More on changing the date of Masters track or other races

Candi Murray/Oregon Bicycle Racing Assn

2003-08-04



Another problem to this whole debate and is the one that I have been most

concerned with is that OBRA does not have enough officials that are willing

to work this weekend to do 3 events. If I cannot staff officials should I

cancel events? or reschedule?

Candi







-----Original Message-----

From: mike.m-@obra.org [mailto:mike.m-@obra.org]

Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 9:40 AM

To: OBRA Remailer

Subject: RE: Re: [OBRA Chat] Should I change the dates for the Masters

Track





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



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