[Closed] Masters Category to be Scrapped by British Cycling!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Replaced with a Jedi category?

What your thread title needs is more exclamation marks.

The top of masters is now faster than the top of expert. Don't see the issue myself. Top few belong in elite, the others into expert/sport.

Only issue I can foresee is that it's a big category, so the other categories are about to get bigger, and thus the course will get busier at the nationals.

I can't see you having done an NPS since Coed y Brenin in 2007 OP, how much of an issue is it really? Or is this vicarious indignation?

a good plan like that sounds. 😉

i dont get your outrage.......

it seems to be a place where ex elite riders go when they are fed up of elite or have other commitments than racing.

It seemed to be elective wether you raced in elite or masters.....

Yeah no problem really - the front end of Masters is just a place where ex-Elites go to when they can't train long enough for Elite any more. We can slot into Expert quite happily.

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Good, Masters is a far too early reminder of your advancing years. At least when you get into Vets you are in your 40s and well aware that you are not as young as you once were.

njee20 would you want to ride expert with 100+ if you weren't gridded in the first 5 rows? Top masters and expert, are similar level yes, but still way off elite top20.

njee20 did one in 2010 but was told had to ride sport, back row of grid, finished an embarrassing 5th. I was planning and training to ride masters in 2015, hence my annoyance.

If you're good enough you will get gridded in the first five rows. In your case you're effectively starting from scratch anyway so will have to do what everyone else does, get a couple of early season events in where the fields are smaller and pick up some points.

It's not a new idea I don't think it was certainly mooted a while ago to lose the category.
This also has the side effect of meaning that I will forever have won my last race in Masters 🙂

LS, I guess your right.

Yea.....no more mid pack heroes getting pissy when us Vets come past despite giving them a 3 minute head start 😀

I've always found the Masters (30+) category ridiculous in an endurance sport where many people are peaking in their early 30s. Good riddance I say 😀

Is these days of -isms I'm surprised we still have age or gender categories , When in essence it's more to do with How fit you are not How old you are or what bits you have. Just change wholesale to distance or time categories and let people choose.

njee20 did one in 2010 but was told had to ride sport, back row of grid, finished an embarrassing 5th. I was planning and training to ride masters in 2015, hence my annoyance.

I do ride expert. You rarely get five rows of people these days!

The top of masters is quicker than the top of expert. If you were planning to win masters you'll win expert. The people who should be annoyed are the experts whose category is being invaded!

I've always found the Masters (30+) category ridiculous in an endurance sport where many people are peaking in their early 30s. Good riddance I say

Yea.....no more mid pack heroes getting pissy when us Vets come past despite giving them a 3 minute head start

That applies throughout though, doesn't it? I've caught the entire Expert field and half the Elites before now. Most will get out of the way but there's always one or two where ego takes over!

tenacious_doug - Member
Good, Masters is a far too early reminder of your advancing years. At least when you get into Vets you are in your 40s and well aware that you are not as young as you once were.

I've never managed to get into any kind of race stuff yet, but scares me that my category would be Vets.

Though I'd only be doing it for a laugh if ever I do one, so as long as I can do the Fun category, I'm fine 😀 , otherwise I'd only be pissing off the serious folk 😉

British XC R1 top 5 Expert times:
01:23:14
01:24:35
01:25:24
01:25:42
01:26:14

Top 5 Masters (same distance):
01:23:28
01:23:29
01:23:59
01:24:50
01:26:19

Not much in it.

Agreed, they tend to be the fastest and hardest (in XC and CX anyway)

Not really 'the' hardest, but hard nonetheless. Interestingly in 2014 there was a bit of a slow down in Master in XC, and Vets was often faster at the sharp end.

I'll be over 60 next season according to BC rules, so I'm looking for a new super-super-vets class

Super vets [i]is [/i]>60.

the MTB XC age related categories are pants

too dominated by people who were and remain very good, puts off new entrants to the sport

dominated by people who were and remain very good

What I'm trying to get at here is, that anyone age 30-39 can currently enter sport or masters if they have a BC license and choose the race best suited to them at that time. So a harder/faster/longer race if they want too.
But if the Masters gets binned, then those people aged 30-39 will have to do a season in the sport cat and finish in the top5 or 10 (not sure which), in order to move into the expert cat to be able to complete in the same level of harder/faster/longer event, but not until the following year.

