I completely understand your reservations and it is valid.
race organisers have a massive problem to get full road closure.
1) cost
2) approval
the cost issue is a big one for the 99er organiser because it’s a school that owns and runs the event. They mitigate the risk somewhat through the very early start and the route being out into the countryside.
I started in A and we didn’t have a big problem with riders staying in the lane probably due to losing about 20 riders in the first crash at 1,5km. So bunch size does help.
but when we caught % they didn’t allow us smooth passage through and forced us in to the oncoming lane. Fortunately this was on Adderly Road which was closed but B was chasing us down and they started only 2 or 3 min behind us. They don’t make it across but took a minute out of us. If they had caught us then we’d have had a problem keeping everyone in the left hand lane.
This problem occurs in many road races. Often riders with lower indexes drop back to ride in slower groups to help their buddies improve their seeding so that come DC, they can smack talk for KOTAS. So slower groups end up catching the faster groups and chaos ensues.
personally I’d like to see this practice stamped out because it creates a lot of problems come The Fun Ride World Champs with okes and gals being seeded in groups they can just about hang onto. The psychology of this is quite interesting and there’s probably a few PhD studies in getting to an understanding of what drives people to cheat in this manner to achieve a good FRWC seeding while not actually being fast enough to be there. Many of these riders do t seem to have more than a few years of cycling under the belt. Last year in 1A there were plenty of 2 xFRWC finishers in the bunch! How!?! Back in the 80’s and 90’s your seeding was updated once a year , in August , before the new fun ride season began. They took your Argust time and you were grouped and there you stayed until you improved your Next Argust time. The. They introduced the index system and you were allowed one re-seed during the season other than your Argust finish timing time driven seeding.
today, you are reseeded after every race. Pick tour race appropriately and you can jump from Z to B within a couple of races if you have a buddy or 2 helping you. Fast but they haven’t learned the ropes and bunch riding skills. Still totally dominated by time pressure with no big picture thinking and certainly lacking a safety mindset.
e.g. during the 99er I loved my spot in the bunch and who I wanted around me based on their similar riding style and fitness that I could determine from pedalling and overall smootheness. The jerky chaps I steered clear of. Except there was this one box who continually insisted on pushing up on my left hand side despite me sitting on the yellow line. At one point, somewhere around 66km he does this again but this time there’s no shoulder and his mate decides to push me on my right to slow me down and tjunes me to give his buddy space to Join the line.
Well someone can just FRO and he’s lucky I didn’t nudge him Into the ditch for endangering not just Myself but the rest of the bunch behind me. I left him out there in the dirt but it’s this kind of unacceptable behaviour that is endemic in the present road race community. They have t paid their dues and the system has made it easy for them to climb the ladder too fast without learning the ropes. And hence road racing is crazy dangerous today.
now on approvals, sure they could get full road closure approval but probably only for a limited time like maybe 9am. This will help but it will cost the organisers a lot more money and that means raising the entry fee which may reduce the numbers. Remember a lot of the event structure is build in experience of what worked , what can work in future and how much it will cost. I’m sure every event organisers first prize from the CoCT is full road closure but it’s just not possible to shut down large parts of the city every weekend for bicycle races when we already have a massive congestion problem.
what is achievable is maybe more time between the groups departure and definitely stamping out behaviour of A index riders dropping back to help their D and E indexed buddies. The “how” is a problem but as we have seen, wee have a morally corrupt society where on the one hand we scream at drunk drivers killing cyclists but leave a bicycle race after 3 beers and definitely over the limit. The only way to fix this is to reduce the number of times seeding runs are conducted
