About the 50 km-rule : A few weeks ago you defended this rule because otherwise no one would train on sprint (making sprint as important as flat, mountain...) ... today you completely change your mind ... not nice for the sprint-trainers who hired such a trainer BECAUSE of the 50-km rule
Indeed!
Congratulations, Il Impulsivo, you amaze me every day again.
- You now managed to reduce the totality of final sprints in races during one season from 17% of the (recalculated) distance, to 8%. This is now only a sideskill, while some weeks ago, you were the one that defended sprint as an equal skill to the others, which in the beginning looked kind of strange, but after some reconsidering, I even liked your approach.
=> Total flat is now 31%, hill 20%, mountain 27%, downhill 13% and sprint 8% (recalculated %tages): this means that there is a big discrepancy between those skills and if you have to choose training from now on: mountain and flat seem the only proffitable ones.
- All owners of cyclists who were trained on the sprint skill are ripped off. And most of them can't change their trainer on short terms, because it would mean a financial catastrophe to them.
- The cyclist specially bought because their sprint-skill was at least high enough in combination with their other skills (min. 3 was my criteria for buying cyclists) are clearly overrated now. It seems I paid way too much for thisk kind of guys in the past, since their advantage for the average race speed is now decreased significantly!
- You change this during a big tour and in the middle of a season! All cyclists for these and the next tours are carefully selected and planned ahead (with effort, effect on fitness for the next 3-4 weeks, participation or not). With the new info, we would probably have made other choices and even have to adapt our well-planned race/tour strategy.
- All material selection is influenced in the upcoming races. What's even worse, we didn't have time to adapt our material selection to the new circumstances for the recalculated race.
To give some examples: rear wheel 4 and 2 are special sprint-wheels. They are at this moment (new rules) only proffitable in 3 races and in none races respectively (please skip rear wheel 2 from the list
). Other gear has disappeared as well for the upcoming races. This must be a sign to you too that the sprint skill is now underestimated way too much.
- It would be far better to first listen to all kinds of strategies/solutions/proposals on the conferences to solve a bug first, instead of tweaking and fippling and try-and-error. And then, off course, I do not mean listen to the first 3 complaints or suggestions, but waiting for at least 3 days, maybe a week, before implementing changes to the race engin, or a new set of rules. In this way YOU and also other have enough time to consider all side-effects of it.
- Now also the flat intermediate sprints are only 1km and this is a real joke. You could as well skip it entirely then and just see who comes first at that point on the intended skills. Imagine sprints are at 60km/h and the ones with 1 sprint skill make 61km/h, the ones with 3 make 63km/h (numbers and calculation are purely fictive off course), then on 1 km this only makes a difference of 2 seconds!!! (57 seconds versus 59 seconds).
=> Maybe the 3km (or 1km or whatever) should've been the same for all cyclists (so based on sprint skill for all) during the intermediate sprints, in this way solving the gap issue between sprinters and those who are hilling 4,5km or mountaining 6km. Or the average speed on sprint should be different for mountain sprints then for flat sprints, which also seems more realistic to me.
- The gap still exists between selected riders for the sprints and the other, but is reduced by 3. It is still an ERROR that my mountain sprinter has to wheel in yesterday's race 4km sprint and all others 8km mountain (or 6km hill) instead of that. The effect is not that big anymore, and some of the better cyclists will now mangle in the top-5-10 too, despite not being selected for sprints. All cyclists should have exactly the same number of kilometers, there is no other (good) solution.
- Changing deadlines of transfers should either be 1-2 hours (if site is only unavailable for a while), or 24 hours. Everything in between is unfair.
Most important conclusions so far:-
There was a bug for the intermediate mountain sprints, but your fix is not the ideal one. You only
reduce the error, but still it is there (1km SP versus 2km M and 1,5km H, and this per intermediate (mountain) sprint).
- The 50km change to FL/4 change is so significant that this needs to be a change that you
announce this season and execute next season, not from yesterday to today. This is, IF you still are sure this is necessary for the game because you now reduce the sprint skill to something that has even less influence than a few levels of steering/bravery.
- You are too impulsive.