mike.m-@obra.org
Ernie Conway, E-Racer [mailto:ou-@consystency.net]wrote:
"As noted at one point on the listserve in June/July there was something
like
35 days of continuous/daily racing. That is a lot of events and coordination
and sometimes some flexbility has to take place."
There actual is a 78 day period where there is at least on bike race in
Oregon each day. The schedule currently has 274 separate days of racing.
The days are distributed as follow; mountain bike 44, road 173 (single road
18, circuit 64, stage day road 20, single day crit 33, TT 20), track 47.
There are 112 days of racing on weekends and 162 days of racing on weekdays,
which includes Fridays of some weekend events. Most weekend days have at
least 2 races, generally a mountain bike and a road event. There are
several days were there are 3 or even 4 races on the same day.
In general race organizers do a pretty good job of trying to avoid having
similar types of events on the same day. This makes sense since their event
will suffer if the potential market for participants is spread over 2 or
more events. There have been a couple of examples this year where this has
not occurred. Both of those have involved scheduling a criterium that
conflicts with a State Championship event on the track. Both of the road
events in these cases were events added on to the schedule well after the
fall scheduling. I suspect in both cases the organizers of the road events
were trying to squeeze their events into a crowded schedule and they felt
that they would rather compete with a track event than another road event.
Unfortunately, since nearly all track riders also ride the road, both the
track and the road events will be diminished when this happens.
People have called for OBRA to "fix" this problem by limiting the number of
race days, the number of events or by giving dates exclusively. I am not
sure that any limitation would really be a good idea since it is probably
better to let the market make the decision about what is the "best"
schedule. In addition, we really have little way of preventing someone form
holding a race. The most we could do would be to withhold OBRA services
forcing them to look elsewhere.
Mike Murray