We all agree seeding or batch starts are needed and seemingly a combination of both. The problem is universal though. Unfortunately we are at the forefront of this and the situation is unique to South Africa as we have the LARGEST participation base of any country in the world. And unfortunately we cannot simply adapt a system. It's doesn't help we go for ROAG up here in Gauteng because: 1. Only Three / Four races use the ROAG system. 2. Rider pool is too small with 80% KZN based riders. 3. 90% + of Gauteng MTB races here use the SStiming system with built in timing chips and not Mr Price chip / Roag board. 4. We already created boards with chips as unique identities for riders and have handed out / sold thousands of boards and thus can?t adopt Roag?s system. NATIONAL MTB SERIES Advantages of our system: 1. It's National. 2. 12 Events, catering for three main disciplines of the sport. 3. Less social, more racing orientated, courses harder than most races. 4. Official SA-MTB / CSA approved NATIONAL MARATHON SERIES, for seeding at top events like 94.7 etc. 5. Many Clubs / Provinces allocate colours according to National MTB series placing. 6. National MTB Series is points based not time or position. 7. Points are calculated according to the difficulty of the race, your time behind the leader, based on a sliding scale of the top 70% of riders behind the winner. So not just position, ie. you are awarded more points the closer in time you are behind the leader and less points the further in time you are behind the leader, but not added like the tour de france, as staging events work differently and only on time. 8. Bigger rider pool (we currently have 10 000 participants and 40 000 strong database) but still need more events to increase it even further - constraint to 7 events because of budget. 9. National pool of riders - most widely covered geographical area. We recently added the Nissan Provincial series to our pool of events, which increased our events to 17 per annum and will increase our rider base even further. We are happy to incorporate the Roag event results into our Seeding system, but it is not that simple as Brett quite rightly said as we can not verify the identity of riders. ID numbers doesn?t get captured at most events, because it is too long and time consuming and capturing errors occur. It may be an option to use license numbers as a unique ID, but MTB riders will have to license in order for this to work. Fritz Pienaar2009-06-22 14:18:11
