A wet sportive…

The whole “it’s a race, no it
The whole “it’s a race, no it isn’t a race” debate is pointless. The only thing EVERY rider MUST do is ride in a manor that is suitable to the environment around them at the time – weather, road conditions, other riders, spectators, pedestrians – and by best endeavours not be the cause of an accident.

At the end of the day we all want to get from start to finish in one piece and achieve whatever personnel goal we’ve set ourselves, for some it’s just going to be to get round, for others it’ll be setting a fast time, for others it’ll be racing their club mates. We’re all different and are motivated differently.

bikeboy76 wrote:Thank you

bikeboy76 wrote:

Thank you Matt Eaton for saying what I have always though. Sportives ARE races, they are a mass time trial event open to the public, there are always going to be people trying to go as fast as possible including me. This is what is so attractive about closed road events. I am sick of hearing this ‘its not a race’ rubbish. True you don’t need to be a Dick (channeling Adam Hills) but people will be going fast.

I am 37 years old, I weight 90kg and my hip bone is two inches lower than other guys my height; I have spent a large part of my life playing tennis and white water kayaking; I will NEVER be as fast or naturally talented at cycling as I want to be, or you might be. This Cat 4, ‘find yourself a race’ bollocks is bollocks.* Not everyone can take part in even the lowest level of competitive cycling.
Sportives are there to cater to exactly the type of knobs/people you are complaining about. There are tens of thousands of keen amateur cyclists looking for an occasional challenge who can only do a couple of events a year because they are real people with jobs and families and lives to live. I have not enough time to cycle as I want because I have to live the rest of my life and I don’t have the time or money or equipment or fitness or time or money to pretend that I am some semi-pro. So I do these things a couple of times a year and moan on the internet about how I want to be better and will overshoes help or not because I know I have very little talent but try my best.

My definition of going my fastest 5 hours for Sunday could well be slower than someone capable cruising around in 4; if Lee Dixon cut me up I might be fuming whilst he wonders what I am complaining about because he is not exerting himself. The only grounds for complaint you have is with the organisers for not being more rigourous in their start waves; but how can they be with 20,000+ to start, most or which wouldn’t mind a slot as early as possible.

In summary SPORTIVES ARE RACES. If you have paid to enter a timed event from point A to point B and you don’t think you are in a race, you have made a mistake. If you want to blow hard Glynr36 please post your Cat4 results.

*Swearing; if its good enough for Stephen Fry, its good enough for you. – Me.

Well said! I hate the elitist attitude among many racers (and club riders) that you aren’t a real cyclist if you don’t compete in the evening TT down the bypass or zoom along the lanes in your peleton all in the same jersey every Sunday.
I pushed myself on RideLondon, really pleased with the time I got. Was I racing? Not sure, I wasn’t racing any particular person, but I wasn’t bimbling along either and was very conscious of my time/progress. I’d love to spend £5k on a bike and spend all week riding it, but I don’t have the time or the money.

oozaveared wrote:
Ride London

oozaveared wrote:

Ride London aside I am in two minds about sportives. It’s great that people want to be out on their bikes and people do like the sportive format. On the other hand its a “for profit” cycle event the proponderence of which in Surrey has got the council speaking of regulating all such events including the trad club run. It would probably be better if people joined their local cycling club and the money used to organise rides that way and then at least the money would stay in the sport not get siphoned off by carpetbaggers that may or may not be involved in the sport but are involved in making a profit.

What’s wrong with people making a profit from cycling? My LBS makes a profit … at least I hope it does because I want it to be there next year and the year after that. Bike component manufacturers make a profit too, as do the makers of all those dodgy “sports specific nutrition”, etc, etc. Profits enable R&D and make tomorrow’s products even better and usually cheaper too.

Sportives are an ‘event’ and the organising of events is a notoriously risky venture. A lot of work needs to be done (and money put up front) well before they see a return. If the paying public makes the event a success then the organisers are entitled to make a profit. I’m not interested in sportives myself but I applaud the organisers of them who have certainly contributed to making cycling more popular in the UK.

Matt eaton wrote:
Let’s not

Matt eaton wrote:

Let’s not beat around the bush, sportives are races. There are people at every sportive who want to get the best time and ‘win’ the sportive. In the origonal Gran Fondo format prizes were even given. Sportive organisers carefully avoid race status, but folks are definately racing. Just like marathon running a lot of people do it as a personal challenge and don’t really consider themselves as racers, but its still a race.

