RaceRanger Age Group Test Offers Insights on Future Potential and a Glimpse of Athlete Drafting Data

Triathlon Forum
1

Originally published at: RaceRanger Age Group Test Offers Insights on Future Potential and a Glimpse of Athlete Drafting Data - Slowtwitch News

RaceRanger, the draft-detecting technology developed by former pro triathletes James Elvery and Dylan McNiece, took the next step in its evolution last month when 255 age group athletes used the device at Challenge Wanaka.

Elvery and McNiece have been working on the project since 2014, but got serious about it in 2017 thanks to backing from World Triathlon. Jimmy Riccitello, IRONMAN’s head referee, has been working with RaceRanger since 2018. The devices have become a mainstay at pro races over the last couple of years thanks to their use at Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) races and the IRONMAN Pro Series last year. This year RaceRanger will provide its services to 37 or 38 pro races around the world.

The RaceRanger technology features two electronic units placed on each athlete’s bike, one at the front and one at the rear. The rear unit has a light which serves up signals to the rider behind, letting them know if they’ve entered the draft zone of the rider ahead of them. The front device measures the distance to the rider ahead, but can also show warning and penalty signals from referees. Accurate to 10 cm over 30 m, the RaceRanger system measures 10 times a second.

Athletes and officials have praised the system for providing concrete feedback on where they are in a draft zone. It’s become a mainstay at pro races, but ultimately for the RaceRanger technology to really become profitable, it will need to become a part of age group racing, too. The question has always been, would athletes be willing to pay a bit more for a device that would help prevent drafting in their race? Would race directors see that it provided enough value so they would be willing to pick up the cost? Could the added expense be split between the two?

Before all of that even becomes an issue, though, the first step is to ensure that RaceRanger can be scaled to support a large race of, say, 3,000 athletes. Hence the trip to Wanaka last month to test things out.

According to Elvery, the first run was a success. The RaceRanger crew were able to figure out some of the “pain points” in the process. They had six people on hand to help fit the 255 units on the bikes. (The plan is to start having athletes put their own devices on in future.) There was only one bike that they couldn’t fit a device to, which Elvery said was a pleasant surprise. (And, if they’d had more time to move the athlete’s rear-mounted water bottle, they could have got the unit installed.) Another happy success was that while, for pro races, each unit is turned on manually, in Wanaka the RaceRanger engineers were able to have the devices turn themselves on before the race, saving a lot of running around. Since not everyone in the race was equipped with a RaceRanger, there were some issues of with bikes interfering with the process – “We need to have it on all the bikes for it to really work,” Elvery said.

“The feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” Challenge Wanaka race director Jane Sharman said. The race officials were equally as happy with the test.

Coming to a Race Soon?

Despite the success and positive feedback from the first age-group run through, there’s no plans to implement this technology at more age group races in 2025. There are a few steps RaceRanger is looking to implement before its ready to tackle a potential 3,000-strong age group race.

The next step in the development of the RaceRanger device is two-fold: the goal is to have just one device on each bike, and each unit will have an enhanced chip so it can provide more accurate tracking data. That will allow the devices to provide precise tracking information (as opposed to the estimated live tracking gleaned from timing points). In addition to ensuring that your loved ones or fans aren’t still having a coffee as you fly by, that info could be a valuable safety tool, allowing race directors to get help to athletes more quickly if necessary.

That data, if it could be provided “live” to the officials, would also make it possible to track athletes drafting patterns without being right on the scene. An official could get an alert that an athlete has spent an excessive amount of time in the draft zone, and move to their position to check things out.

Current Reporting Abilities

Even without the next-generation of the RaceRanger device, the company has been providing both IRONMAN and the PTO with detailed race reports after each race. Using the data from the race in Wanaka, RaceRanger has provided spreadsheets with those reports (they generated anonymous names to ensure no one’s information could be identified.)

The report provided a massive amount of data: Here is some of the interesting stats we got from it.

  • Illegal Time: Anytime the athlete breaks the drafting rules. The time in this column varied from 1 second to 24 minutes and 42 seconds. This could be:
    • taking longer than 25 secs to overtake
    • taking longer than 25 seconds to drop back
    • anytime they enter a draft zone and then drop back out the back (yo-yo)
      • For example: Taking 30 seconds to pass, earns you 5 seconds towards your illegal time score.
      • A 10-second yo-yo in and out the back of a zone would earn 10 seconds
  • Overtakes: The athletes overtake count for the whole race. The high in this category was 184.
  • Slot ins: Instances where they slotted in front of t a rider into a gap that didn’t exist, and didn’t complete a pass. This is most interesting for pro competitions. As you can see from the race in Wanaka, this isn’t a real issue for age group athletes. (At least in this race.)

