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The fact that ESO doesn't know the details at this point in time, well after budget decisions needed to be made by teams and sponsors is the problem.
The fact that ESO doesn't know is not an answer. It is unacceptable.
Of course
I'd like to point out the most blinding oblivious part of all of this. Prize money for "World Cup" riders is still non-existent.
Race organizers(even SMX & all the money it supposedly laid out for racers to win) still pays the riders crap after top 3. Ellie riders skipped SMX because they couldn't make their money back even if they got top 10.
Anyone in big ticket item sales will tell you that "Feast or Famine" pay scales leave even the people hitting the peak of the pay scale get paid crap when you average out your wins & losses.
ESO/Discovery is robbing the riders on the pay side.
I think there has to be a middle ground between excluding privateers, and where things are right now.
if you look at les gets qualies, 160 riders finished qualies (not including dnf or dns riders). The difference in first to 60th was was 11 seconds. The difference from 60th to 150th was 50 seconds (i excluded dudes who were like 2 min back that I’m assuming had crashes). Some of those dudes that are that far off probably shouldn’t be entering world cups.
i think the field can be cut down a lot, without getting rid privateers. Maybe with less people it makes it easier to qualify 60 to finals, or maybe if they must cut it to 30 for tv, they can have a “b” finals right after qualies. There can be series points given out for that, and maybe top 3 in the b finals get a spot in the big show the next day. Kind of like an LCQ.
I’d like to see it run 100 in qualifying, 30 in finals, NO protected riders, NO WC overall points for qualification.
big dogs would have to slow down to make sure they qualify (without flat tires crashing etc) and then you have another 70-80 guys sending it to make it into the final. Still gives plenty of chances for privateers to make the final and trims the final down to 30 which is good for TV.
also a lot more simple rules and points which is important when the governing body can’t follow their own regulations
The amount of riders eligible to enter a DH race is limited to riders with 40 UCI points or obtaining one of 3 spots from their national federation.
The UCI has limited points to only be awarded during finals, so we should see this number come down considerably.
Plus if you are on a registered team you don’t need the 40 points. I think you may see more riders form their own “privateer” teams next year as long as team fees don’t increase too much.
you also earn points outside of the World Cup races. Currently there are 350 riders globally that have 40 or more points.
Not sure if any level of comparison is fair, but here's a look at the top 20ish males who competed in the World Surf League Championship Tour this year, their total event earnings and how many events they competed in.
WSL has a fair amount of outside sponsorship from Corona, 805 Beer as presenting sponsors. Apple Watch, Yeti, etc. but these prize purses for events are wild. WSL shells out almost $1M in prize money for each championship tour event (Men's & Women's combined).
I think WCDH athletes give way more risk compared to WSL world tour guys. Their events had sub par waves all year and that leads to the vast majority of their heat times being taken up by just sitting there and waiting.
ESO/Discovery will try to convince us it's the resort that costs so much and thus no pay.
But we all know it's not true. They wouldn't buy rights if they didn't have money.
I'll make this statement a thousand times over.
STOP PUTTING ON EVENTS IF YOU CAN'T RAISE A CASH PRIZE PURSE FOR TOP 20!
Your event is a financial failure if it has a National or International draw at all.
With DH, we've all fallen into the trap of putting on races so people "have something to race".
But in the end, we're selling ourselves short.
I think we can share a lot of marketing ideas for how to come up with a $10,000 prize purse for a local race.
$100k for a regional race.
$500k for a national.
The money is there to ask.
We just need to share ideas and make sure those ideas are ONLY related to sponsors outside of the bike industry.
Let the bike industry support the racers they want to appear.
Bring the event standards up to a money making venture.
But in a surf event, how much does it really cost the organizer to put on? The ocean and waves are right there. It seems like (and I have no actual info here) downhill events take a huge amount of cash to put on, close the mountain, run the lifts, build the track, etc.
On another topic, I’m curious what kind of stories ESO/Discovery are trying to build in downhill with a smaller field. It seems like, with their race intros and commentary this year they are trying to build up the star personalities like Vali, Myriam, Loic, Gwin, etc. Which could be really cool, I’m stoked for when Myriam or Amaury are healthy and back racing, and their journeys and challenges could be really inspiring and exciting, with the right focus. Or like, Greg coming back next year to try for the rainbow stripes and go out on top.
Are those the stories that are going to grow the sport? We need more sponsors and money and excitement to pay the riders more, right?
As someone who is already a fan of the sport, I was most stoked about Charlie winning World Champs, and Osin (as someone said 47 plate!) and Ronan going one and two, but a lot of us nerds know the background on why that’s incredible, and most of that story comes from off-track coverage like WynTV. (His XC video this week was incredible too!)
I think it’s a tough challenge because there’s so much happening that you just can’t see on the track, and the results are unpredictable and that’s part of what’s so cool.
I genuinely think that if the idea is "grow the sport" (which is something everyone says, always, but I think is especially important now given what is being said quite loudly), then focusing on the "best of the best" is not the way to do it.