Very true. The lads I usually ride with, despite us all putting down identical estimated times, had different start times but we all went out with every intention of smashing it if we could.

We had trained hard for this ride. We felt strong and wanted to take advantage of the closed roads. We weren’t out for a Sunday bimble.

We all took it easy in places for safeties sake but we were, not to put to fine a point on it, racing each other.

Not big, not clever but true nevertheless.

I can go for a countryside spin anytime, but closed road riding? Rarer than a rare thing in this country.

Before anyone says “go Crit racing”, it simply isn’t the same.

oozaveared wrote:glynr36

oozaveared wrote:

glynr36 wrote:

The problem with sportives is a huge majority treat them like a race, and therefore ride like dicks, as thats what they think is needed.
The fact that I saw on twitter RL allegedly had a podium sums it all up, and many cynical tweets with a ‘finish line’ shot of a sprint titled, ‘number one sportive-ist’ too.
The sooner people treat a sportive for what it is, which is a bike ride with a few thousand other people where someone else has planned your ride, signed it all for you, and provided feeds so you don’t need to worry about anything but riding the route the better.

And to be absolutely fair whilst the organisers state that they are not a race (for legal reasons) They don’t stop people racing. They encourage it.

Very different to a club run.

Ride London aside I am in two minds about sportives. It’s great that people want to be out on their bikes and people do like the sportive format. On the other hand its a “for profit” cycle event the proponderence of which in Surrey has got the council speaking of regulating all such events including the trad club run. It would probably be better if people joined their local cycling club and the money used to organise rides that way and then at least the money would stay in the sport not get siphoned off by carpetbaggers that may or may not be involved in the sport but are involved in making a profit.

Let’s not beat around the bush, sportives are races. There are people at every sportive who want to get the best time and ‘win’ the sportive. In the origonal Gran Fondo format prizes were even given. Sportive organisers carefully avoid race status, but folks are definately racing. Just like marathon running a lot of people do it as a personal challenge and don’t really consider themselves as racers, but its still a race.

As far as the merits of sportives go, my view has softened a little. Having someone mark out a nice route and provide food and drink at suitable intervals along the way is probably worth £20.

I think that any local authority trying to regulate club runs is going to get into difficulty so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. After all its just a bunch of friends that have decided to go for a bike ride together; perhaps a regular occurance but not an organised ‘event’. Unless they outlaw cycling altogether I don’t see how they can stop people going for bike rides.

Re the faster/slower riders
Re the faster/slower riders thing – while the wave organisation may well have been pretty good what you had there were huge numbers of people puncturing so finding themselves “out of group” and then trying to chase back on or to make up for lost time hence (potentially) charging through slower groups.

To be fair, the vast majority of riding I saw was pretty decent and certainly on the Newlands Corner descent (which we hit right in the middle of a torrential downpour) everyone eased up and used the full width of the road, lots of calling “on your right”, “on your left”, “passing” etc which was good.

Although early on in London some idiot riding a full on TT bike tried to join our paceline and we had to tell him to sod off. Not sure how he’d got the bike past the marshals – the literature was very clear that tri-bars etc weren’t allowed.

Wasn’t having a guy down on his tri-bars in a paceline at 28mph in the rain, no chance.

step-hent wrote:The water

step-hent wrote:

The water wasn’t nearly as much a problem as the standard of riding – lots of the ‘everyone else can go f* themselves’ attitude

Unfortunately something that seems increasingly common across all levels of sportive-type events, from this, to something like the SkyRide.

A simple lack of common courtesy for others on the road, and it does work both ways – people trying to go inappropriately fast, or groups spread across the entire road pootling round at a crawl paying no attention to their surroundings/swerving across the road in front of others without even a brief glance over the shoulder.

Dare I say it but how about
Dare I say it but how about using services like Strava to estimate riders times for them?

If the organiers could get data about a riders average speed and the average length of thier rides they could do a relitivly simple calculation to estimate their time over 100 miles. They could add in elevation data etc. to get a really accurate figure but this is probably overkill. There seems to be a lot of data out there that could be used in this way if it could be gathered together. Even if they could provide a way for riders to do the calculation themselves it would be better than just taking a guess.