Mike Murray
There actually is a very large amount of data available. The OBRA database
can tell you how many current female members there are, 766. It can tell
you how many have a CCX category designation, 594. It can tell you how many
are CCX only members, 145. It can break those women member down into age
groups. Salient to this discussion is that there are 18 60+ women total in
the OBRA membership. Some of those are people who really aren't competing in
races to any degree. Candi would be an example. Only half of them have a
CCX category designation. Basically we can parse out piles of information
from the membership database. In addition, we have data on all the
competitors in all the bike races that OBRA was associated with going back
several years. We can tell how many turned out for any given race. Using
historical patterns you can guess a predicted participation for any
different category/age/gender delineated field. Grossly looking at these
numbers my guess is that if there was a women's 60+ CCX field at the larger
participation events there would be 2-4 competitors in that group at most.
At smaller participation events there may be none. There is, of course, the
possibility that there is a large and untapped market of 60+ female CCX
racers out there that have not joined because to date we have not offered
that product. Somehow I think that is unlikely.
Mike Murray
From: obra-bounces@list.obra.org [mailto:obra-bounces@list.obra.org] On
Behalf Of Melissa Boyd
Sent: Saturday, September 21, 2013 00:30
To: OBRA e-mail; cmurray@obra.org; Kenji Sugahara; Brad Ross; bonnie
rosenfeld; OBRA Women
Subject: [OBRA Chat] Masters Women CX Participation
Bonnie, thanks for raising the question about masters women's age groups!
Since there didn't seem to be a lot of hard data floating around, I took the
2012 Masters Women CX BAR list and sorted it by age. Here are the age groups
these women will fall into for 2014:
35-39: 40 women (estimated)*
40-44: 44 women
45-49: 36 women
50-54: 20 women
55-59: 17 women
60+: 2 women
* The 35-39 group is probably similar in size to the 40-44, but cannot be
properly counted given the 2-year gap from 2012 to 2014.
I hope this will be useful to the CX organizers as they make plans for next
year.
NOTE: The list does not include women who raced but didn't earn BAR points,
women who raced with 1-day licenses, masters women who rode in non-masters
categories (Beginners, SS, etc), or women who may race in 2013 or 2014 but
didn't race in 2012. However, it is probably still representative of the
general age distribution for CX masters women.
Hope this is helpful!
Melissa