If you are a 16-year-old who's parents gave them a DH bike and was entered in a few races and placed well... I feel it more exciting when the message is
"Anyone could win! These are the best, most consistent, but noone can guarantee anything!"
It really does encourage more people to try. Otherwise, I feel like you can consider yourself written off from the get-go because you're not the 10 riders being focused on.
This might be my own mentality though, because I am not the kind of person to see someone doing well and think "I can do better"
I'm more of a "I bet I can keep up" kinda guy.
Red Bull put on DH races to sell caffeinated sugar water. It would be no issue for Red Bull to take a loss on each event. Chalk it up to marketing. WB is now trying to turn this sport into a profit center. From what I have seen WB likes to move quickly. My guess is they will lose interest in DH racing within the next two year, as the continue to draw in the revenue they had hoped.
Here's the thing if Discovery does a pump & dump after two years of not having it turn into what they want/thought it would. We can't bank on Red Bull or someone like that to come back and rescue the series. Makes me a little nervous to see where it would go if this type of situation happens.
More like a deflate and dump but point taken.
That's not their M.O. though.
They lock contracts & will let products sit just to retain rights to future broadcast opportunities.
They don't "grow" sports...they purchase rights to sell sports.
If DH is a dump for them after 2 years, they simply stop the broadcasts sighting "losses" and retain the rights.
And to buy it from them, they'll want far more than they purchased it for.
World Championships is the perfect example. US rights owned, but not exercised. The broadcast simply doesn't exist in the US.
If internet wormholes didn't exist, the US market wouldn't even know it happened.
Windham's gone.
https://www.bikemag.com/news/windham-bike-park-closed
Wow, that really sucks.
world champs seems to have been packaged separately or at least the rights agreement for North America preceded the WB deal. In Canada and the US it was on FloBikes which is another streaming service to get and one you have to sign up for the whole year.
World Champs have been on a separate media/broadcast licensing deal for a long time. It's nothing to do with the ESO/WBD takeover.
As a local, it really sucks to lose Windham. Wish they had put more effort into expanding the trails, which may have helped draw more people to ride there. So much potential for that hill, sad to see the direction it's going with this new Investor. Won't be surprised to see it go completely private in the next year or two and push locals out of skiing there as well.
Schedule can't be released because negotiations with the venues are still ongoing. One would think this should be done while the season is still running. Was the same with UCI tough.
On another note: once there is a feeder series, I'd go that far and say Worldcups don't need a qualie at each round, because the feeder serie is the qualy. Means Worldcup 60/20 riders get invited (XY% of each continents feeder series) and a couple of wild cards. Set riders will still do a qualy for 30 /10 for finals. No protected riders because each rider is set anyway. If a wildcard rider makes it through the WC "qualies for 30/10 finals" good enough, makes up for great privateer stories.
Red Bull could set up a feeder series like that. They have the experience, are a worldwide operating company, has recources, etc.
Chances of people having a summer cleared off ready to drop their jobs and plans to go be the 90th guy, let alone have any kind of technical plan in place for wrenching/pitting/etc sounds impossible.
I was actually pretty disappointed to see how few US riders attempted to qualify at the SnowShoe World Cup considering it was only 1 of 2 on the entire continent. Can't imagine people from around the world being "on call" for a World Cup race.
I raced Les Gets as my first World Cup this year. I did not qualify, I was 7 secs off qualifying, but still in 108th place. I'd say still behind me were some people with reasonable place, while towards the absolute back of the qualy results were those who were siginficantly slower (there were not that many of those). Also the slowest guys often come from places with a lower level of DH racing, they might even be able to get enough UCI points to start because some countries are much easier for that than others. Anyway there were a lot of riders there and the waits for the lift were pretty long, but for me it was an incredible experience and it humbles you to see how much faster the best riders can get through some sections compared to me.
Bruni has always been generally unlikable for me. He has always seem spoiled and entitled. He has moments where he see like a fun decent human but then he always finds a way to remind me why I don't like him.
I remember there was talk about all the riders just not taking a run to prove a point and it was said someone would not follow. Bruni is the one who would take the run. He would say look at all the points a just gained like that would make it ok.
He was also the "champion" for the rider's union. Then he got whatever he "wanted" and dumped the cause.
How do you know this?
Seems odd to be all for riders union then less than a year later be all in on 30 riders and trying to remove all but big team riders from WC. He has not flat out said it but 99.99% sure he is not backing the union anymore. To be honest that seemed to been a lot of talk that went no where from pretty much everyone
Appreciate you re-iterating what I saw from the outside.
Amazing how the fella's passion for a union changes when you're not the pee on and your pockets are fattening.
Fox is based in Germany and lost Pascal so logistics are pretty tough for them at the moment. Hopefully they find someone to fill his role. Top notch crew of people, always stoked to have them at World Cups.
Team tin-foil?
The world cup rider's association has always been only the top 30ish men and top women riders. It was never a union of hundreds of riders and was never planned to be such. It was, from the outset, about protecting the careers of the most elite riders.
As you said, "saw from the outside", so what you saw and what is reality in this case are two different things.
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