ROAG & Hill2Hill

[Bikalot]

brettAS please read the thread and comment on the relevant postings

 

[BrettAS]

Toti 69er was our first ROAD experience. what a shambles!! despite loud assurances that ROADIES are organised, we were unpleasantly surprised. what we learned was that we have to take a more "active" role in determining the procedure for registration at road races.

 

At Golovane, the power cuts really put massive pressure on the whole registration process.

 

what people cant seem to understand is that ROAG is responsible for ADMIN ONLY!! it is the EVENT ORGANISERS reponsibility to ensure there is power, backup power, venue etc. ROAG just does the work.

 

we are finding is that people are relying more and more on ROAG to solve ALL their problems. riders are asking the ROAG ladies milions of questions at registration thereby delaying the whole process. the girls are there JUST to take entries and hand out stickers. not tell you how much single track there is on the course or where the toilets are etc!

 

Riders are also falling into bad habits. they leave / lose / forget timing chips and number boards and then argue when ROAG asks them to pay for a replacement. RE ISSUING boards and chips adds unnceccesary time. because of the automated process now, riders are arriving later and later at registration. in the old days, riders arrived at least an hour before the start. now we are finding 70-80% of riders are arriving half an hour before registration closes. the solution is to have more ROAG girls at registration, but this costs money! if we increase the number of ROAG personnell, the rider will be paying ultimately.

 

so, the best solution is for everybody to bring their brains to registration, make sure they have ALL their equipment, and to arrive early.

[Aicorner]

Welcome to the world of race admin - race organisers have had to deal with cyclists leaving their brains (and manners) at home (and with power cuts etc etc) since races were organised.  ROAG is a good idea but you have to meet all the challenges, not just the ones that are easy to solve.

[BrettAS]

so it seems.

 

thanks for the encouragement.

[GTfan]

Brett, while you're here, I'm still a little bit confuzzed as to how the whole seeding and batching works.. unfortunately I don't get the chance to ride in these races every weekend, but how does it all work to work my way up in the batches??

[BrettAS]

at the moment the ROAG seeding is an average of ALL the ROAG (only)events you have done. if you go to www.roag.co.za , login and go to your MY ROAG, you can look at the seeding index.

 

we will be changing the calculation before Eston to be an average of the BEST 3 ROAG events. This will then be ongoing, and the index will be revised after each event.

 

in the next month or so, we should have access to other event organisers data. we are hoping to tie up a relationship in the near future. this will mean ROAG data will be shared with other organisations and we will have data from Gauteng and other places as well.

 

remember the ROAG index is NOT a ranking. there may be some people ahead or behind you that have acquired their index from shorter or longer distances.

 

hope this helps.

[GTfan]

Thanks