It's often apparent in the world of time-trials that the "fast" courses pull a huge number of competitors, yet so called Sporting Courses (Spoco for short) fail to deliver these full fields.
It's an interesting one, because in my books, a time-trial is a race against the clock. It doesn't matter if it's a fast dual carriage-way, hill-climb or 40mile hilly circuit. It's the latter of these which really appear to be suffering in terms of competitor numbers (and hill climbs... but that's a couple of months yet!), has the time-trialling mentality to just do 10's gone a bit far?
There's certain races, such as the Beacon Mountain Time-Trial, which I competed in earlier in the year which attar act a large field. There's some hard climbs in this, enough to put off many a time-triallist, yet because of the Beacon's classic status there's plenty of riders out there challenging themselves.
The Rudy Project Series really seems to suffer though, with round 5 having 17 senior male entrants. You'd have thought a national series would have more numbers? What's more to the point is that this event covers two laps of the first loop in the Beacon event, the big climbs are missed out. Perhaps the Rudy's are two spread across the country in both terms of time and distance to attract any but the most commmited to each round? Or is it the fact the entry dates are a good few weeks in advance (I would have ridden had I got an entry on time)?
Which brings me to the BTTC at the start of September, the field sizes are tiny. Apart from the masters event, which isn't run under UCI rules, the biggest field of any category is 35 riders. The main event, Senior male has 26 entrants and in the junior category there's not one single female.
So what's everyone doing!? It appears that a huge amount of the 30+ seniors opt in for the Masters category, whether this is because they don't want to change their bike position for just one event (I keep mine UCI all season), or maybe it's because they've more chance of medalling in their age category, frankly I don't know. There's a serious lack of road-men in the senior category too, the three riders from Team Sky are there to chase the medals, as are the evergreen Hutchinson and Botrill, but this type of event suits a road rider down to the ground, so where are they all?
Is it again a case of the entry deadline being too far in advance? Or maybe there's a lack of media attention and hype in the lead up to the event? Certainly the event in South Wales last year had plenty of information out there before hand. Perhaps it's too late in the season? Tester's aren't as prone to this as road-men, who are always eager early March; but have riders gone into hibernation by September?
Or do we go back to my original statement, are time-triallists scared of not doing a set distance event where they know they've not got a PB to chase? Is it a whole paradigm shift of the tester's mentality to go for a position instead? After all, you're placed at the end of an Open 10.....
http://www.northamptondca.org.uk/ListofRiders.pdf
