RaceRanger (RR): over half the athletes (no Pro field) had RR fitted to their bikes. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive: main highlight being that RR offered visual indication of what a 12m gap looked like “removing stress and uncertainty”.
RaceRanger, Challenge Wanaka says, “contributed to a cleaner, fairer race and a better overall experience for all.” And what’s more they have published “anonymous drafting data from the race, offering athletes, officials, and event organizers unprecedented insight into drafting dynamics.”
Insights
The data provide an objective picture of drafting behaviour, including:
- Time spent “Yo-yoing” aka drafting/pulling out of an overtake
- Exceeding 25 seconds to overtake
- Exceeding 25 seconds to drop back after being overtaken
- Most drafted competitor (the ‘favorite wheel’)
- Longest single drafting instance
- Frequency of ‘yo-yo’ drafting behavior
RaceRanger produce an event summary spreadsheet (extract from example pasted) and a detailed file on each athlete with every passing / drafting interaction (edited extract from anonymised example ‘Sal Smith #34’ is a naughty, naughty girl).
Event Director said “We saw competitors actively using the units to stay within the rules, which contributed to a much cleaner race overall. Many [athletes] were surprised at just how far 12m actually is (sic) in a race environment.”
NB “These reports include randomly generated names and numbers as real names have been removed).” No ‘Sal Smith’ in the results list btw!
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Seems to me like this could easily be done using each persons head unit or watch, making this tech obsolete in the very near future. How accurate would a LIVE Strava Flyby type feature be? The New Garmins have active segments using the people you are riding with. Just create an app that records everyones position and surely it could record all the same information RR is trying to collect and possibly with better accuracy… Right? I guess this would only become possible if every head unit worked on LTE and there was a widget or app running on them that gave Ironman or RaceRanger permission to communicate.
In theory, but in reality the constant scanning/communicating would burn through the tiny battery inside a garmin wristwatch (or apple, etc). Seems fairer to supply the race ranger units than require all competitors to buy compatible computers. Also, suspect you need the front reciever and rear transmitter as otherwise the signals between headunits is blocked by the athletes body and would be often ‘reflecting’ off a wall/barrier and so innacurate, which is worse than current situation if you have electronic drafting that is wrong.
Leaving aside Tony’s “could be easily done” which you’ve addressed.
Except see RaceRanger’s planned future developments(aspirations):
A “single-unit systems for easier self-installation on bikes”
This implies they’ve already done bench trials of a tx/rx unit which does away with the fork mounted tx. A key requirement is the visual cue (by colour) visible to the rider behind (and motorefs btw) so the rear/seatpost mounted element has to stay. But it, in theory, can have a tx capability added, to transmit forward, with a directional antenna, with sufficient strength to reach out 25m to the rx on the seat post of the rider ahead.
Does that make sense?