Guys, look, Cat 4 isn't for getting podiums. It is for learning to race. 10 and done. Keep Cat 4 a beginner race, so the beginners have fun.
If you've got more than one season back there, even if you are slow, you're not a beginner anymore, you just suck. #toughlove You gotta work at it.
MABRAcross Public Service Announcement from In The Crosshairs on Vimeo.
didn't Ctodd write a song about it?
4 comments:
Popular theme but this is a solution looking for a problem. I just clicked on 5 names that were in the top 10 Cat 4 at NBX and 4 out of the 5 had no results prior to 2012 and the most races any of those 4 had was 8. This included the winner.
Yup. That's the nature of the Cat 4 races. There are other rules too (winning X number of races with X number of riders).
There is an old saying on the road: No such thing as a fast Cat 3.
What does it mean?
The talented beginners upgrade out of 5/4 quickly, if you're fast enough to win a Cat 4 race you're fast enough to compete at the front of the cat 3 field and it doesn't take long to move to a cat 2.
Old saying but some accuracy.
Top 5 of the Cat 4 races would be at the front end of the field in the Cat 3 race... usually.
It has been a problem. But will the solution work? Who knows. I think promoters are going to need to add a Cat 3 35+ field. I'd suggest ditching the Cat 4 35+ and replacing it with a Cat 3 35+ race (on days they run the 4 races separately).
No one likes a sandbagger.
I'm not agreeing with you here. And there already is a 35+ Cat 3 race. It's the one you do.
But if this really is a problem for anybody (who?) the solution would be to make Cat 4 back into "citizens" racing. Instead of charging $50 enter the elite race, make the Cat 4 $50 and the elite $25. Then you have a built in incentive to upgrade. It's totally fair because nobody should be paying the $50 entry-level fee for long anyway. They just upgrade, which is a sort of frequent flyer senior status, and reap the benefits of reduced entries. Just like we used to charge citizens twice as much as licensed racers.
I'm afraid NBX may not be representative here. I randomly chose another race: Canton Cat 4 35+. For the top 5 riders:
Total Races: 30,43,20,18,54
Top 10s: 10,10,15,5,13
That is as far as I went, but IMO, they should have all been 3s long ago.
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