Time to Say Goodbye to USAC?

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7/18/2016 5:19pm
Stokermtb7 wrote:
im sure he knew, because i was yelling at him. this rider did not want to give his run up and the dust caused me to...
im sure he knew, because i was yelling at him. this rider did not want to give his run up and the dust caused me to crash.





mfoga wrote:
I raced for quite some time. I have been caught behind people. I have had times where I had someone behind me who should have never...
I raced for quite some time. I have been caught behind people. I have had times where I had someone behind me who should have never been in that class catch me and I heard yelling but i had no idea what was being said and I wasn't about to slow to look behind me. Once again your assuming they heard and understood what was being yelled. .

Also nice edit to you original post that deletes almost everything you said.
I don't race but I would assume being on a closed course with staggered starts, if there's a rider behind you yelling...chances are they're yelling at you to get out of the way? Why else would they be that close behind you and what else would they be yelling? HEY MAN YOUR TIRES FLAT!
mfoga
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Moreno Valley, CA US
7/18/2016 6:34pm
Stokermtb7 wrote:
im sure he knew, because i was yelling at him. this rider did not want to give his run up and the dust caused me to...
im sure he knew, because i was yelling at him. this rider did not want to give his run up and the dust caused me to crash.





mfoga wrote:
I raced for quite some time. I have been caught behind people. I have had times where I had someone behind me who should have never...
I raced for quite some time. I have been caught behind people. I have had times where I had someone behind me who should have never been in that class catch me and I heard yelling but i had no idea what was being said and I wasn't about to slow to look behind me. Once again your assuming they heard and understood what was being yelled. .

Also nice edit to you original post that deletes almost everything you said.
I don't race but I would assume being on a closed course with staggered starts, if there's a rider behind you yelling...chances are they're yelling at...
I don't race but I would assume being on a closed course with staggered starts, if there's a rider behind you yelling...chances are they're yelling at you to get out of the way? Why else would they be that close behind you and what else would they be yelling? HEY MAN YOUR TIRES FLAT!
Spectators?
bturman
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Durango, CO US
7/20/2016 12:53pm
mfoga wrote:
Spectators?
His point was that longer intervals would prevent this problem.
They may reduce the number of times it would occur, though it'd still happen due to mechanicals and the lack of qualifiers in beginner/intermediate/expert classes. Pros often get a full minute or more, depending on the venue. If everyone got a minute, though, race day would take forever.

DHsteeze and Stokermtb7, know that blaming the person in front of you for a crash is a bit short-sighted and could easily be prevented. Looking back on my racing days, this was all part of the learning experience. If you're a fast rider, make it known in a kind way before the guy in front of you drops in. Something as simple as, "Hey man, I'm feeling good today. I may holler 'RIDER!' if I catch up" will likely do.

If you're getting caught in a DH race, you're (clearly) not winning. It's time to move over and let the guy behind you pass. Anyone with a brain will acknowledge that fact.

Big Bird
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Oceano, CA US
7/20/2016 7:09pm
bturman wrote:
They may reduce the number of times it would occur, though it'd still happen due to mechanicals and the lack of qualifiers in beginner/intermediate/expert classes. Pros...
They may reduce the number of times it would occur, though it'd still happen due to mechanicals and the lack of qualifiers in beginner/intermediate/expert classes. Pros often get a full minute or more, depending on the venue. If everyone got a minute, though, race day would take forever.

DHsteeze and Stokermtb7, know that blaming the person in front of you for a crash is a bit short-sighted and could easily be prevented. Looking back on my racing days, this was all part of the learning experience. If you're a fast rider, make it known in a kind way before the guy in front of you drops in. Something as simple as, "Hey man, I'm feeling good today. I may holler 'RIDER!' if I catch up" will likely do.

If you're getting caught in a DH race, you're (clearly) not winning. It's time to move over and let the guy behind you pass. Anyone with a brain will acknowledge that fact.

I've been on both sides of this coin. One just pulls over enough to allow a pass.
7/20/2016 9:40pm
I stopped buying a USAC license or racing USAC races a couple years ago because I was tired of this crap.
MrPrometheus
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9/18/2009
Location
Bellmore, NY US
7/30/2016 8:59pm
I thought I would add my $0.02 as I take a much needed break from the stress and rage of trying to help keep things running smooth for the Killington ProGRT. (Thanks USAC and UCI officials for all the ala carte requests in the name of “rules” )

My background
Let me give you some quick bits about my background so you can see where I am coming from and hopefully realize that I am not some random forum troll.

I have been racing downhill since 1996. I have seen the tail end of the golden years, the NORBA years, the downhill is dead cause everyone pulled the money out years, the ProGRT rollercoaster years, the DH 1 pipe dreams etc.
I love all things downhill and have for a long time.
I have good friends in the industry both on the product side and on the racing side.
I have a strong relationship with the owner of a popular east coast venue which gives me a rather unique view from the venue/promoter side of things and incidentally on the timing and registration side of things.
I do not think it would be unfair to say that I am largely responsible for bringing registration, timing and results out of the stone age and into a more streamlined process for a large number of east coast races. Are there still problems and improvements to make there, absolutely. Apologies for any issues along the way. That work aside from some comps and other perks has largely been for the love of the sport and to ease my personal frustrations of how bad it used to be. I don’t want to even start to explain the chaos of what it is like on the timing side of things. I will say I can understand peoples frustration and perception that timing + registration screw things up. Let me defend against this from the insiders perspective and say 90% of the time a USAC official is to thank for the delays or shifting around of things.