From the data provided from Wanaka, the “worst offender” spent 24 minutes and 42 seconds in the draft zone. That athlete also “yoyo’d” – entered a draft zone and then dropped back rather than passing – 31 times. The data showed that the athlete spent 9:42 on one athlete’s wheel, including one stretch for that lasted for 2:11.

The “least” offending racer spent a grand total of a second riding illegally, never yo-yo’d and managed to overtake 17 people.

The folks from RaceRanger believe that this type of information would be of interest to athletes and officials alike. With enough data, athletes could even have the equivalent of a “drafting passport” developed, showing an athlete’s general riding habits.

RaceRanger can also create individual reports that also provide location data so officials know exactly where on the course an infringement might have taken place. From that information, an official could identify that the incident might have happened going through an aid station or another area of the course where a penalty would not be given.

Letting RaceRanger Make the Calls

At this point the RaceRanger technology is used as an aid for race officials. Elvery acknowledges that there’s a long way to go before athletes and officials trust the technology to the point where they’d be willing to have calls made based on the data provided. It feels like a similar process to the Hawk-Eye technology used for tennis officiating now. Originally designed for television of cricket in 2000, it eventually became the basis for a challenge system in tennis starting in 2006. Over the last few years we’ve seen the technology incorporated into professional tennis on a full-time basis.

The bigger question is whether or not athletes would be willing to pay anything extra to be able to use the equipment. A recent survey run by Tri-Mag.de found that middle- and long-distance athletes appreciated the potential of the RaceRanger technology more than sprint- and Olympic-distance athletes. Those who were in favour of it said that they’d be willing to pay roughly 16 Euros to use the device at races. Elvery said that’s “about what we would need to charge.”

Certainly age-group competitors competing at the front of the pack would be keen to see this technology take off and be implemented at races, especially at world championship and qualifying events for those championships. Events geared towards recreational and beginner athletes probably won’t see the value in adding this technology at this point. We’re at least a year, and more likely two years, away from seeing how it will all play out.

[/um_show_content]

1 Like
2

Excellent article. Some snips of the type of data available in this post:

I’ve linked to this article from that tread.

1 Like
3

Some really great data here.

If I’m guestimating the bar graphs right, nearly all of the 255 race ranger using athletes violated the rules.

Just thinking through what that says about the rules
 It’s clearly nonsensical to have rules that should penalize everyone but penalize practically no one.

I think the benefit of RR could be to build itself into the rules. I’ve said this elsewhere, but it’s a poor use of a new technology to force it to use old way of thinking.

RR could be built into the rules to give each athlete a target amount of draft zone time and automatically add time to their result as they go over.

Let’s just look at where 70% of the racing population spent time in the draft zone: from the charts it looks like 4 minutes or less.

So for a 70.3 distance RR can say you get up to 4 minutes of draft zone time and then after that every extra second you draft adds 5 seconds to your finish time.

Boom, Race Ranger just codified itself as an integral part of the rules and built an interesting story around the product and the metrics that athletes will use.

3 Likes
4

The tech is great and the write up here is really interesting. I still can’t see why Ironman would say ‘yes’ to using Race Ranger. What’s in it for them? It would just show that the dirty-not-so-secret (that the 3000 people IM races are draft fests) is as bad or worse than expected.

1 Like
5

There’s an important nuance. What you looked at isn’t draft zone time but illegal draft zone time. Maybe that’s what you meant but it isn’t what you wrote.

As AG we have plenty of legal draft time (which the pros can’t do) because you can draft all the way to a pass.

So you would have to approximately add the number of passes * 25 seconds.

2 Likes
6

Yes of course, I’m referring to illegal time in the draft zone, not time that gets reset because a pass was made.

What’s actually notable about this data as well is when the athletes knew they were being recorded and the data would be analyzed they still ALL violated the rules. I wonder what the results would look like if this was a blind test and they didn’t know their bike had the sensors. I assume even more drafting right? If you’re being watched and you “cheat” this much, surely it must be much more drafting when you’re not being watched?