This is assumption based on current rules though, so could be totally different when they say.

I'm not really bothered about this as my regional series lumps us together anyway.

If it means I get to race earlier in the day at nationals and that they can find more time for Sunday practice then I would rate it as a good thing.

Errr I may have missed something here.Are you saying it should be dominated by people who are a bit pants?

I guess it could be done more like du/triathlon where you have 5 year age groups. At least the talent gets spread around a bit more then.

Oh god no....have you ever raced TLi or LVRC.There's about 30 categories.....with 3 people in each.

Rorschach - Member

Oh god no....have you ever raced TLi or LVRC.There's about 30 categories.....with 3 people in each.

Everyone's a winner then! 😀 Well, on the podium at least. 😉

Hmmm interesting, was considering a SXC race or two in 2015, only did one in 2014 mind. I can't even remember how they set us off, just remember it being bleak as **** and flailing like an idiot to get clipped in at the start! Goes off to look at times...

As with a lot of the categories, in masters there seems to be a few quick bugger and a big drop off in speed as you move down past the top 5. So I can see this move being a non-issue for some, and might make a nice competitive expert cat at the top end, but result in people stopping racing due to being towards the back of a massive field?

I think the real issue is the elite category really. It needs to be made more, 'elite'. People seem to get their elite license and not have to do anything to keep it, and end up being embarrassingly slow for the category.
And still only two or three junior riders are taken up into elite, which I find ridiculous, looking at the times of the top juniors compared to most of the British elite field. We come halfway through the elite pack in a race for ****s sake, so why do some very talented riders get unnecessarily dumped in expert for a year?

It's daft when a junior goes into expert, then dominates for a year, agree that more should go into elite if they're good enough. I do agree about demotion of slower elites, but difficult to enforce - there aren't many who are [i]that[/i] slow, and by doing a few under represented races it's easy to finish higher up the rankings than one may expect.

When I started racing Vets where 35 and over.
I started racing as a Vet then they changed the ages so that Master was up to 40.
That made me a Master for a couple of years then back to Vet and on the Grand Vet.
I might be tempted out of retirement if they brought out a Cat for 60+. 😉

I think that could be a hangover from the fact that elite races were 2 hrs 15 minutes not that long ago.

I think people thought that juniors would struggle with the step up in distance.

I loved the Masters class when it appeared 1996 had my best MTB year ever 18 wins those were the days.You won cash and all sorts of goodies.Long time ago HAY.

I spent a few years racing (4 i think) I was pretty pants but I got a little better. My best position was something like 6th on the first lap, but finishing 13th out of 100ish in a gorrick at crowthorne. Unfortunately I got a bit ill after that and never seem to have got back.

In the gorrick u get a medal if in top 10% @(expect for fun) so pretty close to that but still millions and millions of miles off competing for the number 1 spot.

The problem was that in pretty much all categories the top riders were lapping in the same time.

Really in my mind there should be no ages categories. Just ability.

Ie Fun, Then something C**p, Average , Open , Expert Elite.

That way u'd have a chance of actually moving up the categories and getting near the front positions even if your not going to be that good a rider in the end.

Like BC road racing where the majority of people at the front do just enough so they don't get promoted at the year end? (there is a suspiciously large number of 2nd Cats on 199 points at the end of the year).

As a vet wouldn't mind be able to play in other cats but we are considered too old... Funny that if I pretended to be 10yrs younger I could have got a lot more podiums last year in my regional xc series. Just from experiences in that series the actual classes have less entrants than the age related ones, up to 50 in the vets and up to 40 in masters. Maybe time to lose the vets class as well, pretty please.
Just seen that I put numbers as 50 and 40, meant entrants not ages..