Through all the above I have had numerous interactions with both low level and high level USAC and UCI officials through the eyes of a racer, a promoter, industry insider, timing official and general observer.

I tend to be rather shy socially and try to remain outside of the politics around all these moving pieces. I am inquisitive though and have had some rather insightful conversations over these years. All this being said I am not ignorant enough to say my view covers all views of this debate. I am eager for the healthy discussion and presentation of other views or objections on this topic to make it a well rounded discussion.

The problems
Racers want a quality framework to compete fairly at grassroots levels,national levels and potentially world levels.
Creating that framework requires sets of rules, policies, guidelines and governing bodies.
UCI is the defacto governing body for the world level. If you want to race at the world level you have to play by their rules. Replacing UCI is an entirely different can of worms and effort required.
UCI rules currently state that there can only be one official national governing body for ALL cycling disciplines for a given country. You can not have downhill be one governing body and road another. This is a very important catch 22 to keep in mind.

For the most part the UCI sets rules and guidelines for racing at the world level. They provide suggestions for what to do at the national level but defer to the national level governing bodies to set their own rules. The catch however is when you want your race to have UCI points that count for the world level standings you must then play by the UCI rules for those racers in the point awarding positions. This does not preclude the national body from pushing their own set of rules and guidelines into play as well for those races. In the case of a ProGRT which is both a USAC national level series and an UCI points awarding series it makes for quite a power tripping mess.

From my views, discussions and interactions UCI and USAC officials do not quite get along well. This appears to be especially true for the downhill discipline. For the most part the UCI “tolerates” the behavior of USAC but will be more than happy to trump USAC with their own rules whenever possible. To be fair the UCI has the harder coordination job of the two when you take into account all the other governing bodies it has to interact with.

So for races that are not at the UCI point awarding level that leaves us with just USAC running the show. Keep in mind that USAC is the national governing body for all cycling disciplines. That puts downhill at odds for resources for all the other disciplines but mainly road cycling. I have been at dinner tables with high ranking USAC officials that were all to happy share their thoughts on "lazy downhillers” not realizing I was one of those racers myself. Upon speaking up and letting them know I race downhill and my thoughts the conversations only went silent or dismissed with low brow treatment.

It is rather obvious that downhillers do not like the way USAC is treating racers and the feeling from what I have witnessed at some high levels of leadership at USAC is that the dislike is mutual. USAC would rather have nothing to do with downhill race racing.

So where do we go with this unfortunate relationship? Can there be a healthy way forward?

Solutions?
I am not fan of just ranting away without providing potential solutions to problems. So here I present what I see are some options. I will say that I would love nothing more than to take one of these options and pursue it to the end. However my current set of goals and priorities in life do not allow for the focus it would take. I share these regardless in hopes to continue the discussion and perhaps inspire the people who might be in a better spot to take initiative on it.

A. Petition UCI to remove the single national governing body rule for all disciplines. This would open the possibility of new national governing bodies for the same country feeding into the world level.

Not sure how feasible this will actually be as from the UCI view it will be taking an already hard problem and making it harder. Should it be possible though we could then have proper competition amongst governing bodies on the national level and we get to vote with our race fees/attendance. I suspect what would likely happen rather quickly is that USAC would finally be able to wash its hands of the "lazy downhillers"

B. Create a new national race series without USAC sanctioning.

This has been tried at various levels at various times across the USA. The main issues with this are around money. For the most part sponsors want to sponsor world level athletes. To get your foot in the door for world level racing you need UCI points. Currently only USAC sanctioned races in the USA can provide UCI points. You say that you will never care about racing at the world level so skip USAC all together? It still costs a lot of money to run a race series. One of the unfortunate truths is economies of scale for race insurance or being grandfathered into insanely low insurance rates that new race series will never be able to obtain. Getting an alternate race series running will involve the grunt work around rules, coordination etc. Unless that is someones full time job while not impossible it is unlikely that a grassroots effort will be successful. It takes years of effort and sacrifice before any “returns” in whatever form that might be are seen. It is rather common knowledge that nobody goes racing to make money. Unless you are NASCAR or some other big player you do not really run race series to make money either. Recall the downfall of NORBA? An alternate race series is going to be fueled by the love of racing for a long time and aside from that love there still needs to be some serious financial capital involved.

C. Ask USAC to contract out all rules, responsibility etc for the downhill discipline to a third party who essentially pays a bribe to USAC for their governing points.

While this sounds rather dangerous as it will cost likely even more upfront than option B. It might be the easier path forward and it is my understanding that this is how a bunch of other countries have their race sanctioning setup. They basically pay off a shell governing body that acts as a placeholder to the UCI while regaining control of the day to day operations of things. It can be a slippery slope though as you are always at the mercy of that official governing body. What is your asking price USAC to have us lazy downhillers go away?

D. Not do anything?

Seems lame and fodder for this thread to come up every few years

E. More downhillers involved at USAC?

We can go the political route and vote in more of our own but this will likely take a long time to make noticeable progress and it is unclear how sustainable it is.

Anyone have other solutions?

If you got this far and read all of that grab a beer you earned it you lazy downhiller.

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