1 Like
7

There’s one aspect I haven’t fully understood. There were under 300 RR out of 3000 athletes.

Did they select a specific wave/age group?

Even if you can try to give the RR to athletes getting out of the water around the same time, you will be often passing athletes that don’t have a RR?

So any measured illegal drafting time would be a subset of the actual drafting time?

–
To answer your question, I think there’s many situations where people would be willing to respect the rules, but as soon as you see others bending them a little, you start doing the same.
Also, to actively play within the rules is a lot more effortful once there are groups around you. You’d have to constantly pass the group and let them pass you.
My experience is that most people don’t do that. They may not be sitting right behind the wheel like at the TDF but they aren’t respecting the rules either.

If the RR athletes were competing against non-RR athletes and see those athletes drafting blatantly, would they respect the rules the same way? Some would some wouldn’t.

Also, there’s situation where it’s objectively more difficult and it’s expected that judges will be closing an eye. Out of transition, steep climb, tight turns, etc. It’s my understanding Wanaka is very hilly.

8

This was a race of 300 people, not 3000

9

Close to 3,000 athletes of all ages competed over three days.
https://www.challenge-wanaka.com/2025/02/18/raceranger-makes-history-at-challenge-wanaka-2025/

Based on the article, I understood that 270 people was the size of the specific race that used Race Ranger but that the event was much bigger, although over multiple days.

Now I did some more digging.

Firstly, RR didn’t cover the entire race (still most of it) because only 270 individual athletes had RR while the race was around 300. It’s not clear if it included the invitational part of the race (a handful of athletes).

Also, RR didn’t cover the team race or the aquabike, which have been going on around the same time as the individual event. There was a gap between the starting times but the cycle course was a 3 laps course so there surely was some overlap.
https://www.challenge-wanaka.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/CW-2025-Timetable.pdf?x40984

According to the results, at least approximately 230 additional athletes, in addition to the RR athletes, were on the course at the same time as the RR athletes.

I’m not interested in doing further research, but I do think they could have explained it a little better.
If somebody was present or involved, I’m interested in hearing how they think RR affected athlete’s willingness/ability to follow the rules.

1 Like
10

This sounds great to me!

11

@Lurker4’s suggestion (above, time illegally in red flashing over 4 minutes (70.3)) gets a paste and shout (at 13:00 in the GTN video). Extra time to be served at a penalty tent rather than just ‘added’ to an athlete’s time, to have both an immediate effect and a deterrent effect (pour dĂ©sencourager les autres).

12

This post wound its way onto GTN’s latest video on the topic.

I think we can quibble about how much grace period to give people, or how harsh the penalty is after you’ve exhausted your grace period, or what the conversion factor might be - but IMO this is the way that RR should be implemented at major events (though once everything’s been vetted and trialed).

Once you’re done, the data is downloaded, you get assessed a penalty based on how well you followed the rules. GTN seemed concerned that newbies would find it off-putting, but something like this isn’t going to be brought out at your local try-a-tri - it will be for your big IM, T100, and challenge events. Start at the WC and work your way down.

13

Interesting idea, but it also noted each course might need areas where drafting is not a penalty. You mention Ironman, is it drafting time if you are coming in to an aid station? And how do you handle a climb early in the bike course?

Beside those concerns, I do not see many races adding penalties after the fact. First across the line is not the winner?!? That is why Ironman has penalty tents right now. They want the first across the line to be the winner - I know, only a pro issue but still.

14

Other than for the pros, first across the line hasn’t been a thing for the better part of a decade - so that’s not really an issue. The next gen is going to supposedly have live GPS tracking as their value add, so it isn’t hard to have it de-activate during certain areas of the course either.

I think that the issue that we’re all trying to solve (and why RR was created) is what to do about drafting when the refs aren’t watching - and as we saw, there was a lot of drafting. There were guys that had >20 mins of drafting, even knowing that RR was watching.

I dunno if any solution is going to say “most triathletes need to have an after the fact time adjustment” - but for the egregious folks, by all means hit them with whatever penalty is sufficient to deter them from doing it. But that’s why I said we can quibble about when and how the penalty gets implemented. But at 20 mins you should definitely get something (DSQ???).

Or we could be more elegant, and just say that in order to qualify for the WC, you need to keep your drafting time under 2 mins (or whatever threshold we want to set). That way if you want to blatantly draft, you’re really only cheating yourself.

