Quote:
Originally Posted by VxZeroKnots
There is no written rulebook, it's pretty seat of the pants rule wise. In previous years missing a check was a DQ, this year I guess it was a penalty which I'm sure was covered in the riders meeting but if you've ever been to a KOM riders meeting they are a bit hard to follow. Just look at some of the top five pro rider's instagram posts and read between the lines to get an idea of the "organization"
IMO no one finished that race 100% but they had to award results to someone...
In three years this was my first time not finishing and honestly I think it's kind of BS that anyone who didn't ride all the course and get all the checks would be considered a finisher. No one does this shit for participation trophies.
I love the event and consider any personal failures incurred during participation my responsibility but the event could go a long ways with some simple changes to make things more clear to the competitors.
Is James Flynn the youngster riding for Moto Center? If so we rode most of this race together both the night and the long race and made the same dumb mistakes. He was also pitted next to us at the Rev Limiter. Cool kid and cool family, if he sticks with it he'll make a name for himself.
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Thanks a ton for the insight, I do appreciate it. I definitely had looked at riders posts, and most just said that they had nothing to say, which indicated to me they were not happy with some aspects. Max Gerston made it pretty clear he would have liked to say some things, but he mostly kept it to himself when getting his 3rd place trophy.
It does put declaring a winner in a weird spot when you have someone miss a check but ride the "entire" course, but have others who made the check but didn't get as far. It raises a bunch of what ifs, and even during the live coverage Jimmy Lewis said that any rider who completes all checks is ahead of a rider who does not (with no mention of penalties). But then again Cody was the only one who made it out for the (shortened) final loop so he surely made more checks than anyone else, but I think a 15 minute penalty was generous looking at that section that was missed.
A couple guys in my riding group went out and did it, and I still need to get the run down from them. One of them actually won the long race for amateurs so it would be interesting to get their take. It seems like it could go a long way to have some rules written down beforehand and not have sections of the course running so close to each other with people racing by GPS. Jimmy says he'd not trying to trick anyone, but it's easy to see how the check got missed and how people ended up backward on the course with how it was laid out. But navigation is the name of the game.
And yes, James Flynn is young gun riding the Moto Center XC250. If he continues at the current rate, he'll be dicing with the pros soon enough. I don't know them personally, but rode with him and his dad in a big group about a year and a half ago just before his first season in A class in AMRA. He was pretty good then, but his skills have skyrocketed since, and now he's battling for top 10 overalls locally with some very talented guys. Definitely a cool family from what I experienced, as well