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Whorty

Gets free watts from the Atom ;)
Location
Wiltshire
Henceforth sandbaggers shall be referred to as "Tragic Gimps" :laugh:

As far as news of Cat Enforcement rolling out globally. No. Not heard anything yet.

I thought it was rolled out now, in so far as every race organiser has the option to turn it on. So if it's not turned on it's not Zwift, but the race owners themselves.

So my assumption now is any race where no enforcement is in play will be full of sandbaggers because their race choices will be limited.
 

Peter Salt

Bittersweet
Location
Yorkshire, UK
I thought it was rolled out now, in so far as every race organiser has the option to turn it on. So if it's not turned on it's not Zwift, but the race owners themselves.

So my assumption now is any race where no enforcement is in play will be full of sandbaggers because their race choices will be limited.
I think we were referring specifically to the ZRL which doesn't do cat enforcement yet.

It looks like they’re going to force the bike selection on us so everyone has the same, but we can choose our wheels
There goes the only advantage that I could possibly have :laugh:

I'm likely to take that week off from work so should be getting good recovery. Hoping for a PB on Bologna.
 

alex_cycles

Veteran
Location
Oxfordshire
I thought it was rolled out now, in so far as every race organiser has the option to turn it on. So if it's not turned on it's not Zwift, but the race owners themselves.

Well that's probably true of published races. But I meant compulsorily global, really. Don't think there's a cat enforcement feature yet for Clubs though. So if a club puts on a race (which can be public) that won't be Cat Enforced.

And of course ZRL still has plenty of tragic gimps in.

So my assumption now is any race where no enforcement is in play will be full of sandbaggers because their race choices will be limited.

tragic gimps :laugh:
 

Whorty

Gets free watts from the Atom ;)
Location
Wiltshire
Well that's probably true of published races. But I meant compulsorily global, really. Don't think there's a cat enforcement feature yet for Clubs though. So if a club puts on a race (which can be public) that won't be Cat Enforced.

And of course ZRL still has plenty of tragic gimps in.



tragic gimps :laugh:

There are 2 types of tragic gimps ... those that are classed as a cat (e.g. B) but then choose to race in a lower cat as it's their 'recovery' ride. This should be stopped and can be easily.

Then there are those who ride below their ability, cruise, then beat everyone the last km ... not much you can really do about those unless some form of ranking is taken into account (which would bugger me up now as I've been upping my ranking in the Tiny race series :wacko::eek::laugh:

I do wonder if one way around this is to have all cats start together, in the same pens ... then everyone will need to push to the max each race just to stay in the pack .. this will force sandbaggers over cat limits by default I would think. 3R do this kind of set up.
 

bridgy

Legendary Member
Location
Cheddar
Good point. I imagine that for sake of simplicity it'll be one leaderboard across all start times. I'll be doing the half seven races, I think.

First up is Bologna so numbers/draft is irrelevant. I'm assuming it's a straight-up TT? Only TT bikes and no sucking?

We need some sort of captain to register the team and whatnot. @bridgy?

Outside of being a team. Shall we also treat it as CC league?

Sounds like there's enough interest for us to try and put a team together - I'm happy to sign up to be team manager which means I can assign everyone to our team. I think everyone has to individually sign themselves up though
 

alex_cycles

Veteran
Location
Oxfordshire
Sounds like there's enough interest for us to try and put a team together - I'm happy to sign up to be team manager which means I can assign everyone to our team. I think everyone has to individually sign themselves up though

Yep. Once there's a team, we can join it, I think, then join the tour...

Screen Shot 2022-10-17 at 10.04.17.png


It looks like they take the best 10 results from each team for each race for the team competition. So the more the merrier.
 

alex_cycles

Veteran
Location
Oxfordshire
There are 2 types of tragic gimps ... those that are classed as a cat (e.g. B) but then choose to race in a lower cat as it's their 'recovery' ride. This should be stopped and can be easily.

Then there are those who ride below their ability, cruise, then beat everyone the last km ... not much you can really do about those unless some form of ranking is taken into account (which would bugger me up now as I've been upping my ranking in the Tiny race series :wacko::eek::laugh:

I do wonder if one way around this is to have all cats start together, in the same pens ... then everyone will need to push to the max each race just to stay in the pack .. this will force sandbaggers over cat limits by default I would think. 3R do this kind of set up.

I think the only way to deal with it is a results-based ranking system. Then, by definition, those who repeatedly win will go up, making room for the next "generation". Anything else is merely rearranging the furniture.

Talking of rankings, as a team we're 38th in C now Bob's become a C on ZP :okay:
 
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bridgy

Legendary Member
Location
Cheddar
There are 2 types of tragic gimps ... those that are classed as a cat (e.g. B) but then choose to race in a lower cat as it's their 'recovery' ride. This should be stopped and can be easily.

Then there are those who ride below their ability, cruise, then beat everyone the last km ... not much you can really do about those unless some form of ranking is taken into account (which would bugger me up now as I've been upping my ranking in the Tiny race series :wacko::eek::laugh:

I do wonder if one way around this is to have all cats start together, in the same pens ... then everyone will need to push to the max each race just to stay in the pack .. this will force sandbaggers over cat limits by default I would think. 3R do this kind of set up.

I agree with you, but because of the way the Cat system works I'd argue there's a 3rd reason for some riders who ride in a category below their true ability, and this is simply the nature of the Cat system and of most races and how they're raced.

The Cat system as we know is based on JUST 20 minute power and nothing else, but most races are decided on 1-5 minute power and/or a sprint, not 20 minute power. If you're racing sensibly, for the vast majority of races there's simply no need or reason to do high 20 minute power becuase you'll be sitting in a drafting pack and don't need to do a particularly hard 20 minute long effort. This isn't really sandbagging as such, it's just racing logically and sensibly, but it protects some riders from getting upgraded when they probably should.

Some people I'm sure go out of their way to game this part of the system too, but some who are capable of racing in a higher Cat still genuinely race as hard as they can, but simply don't exceed the Cat limits for these reasons.

That's why, if you want better categorisation (and you can't have results based systeme which most people would prefer) then you need to take more into account than 20 minute power alone. This Flamme Rouge event uses Normalised Power (NP) which is a great idea because it takes into account those high 1-2 minute power efforts which separate the top riders in a category from everyone else. E.G my 20 minute power in the last ZRL event was 273w (3.5w/kg) but NP was 324w (4.16w/kg). The Cat B winner of that race had NP of 4.53w/kg.
 
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