They did promote you in the early days if you had a racing licence from sport to expert then elite if you had enough points etc.But in 1995 they brought in a second sport category called sports 2 for older people then masters in 1996.Then it seemed to become a free for all.Where you were racing against ex-pros.Not much chance but that's life.

So how many races are affiliated anyway? I know our local xcRampage series is for example but is there a list somewhere?

The whole BC ranking/points/category system seems ridiculously over complicated. Does it have to comply with some kind of UCI protocol or anything?

If you were to start from scratch, how would you design the category system to give us the closest possible racing?

The points were a right cock up back in the 90s.Some times they never sent them into the BCF when you won races that had points.Gave up on it in the end.

Shits and giggles.
Overly serious.
Birds.

I think its a bad idea to scrap masters as it takes a lot of the fun out of it. I like racing my peers. My peers are guys I raced when I was young and fit in the seniors, and now when Im old and not in the masters. I don't want to end up racing my younger self again. I think the BC is seriously losing the plot in terms of MTB (Enduro and too a much lesser extent DH but more generally it now seems). I predict a legit MTB breakaway before 2015 is out, I just wonder whether XC racing would ever make the jump over or is the lure of the UCI too strong?

I think its a bad idea to scrap masters as it takes a lot of the fun out of it.

Don't get the issue Ben - they're not singling you out. They're displacing the entire category. You still race all your peers, just under a different category name. They're not going to put people into elite so you're suddenly getting lapped. If they put people into sport then comparatively you'll do better than in masters.

I agree the category is a bit bonkers and that fun/ sport/expert/elite does the job from a racing perspective. However as I was focusing on racing master next yr it means I'll have to reset my goals (obs not a huge issue).

However I do think age categories have some use... look at triathlon where the huge growth has been partly by the vast number of age categories (5yrs) and so lots more people feel competitive. .. which seems to be important.

“Last season the top 20 male masters were recording times competitive with the top 20 male experts, and four of the top 10 experts in 2014 are of masters age next year. We’ve effectively been running two races over the same number of laps for riders of the same ability level.

“However we’re not abolishing the category. Regional organisers may continue to offer masters races, and there will be masters races at the National Championships if there are sufficient entries to justify them. We’re looking at a revision of the licence categories, and riders holding an existing masters licence who wish to compete in expert or sport races will be contacted directly in the near future with further details.”

Seems like a total guddle. Either abolish it or don't?!

Personally, I was going to ride masters for the first time in 2015, having ridden sport in 2014. I don't tend to ride nationals as they are (in 2014) all 250 miles+ from where I live. I'm not going to get an interesting race in the local series in Expert, but would get a good race in masters. If masters is abolished, that is fine if the top end go to expert, and the lower to sport - I'll move up to expert, knowing that I will now get a decent race.

Abolishing the category for the national series but not as a race licence category seems bizarre and confusing. Will you have masters riders competing in their local series, but then having to choose expert or sport at national level?

Sounds like they tried to come up with a happy medium without thinking it through.

Glad they got rid of Masters it was always a joke cat anyway.

Why not just bin all the cats apart from age groups? Cyclocross just has Seniors, Vets, Juniors etc. Then run points from top to bottom, for license purposes and to grid the field. If you really need to split out the Elites at National level, then that can be done. XC racing doesn't have 200 people in Sport anymore, and the whole thing is too complex and designed for a long gone era.

I blame UCI.

But seriously, for some reason BC have always hated the 30-39 Masters category. In my experience the thing riders ask for the most though is MORE categories, usually related to the area in which they do the best. "why don't you do a female super vet category ?" Er, because you would be the only person in it. The impact will be felt differently by female and male riders I would think, with the ladies cats all being that much smaller.

Looking at my renewed licence and I've been put in expert for XC, that can't be right at all! Just checked out the times for the race and expert/elite done their full race with an extra lap in the same time our masters race took, no way I've got the legs for that shit, vets were lapping faster than masters too. It seems pretty absurd, I thought they were asking masters where they wanted to race?

have a shave and you can race Junior 😉

[waves]