Is there any real benefit for a MOP to have a national ranking? I competed in 3 races this year so I am eligible for a ranking, but at my second event, my timing chip didn’t work and I got no officially time. When speaking with the timing company, they said they would just give me a time based on my estimate (would have been in the middle of my age group). I haven’t followed up to see if they entered anything.
I am in no way getting an award as I am not that fast, I am just curious if it is even worth the effort to get a time for that event.
I see no advantage to it and you’re the only one that will care (so only you can decide if it’s worth the effort). For most of us, I don’t think the rankings amount to much, they are interesting to read but that’s about it.
I know a person who will do one podunk small as USAT race after another (and win) just to get a good ranking…this same person you will never see at Kenosha, Chicago, TriShark or any other race where the AG has any real competitors…has a god ranking though…LOL…just cherry pick your races…
it’s weird because when I do those small races and win as a female, i still get bad ranking. But if I do a big one like IMAZ, the numbers are much better. I guess it’s because they rank everyone together so if I win as a female, but a bunch of males did great, then it looks like i suck.
I agree. I won my age group in one race and got a relatively low ranking and finished in 21st in Chicago and should get a pretty high number. The problem is that there’s always some fast dude in the smaller races who beats everybody by 10 minutes. And he’s usually M35-39. You dudes are fast.
I think it is because some races “count more” based on whether they are national/regional championships, or whether they have more than a certain number of participants.
Thanks for the info. I really don’t need to see my name in print. I just didn’t know if they actually did anything with those ranking like a medal for finishing 4,734 in the nation
Thanks for the link. In this case I was just making the point that you can’t guarantee high rankings by signing up for small local races. All you need is one fast guy and it throws off everything. The baseline for each race is figured according to the size of the race, the length of the race and whether it is a champioship of any sort. Your ranking is then calculated using the fastest AGers time. So, you are likely better off finishing down a ways in a big race than in 2nd OA with one really speedy dude in a small one.
This was in the latest USAT newsletter. I think it will be a system proposed by Lew Kidder (and perhaps others) that is similar to the NASTAR system used for scoring downhill skiing. Lew described it not too long ago on the USAT bulletin boards. Basically, the score for the event will be based on 5 competitors in the event who raced the previous year’s nationals, and not on the size of the event. I do not know what the system does if there are not at least 5 finishers in the event who raced nationals.
Basically, the score for the event will be based on 5 competitors in the event who raced the previous year’s nationals///
I remember reading something about that, and it makes total sense to use the nationals competitors to help weight the race, only problem is we didn’t have a nationals. And it looks like they are going to repeat the mistake of last years almost race, so all that hard work on the rankings once again becomes wasted…
The system being implemented by USAT gives each race a “strength of field” factor which is based on the quality of key athletes competing therein (we call them “local pacesetters”). Here are some key items:
Local pacesetters for the current year are determined by their performances at a selected race in the previous year. Choice #1 for the race is age group nationals - but if nationals isn’t held, there is a second choice (itu oly worlds). If no nationals and no worlds, there will be a third (and a fourth and a fifth) choice - we just haven’t decided what it will be (maybe nationals from two years ago).
There will be two levels of local pacesetters. Level #1 has those who actually raced at nationals (worlds, whatever). Level #2 contains those who raced enough times against the Level #1 people at local/regional events to get a good read on how they compared.
To determine strength of field at a local race (call it “LocalMan”), the preferred method is to select five local pacesetters at random (from either Level #1 or #2), use each to compute the national age group overall champion’s virtual time at LocalMan, throw out the fastest and the slowest, and then average the remaining three. If there are not five local pacesetters, there are backup protocols for four, three, two, and even one. If there are no local pacesetters (a VERY unlikely case), we will go to a third level of local pacesetters (those who raced against some Level #2 people in the previous year).
The whole idea is to level the playing field, no matter where the race is or what size the field. It works pretty well in downhill skiing (the NASTAR system) - and because NASTAR uses just one local pacesetter, the new USAT ranking system (with five local pacesetters in each event) should yield even better results.
Sounds pretty good Lew, I guess we will just need a year of results to see if it really works. I hope that it will not be set in stone in the theory stage, because these things need to be tweeked as they go along, as you notice that it’s not giving the exact results that you hoped for. Are they still going to use the top male Ag’er to rank the women? I always thought that was really stupid, especially since there are many all women races. I’d like to see your finished product, and I’m sure Dan would too, before it goes to the final programming. Good luck, and thanks for all the hard work…Monty
Since I’m not vested with any sort of decision-making authority, I can’t tell you what will or will not happen. But the point person for USAT (Jen O’Day) seems pretty determined to eliminate the gender gap. There are two basic ways to make that happen:
You can have two national pacesetters - the man who wins overall at previous year’s nationals and the woman who wins overall at the same race. But that then requires two completely separate sets of local pacesetters, one for each gender (they can be the same people, but they would have one handicap that “equalized” the race for men and another to “equalize” for the women. Not an impossible task, but it would add an extra layer of complexity to the system.
Or you can use one set of local pacesetters to establish what the national male pacesetter would have done at the local race - and then give each woman a gender credit. Looking at world records in a number of different sports (swimming, running, triathlon, etc), it looks to me like the credit is pretty close to 10%. I’ve actually done a fair amount of research on this subject - and for more details, you could go to my wife’s website (www.cooltri.com) and look under “The Leveler”.
I actually would like to see both gender AND age “leveling”. Every person, no matter what your age, would be chasing the same “100” bogey. The system I’ve been using for years gives everyone a credit equal to 1% of the overall men’s world record time for each year the person exceeds the age of 32. So, if Monty is 47, he gets a credit equal to 15% of the (virtual in most cases) time of the fastest triathlete on earth - and if Claire McCarty is 45, she gets 23% (13% for age, 10% more for gender).
There are some interesting results from such a system. One is the effect of equalizing within an age group. A 54-year-old athlete might lose an Oly race to a 50-year-old by two minutes scratch, but the former would have the better adjusted performance (if the best in the world would have gone 1:50 on the course, 1% is equal to 1:06).