15

The data shared show a accurate location for every time ‘Sal Smith’ ‘did’ a thing (over took start and completion), yo-yoed etc. ‘Her’ most egregious yo-yo started just at the Glendhu Bay Lookout and continued (ie drafting) for over 2 minutes.
So the ‘gps’ is there already and the organisers could specify (but not communicate) specific short zones where ‘illegal’ red flashing doesn’t add to the analysed total eg: first mile, aid zone environs, 180s, first 200m of a climb

Using the RR gps for telling spectators etc where an athlete is challenge will be to communicate that in near real time and then use it in lieu of timing mats. That seems doable for the pro field but a challenge for amateur athletes. Afaik ‘they’ haven’t been able to use the gps that pros carry in the small of their back in T100s to give us that data.

16

Ya, I agree that in the pro you clearly need to have the winner cross the line. so the penalty tent is the way to go.

I’m looking at RR as how can a race, if they chose to use this thing, add value to the organizer as well by eliminating some of the headache of managing penalty tents, officials telling people what they need to do, etc.

It’s pretty straight forward, when you get off the bike, the software will automatically add a penalty time to your time and that’s how far back you are. If you’ve got supporters coaching you from the sidelines, they’ll have to tell you that you need to run even faster than expected, etc. if you’re chasing for the win.

As a newbie, who just shows up at an Ironman, well, you’re mostly oblivious anyway, and when you look at your times, it will show a drafting penalty offset added to your time and a little link that explains what the hell this is. Ideally, they’d already know. And this is WAY easier to explain than all the complicated rules with cards, warnings, penalty tents, where to take the penalty, etc.

You just race the race and the chips fall where they may.

The idea of newbies getting caught surprised by this thing because they make a small mistake isn’t accurate because you’re intentionally, setting that illegal draft limit to something high, like 4 minutes so there is built in grace.

You need that built in grace if you’re going to put a device on someone that purports to track with 100% enforcement. There will be margins or error and circumstances that come into play. The goal for a racer isn’t to “use up” every second of that illegal drafting, but to give you that buffer, much like on the highway no one is getting a ticket for 5mph over unless there are some very clear reasons (school/construction, etc).

Glad to see the idea has legs :slight_smile:

17

For the pros, you can have it so that they’re told partway through the run - there aren’t so many of them that getting the word out is a problem. You can have the data downloaded quick and then the penalty assessed from there. Though even here, I remember a T100 where Sam Long didn’t know he had a penalty until the people in the crowd shouted at him.

Ideally, there’d be a big board as you run by the penalty tent and it shows if and how much of a penalty you have - but this requires additional tech (notably a big board that shows how much a penalty you have) and the ability to monitor multiple people with non-standard penalty times. Not to mention having to download 3000 units of data within a reasonable timeframe.

This is why for the AGers its easier just to assess the penalty after the fact. Just add the time to the timing system and call it a day.

18

Will amateurs care (if their bike time is recorded in the results as a few minutes extra?
What is the aim? [To deter drafting]
Will this achieve that or part?
I can actually see there being a side bet competition for the rider with the most ‘illegal’ time.

19

Some will care, some won’t - though this is what it is now. Though where we’re likely to see better compliance is in having people at 12m instead of 10m or 8m.

What it will do is discourage is drafting amongst the WCQ crowd (which is probably where it actually matters) - if you’re gunning for a world’s spot you can bet that you’re going to play it as safe as you can. And if you put in a big enough deterrent, at some point people will get either a DNF (over time), or a DSQ (after so many minutes, you DSQ) - at which point the egregious folks will start to care.

For everyone else, your MOP people who don’t egregiously draft, the live GPS is probably the bigger draw.

20

That is actually a hiccup to consider. There are plenty of participants who just barely make the cutoff. No one could careless if that back of pack finisher yoyo’d in and out of the draft zone for 40 minutes while plugging along at 12mph.

I think as long as you physically make the cut off, you finished. The time would just be long if they got penalties added to it. The DSQ is equally tough. There’s really no need with race ranger to go to that length. DSQ is used as a deterrent precisely because they can’t watch all the time. With race ranger they are watching all the time. Just keep bumping them further and further down the rankings. Do the top 10 finishers really care if someone was placed 200th or 300th instead of DSQ?