Regarding safety, I thought things were good with the exception of the cones in the criterium. Cones and bike races do not mix. In the 1/2 race, those cones were flying on a couple of occasions and we are lucky there was not a crash.

Regarding the RR results, this is totally a Cycling BC/commissaire issue and completely out of the hands of Sean and K-town. It is sad that in its 1.5 yr existence the expensive and labour intensive finishline camera is not producing results in a timely and accurate fashion. With the finish on a climb in K-town there is no reason the riders cannot be sorted out quickly. The cost of the timing equipment is being passed along to the race organizers but they in return are not getting good service from cycling BC and the commissaires.

Second, overall, the weekend was a really good race experience; the TT and Crit were fun, and unlike some other events I’ve attended, the RR really felt like racing – I loved the course. It required you to be fit to hang with the pack, but also have some technical bike handling skills to deal with the descents and turns. The winner couldn’t just sit back and wait for the loops to count down – there were some attacks, etc. I am an out-of-towner, and I will definitely come back next year to this event.

Third, I too would prefer timing rather than points, but frankly, I leave that to the organizers – I am thankful for such a good event being available, and whatever they feel they have the time and ability to do is fine. Timing would provide a lot more incentive to hang in and finish the RR, though, and would make the overall title far more interesting.

Fourth, and this is aimed at Cycling BC, NOT the organizers of this event, waiting a week for the RR results is frankly ridiculous. I appreciate the difficulties when the field gets shattered like in the 4/5/Masters race, but a week???

As far as the RR results go, that is not an easy task and the most difficult of all the events to sort out. The photo finish camera system is not fool proof and still requires a lot of manual investigation once the race is finished as rider numbers are not always clear and we often get riders crossing the line in ones and twos. This leaves a big puzzle for the officials to put together at the end. There are a number of other factors in play here as well when it comes to placing riders. Please review the information just posted on the Cycling BC website regarding registration, number placement, sign-on and DNF procedures. Trying to place even a small number of racers after the road race can take a great deal of time and effort. Thanks again to all the racers and we hope to see you here next year!

I understand that this is not the most effective forum to make the comment, but hopefully someone at CyclingBC looks at this page and understands that this is not a frustration felt by just a handful of riders.

As licence holders, we contribute a significant amount of money to uphold a racing infrastructure that we expect to be comparable to that of other areas. More importantly, if we want to attract riders from other areas to our races, we are shooting ourselves in the foot by providing this sub-standard level of organization.

It has been five days since the road race and we have no results. Over five years of road racing, I have only participated in one non-BC race where the results were posted in more than 48 hours, and in that race, the finish camera had broken. I should also note that, in that case, the provincial cycling body had the courtesy to communicate the reasons for the delay in a timely manner.

Based on my conversations with other riders and the comments that I’ve read above, it’s nice to see that I’m not alone in my frustration.

Having made some criticisms, let me simply acknowledge that through my experience with Squash BC (having come from Ontario), challenges with points etc. are certainly not unique to cycling. My whining about rankings have fallen on the deaf ears of Squash BC administration for years now. Their ranking system absolutely encourages you not to play more events as your ranking is then protected. How does this grab ya: you could beat the world #1 squash player in the first round and get ‘0′ credit for it (since he happens to be from Egypt and not a Squash BC member !), make it all the way to the final and be heavily penalized for losing there and suffer a very serious net loss in ranking points all despite actually playing well and getting a good result. It’s not sane but as I said, the old folks who run these things are out of touch and don’t like to change things. Just keep speaking out in a constructive way…and play/ride, do it to the best of your ability and have fun — don’t let something lame take away the sheer enjoyment of it all.

Thanks to everyone I got to ride with hope to see you at future events !

cheers.
Imre