2024 World Champs road races. - BBC2

[cycleruk]

Women's - Sat' 28th - BBC2 - 14.00
Men's - Sun 29th - BBC2 - 14.40 >> Also advertised on Red Button = 09.30. ?


The Men's Time Trial was on BBC2 last Sunday and is worth watching even just for last 1/2 hour.
Will be on catch-up:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m ... time-trial

[rjb]

thankyou thats the weekend sorted.

[pjclinch]

Losing the BBC2 aspect so just the races in general, the Mixed TTT was really good yesterday, and today, Hup Cat!

Pete.

[rareposter]

Cracking races for the Junior Men and Women.
Conditions are thoroughly miserable, it's absolutely soaking wet.

[cycleruk]

Just caught the final of the Junior Men's race on Eurosport.
Pity BBC2 haven't shown all the races this week.
Sometimes live racing can be found on YouTube.

[TrevA]

Cracking races for the Junior Men and Women.
Conditions are thoroughly miserable, it's absolutely soaking wet.

Just found out that the junior Swiss girl who crashed, Muriel Furrer, has died of her injuries.

[pwa]

Cracking races for the Junior Men and Women.
Conditions are thoroughly miserable, it's absolutely soaking wet.

Just found out that the junior Swiss girl who crashed, Muriel Furrer, has died of her injuries.

Very sad.

[cycleruk]

Finally a dry race for the men.
More interest on who was going to come second?
But everyone on their last legs by the end.

[rjb]

It looked touch and go at one point but the chasers couldn't get organised. What a ride by Pog.

[Jezrant]

That young Swiss woman's death casts a terrible shadow over the whole event. In the absence of race radios, couldn't there be a way of tracking all racers via individual GPS units monitored through some central command operated by the teams and/or the race organisers for safety's sake?

[mattheus]

It looked touch and go at one point but the chasers couldn't get organised. What a ride by Pog.

Yes, I was on tenterhooks for about 80km. In all that time he never had a comfortable buffer, not with 8 (or more) top riders behind him.

And yes, the battle for medals was also intriguing, constant attacks, including a spell when GB's Onley looked in with a very good shout!

Fantastic race. So glad I watched it "properly" (on catch-up, admittedly.) Oh, ok I admit I fast-forwarded thru 100km-or so!

[djnotts]

Pog is a class act - that was, as one commentator put it, "audacious". Mental and physical dominance. Irrespective of any "doubts", one of the greats.

[andrew_s]

That young Swiss woman's death casts a terrible shadow over the whole event. In the absence of race radios, couldn't there be a way of tracking all racers via individual GPS units monitored through some central command operated by the teams and/or the race organisers for safety's sake?

GPS is a receive-only system.
Most will log their positions into memory for later analysis or upload to Strava, but sending the positions out for real time monitoring needs additional hardware.

There are two options: transmit to satellite (such as Inmarsat or Iridium), or send via the mobile phone network.
Using satellites means relatively bulky devices that would be fit to bike (what about bike changes?), and a relatively costly subscription.
Using the phone network means, as we all know, fairly common dead spots where there's no signal.

In both cases, reporting positions back is likely to have considerable gaps or delays.
If you've ever spent any time watching the dots crawl along the route in the LeTour.fr racecenter map, you'll know how common it is for individual riders to vanish, only to reappear several kilometers further on, and Lachlan Moreton's satellite track of his ride around Australia for yesterday had 3 occasions with about an hour between reported positions.

It would probably be more practical to move the timing chips they use from the bike to the riders ankle (as is done for triathlon), and have failure to register at a timing point trigger an automatic search alert.

The false alarm rate would be the make or break for whatever is used.

[mattheus]

As Andrew posts ^ , there are many issues. GPS is not a 100% reliable magic wand.

Do note that they have trackers on the senior races [not sure which], but that doesn't mean a rider having the same crash in those races would still be alive.

[rareposter]

It would probably be more practical to move the timing chips they use from the bike to the riders ankle (as is done for triathlon), and have failure to register at a timing point trigger an automatic search alert.

Doesn't work for sprint finishes. Or indeed any close finish. The transponders need to be in the same position on each bike and "up the front" in order to measure finishing position.
In triathlon it only needs to be accurate to a second or two and the athlete is running with their bike over the mat in the transition zone prior to starting their run.

Also, why is tracking being discussed anyway?! Tracking wasn't the issue with the incident. It was seen on TV, there were motorbike marshals followed by team car and medics with the rider almost immediately.

There absolutely needs to be further discussions on rider safety and what the riders, the organisers, the UCI etc all need to do to improve it but rider tracking is irrelevant to that incident.