| Subject: | RE: National/International bike racing |
| Date: | 02/16/2000 12:03 AM |
| From: | Mike Murray |
|
For many years USCF did essentially the same thing by qualifying riders for the various national championships through the state championships. This was done away with several years ago over the protestations of the state reps (and basically everyone else with a brain). I think that the driving force behind this was the coaching staff's need to justify their existence by insuring that their riders were the selected riders for higher level events. It was bad business for a rider that did not have coaching staff connections to come out of nowhere and place at nationals. This has now progressed a step further since national championships don't qualify a rider for anything more than an "atta boy". If you look at this year's selection process for the Olympics you will see that it is essentially impossible for a rider to qualify on the basis of the Olympic Trials. USAC is holding trials as a formality only. ATRA (American Track Racing Association) tried to re-institute a performance based criteria for eligibility for nationals by establishing Regional Qualifier competitions. This has not been very successful, however, since Regional Qualifiers are not well attended for several reasons: -Nationals competition means less and less as above. -The large number of pre-qualified riders that did not need to compete in Regionals. -There was no funding for Regionals and hence no prize list, promotion, etc. -The general feeling that since rules and guidelines are often ignored it would be easy for a talented rider to still get to ride at Natz without having to qualify. It is way past time that we return to a system where riders should get recognition based on performance, not on coaching staff connections. It is also time that coaching is moved away from providing service only to the already established elite and instead be available to up and coming riders on a local and regional basis. Mike Murray -----Original Message----- From: John Bravard [mailto:jbra-@pacifier.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2000 10:03 AM To: Jon Walpole Cc: ob-@topica.com Subject: Re: National/International bike racing What Jon describes here should sound very familiar to anyone who ever played Little League, Colt, or Pony League baseball. Teams play a number of "regular season" games in an area. At the end of this season, one or more teams are chosen from the better players of the league teams, and these "All-star" players go on to play tournaments against other teams in the state. Last time I checked, baseball was doing pretty good in this country. Perhaps emulating this system is worth a try. John On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Jon Walpole wrote: Did anyone read the recent articles in VeloNews about John Wordin and the Mercury pro team? I found it interesting that he complained bitterly about the lack of support he had received from USAC. In fact he claimed that the success of his team had been achieved despite USAC and that there was no feeder system to identify good young riders. He talked about how he had personally found riders like Floyd Landis and shaped them into pros without any help from USAC. I'm sure the other pro teams feel the same way. This seems like an opportunity to me, perhaps not directly at the OBRA level, but definitely at the FIAC level. In addition to establishing FIAC national calendar events, perhaps including championship events, FIAC could establish a direct relationship with the pro teams. I bet the folks who run the pro teams have lots of ideas about how such a system might work, and it would be great for young riders to be able to see a continuous path from where they are now to the pro level, even if it was a long and difficult one. In my opinion, this is an area in which USAC has failed miserably for years, and recently it has become even worse. One comment I have about feeder systems is this: no matter what level a rider is at he/she should always know what the next level is and what must be done to get there. Category systems implement this at a local level and I think the current OBRA system is fine for the cat 5 to cat 2 levels. Once you get to the point where you are winning the OBRA cat 1/2 races though there is a problem. It is not clear what the next level is, or how you can achieve it, i.e., there is a discontinuity in the pipeline. One idea I have about this is for OBRA to field a team at national calendar events (either USAC or FIAC). This way the best riders in this region can represent OBRA in bigger races. If those bigger races are part of the feeder system and selection process for the pro teams then everyone can see the whole pipeline. ... the pro teams can take it from there. I think this is more or less what happens in Europe. In Britain, at least, we had club teams, then representative teams at the district, region, and national level. Each representative team had a selection team observing riders at the level below, and a set of target events at the level above. All the riders knew what they had to do to succeed, and your success mostly just depended on how fast you were (that was my problem :-). This kind of system is cheaper to run over there because the distances are shorter to get to the big races. However, I think its even more necessary over here for the same reason. I also believe we can do it here in Oregon because we have a far better regional organization than anything I saw in Europe, and we have more money and enthusiasm. -- Jon _____________________________________________________________ Who will win the Oscars? Spout off on our Entertainment list! http://www.topica.com/lists/showbiztalk _____________________________________________________________ Who will win the Oscars? 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