Drafting in Triathlon? What’s the Big Problem…?
Drafting has been a constant, and highly annoying issue for our entire sport since it first took off in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. We would not be stretching the truth to say that at practically every major non-drafting triathlon held over the last 40 years, there has been athletes being frustrated and annoyed by drafting, or some sort of debate about it during and after the event. It’s always been there, and it just seems like there’s no good solution.
When we surveyed athletes at a major long distance event and asked them what they would like to see improved at the event, and their athlete experience at triathlons in general, only a small % of 20-30% mentioned drafting. If we asked the same question, but with 5 multi-choice answers, the rate that choose drafting is around 60-70%. So drafting has been around so long, and seems impossible to fix, that everyone just accepts it as part of the landscape. “yeah of course drafting is annoying, but you cant fix that”.
See this post for a simple description of what drafting is.
The main issues with drafting are;
Referees are making a naked eye guess of the distance between riders, in a dynamic situation as they ride along the road on the back of a motorbike next to the athletes. Athletes are also guessing those distances. They have to guess, and hope that it matches up to the referees guess.
There are only so many referees on the course at any one time. For a large event, with 4000 competitors, there might be a maximum of 25 referees. That’s one ref with just 2 eyeballs for every 160 athletes. So there are situations where athletes aren’t being watched at all, while others may be being watched all the time, which creates feelings of unfairness.
Generally penalised athletes disagree when they are given a penalty, for the above 2 reasons. They don’t think they were drafting, or there were other athletes around them that they feel were drafting more than them that weren’t penalised.
Another issue is that the because the referees are on the back seat of motorbikes, the athletes can generally hear them coming up behind them, and thus usually have time to adjust their following distances, so that by the time the referee has caught up and is able to asses the situation, they’ve opened a bigger gap to the rider ahead than they have been keeping for the last 15minutes while riding without being observed.
There are also inefficiencies in the way drafting is policed;
When a referee decides to give an athlete a penalty, they must write down a record of the athlete’s race number and then drive ahead to the next penalty tent. At the tent they dismount the motorbike, complete a penalty form, which they sign and pass to the penalty tent referees, before getting back on their bike and out there watching athletes.
The penalty tent referees lay the paper penalty form with the athlete’s number on it on a table, with a stopwatch on top ready to start counting down the athlete’s time when they arrive. They do this for each form that comes in, and often soon have a table covered in pieces of paper. When a penalised athlete pulls in (often in a bad mood…), the referee must quickly find the form that matches the athlete number and start a stopwatch to count down their time.
Another issue is that in many events it is possible for a referee to give athletes a warning for drafting before proceeding to give them a penalty. Referees often take this approach with novice athletes competing at smaller more local events, as this is a way to educate the athletes about the rules, rather than them getting confused, why they got a penalty, and having a bad experience. But there is no way for these warnings to be communicated amongst referees. So if a referee gives a warning and then moves on to watch other athletes, and a second referee comes along, they have no way to know that the first athlete has already been given a warning.
RaceRanger is addressing these issues, with technology. Triathlon will finally have an accurate and comprehensive tool to remove the subjectiveness and fairly apply drafting principles of an individual effort to all athletes.