Monday, March 21, 2011
Large pro teams in UK cycle races...
Reading reports and results from UK cycle races over the weekend. Team Raleigh full 8 riders in Evesham Vale and finish 1-2-3-4 http://www.britishcycling.org.uk/road/article/20110321-Report--Evesham-Vale-RR-0 and Motorpoint finish 1-2-3-4-5 in the Peter Young memorial http://www.britishcycling.org.uk/events/details/38022/Hounslow-Peter-Young-Memorial-Road-Race. While both of these are decent National B events, they are still essentially grass roots races albeit for the slightly better or more ambitious rider. While such complete domination by the pros is impressive I can't be the only one who thinks this is little sad. If there's no big races on over a weekend then of course pros should be doing Nat B races - and its one of attractions of cycling that anyone can race against much better riders and that a guy like me has 'raced' against Cavendish, Backstedt, Elliot and Olympic gold medallists etc etc over the years - but do they really need to put whole team in just one race? Four Raleighs and four Motorpoint in each race would have surely been much better. A smaller team like Twenty3c-Orbea was happy enough to sensibly split their riders between the Peter Young and the Wally Gimber road races.
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Be interested to know how many races those teams promote in a year too... they're happy to come line up 8 abreast and take the top 4-5 placings (frankly I'd be a bit embarrassed to do that if I were them, but that's another story) but what do they give back to grassroots racing? Just curious.
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