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The upgrade requirements for road and CX have been changed
significantly. Please check them out in the USA Cycling Rulebook,
either hard copy or online. You can also access the upgrade
requirements via the discipline-specific pages of the USA Cycling
website. The new policy can be seen at http://www.usacycling.org/forms/USAC_rulebook.pdf This policy will be retroactive for 2007.
The essential differences compared to last year are as follows:
The upgrade requirements for road and CX have been changed
significantly. Please check them out in the USA Cycling Rulebook,
either hard copy or online. You can also access the upgrade
requirements via the discipline-specific pages of the USA Cycling
website. The new policy can be seen at http://www.usacycling.org/forms/USAC_rulebook.pdf This policy will be retroactive for 2007.
The essential differences compared to last year are as follows:
• There is now a tiered scale of points based on how many
participants were in the race. In some cases, this will make it easier
to upgrade, especially in classes with small fields, but it will take
more races to do so as the points are fewer.
• If road races do not meet the distance requirement to be
considered a road race, they may still be long enough to be considered
a criterium or circuit race. In that case there is a different points
table to use, but points would still be available.
• The parameters for upgrading from 4 to 3 on experience alone have been modified.
A couple of explanations/interpretations are also necessary to address questions that always come up.
Stage Races
First, stage races only count for upgrading from 3 to 2 or from 2 to 1.
Second, an omnium is not a stage race. There is no General
Classification for an omnium and no points are awarded for overall
omnium placings. The stage race can be on points instead of time, but
must be a true stage race, which means a rider must ride all stages in
order to continue. That is the easiest way to determine if it is a
stage race or not. A long series of criteriums where there happens to
be an overall prize does not count.
Mixed Categories
The question always comes up about how you handle mixed categories.
Here is a play by play to explain how to interpret it if an rider wants
to know whether a race counts for upgrading and how:
Let's say the rider rides a men's category 1,2,3 road race that is 50
miles and has 72 starters. The rider gets 5th place. Does the rider get
upgrade points and how many? Well, there is no single, simple answer to
that question. The answer depends on the category of the rider
requesting the upgrade and the composition of the field.
• Rider is a category 3 – Yes, the race definitely counts for
upgrading. For a cat 3 to 2 upgrade, the RR need only be 50 miles, so
we would use the road race points table. Since the field is a mixture
of category 1,2, and 3, all of the riders qualify as starters for this
rider, so we would use the road race table with 50+ starters. Did you
get 5 points? If so, you did it right.
• Rider is a category 2 – Hmm. Alas this is more difficult. For a 2
to 1 upgrade, a road race must be 80 miles, so this race does not
qualify as a road race. However, a criterium need only be 30 miles, so
this race qualifies on distance for the criterium table. How many
starters do we use? This is even more difficult and puts the burden on
the requestor and on the administrator to know the composition of the
field. This is why many administrators in the past just refused to use
combined fields for upgrades. That is not the intent of the process,
however. If of the 72 riders, 55 of them were category 1 or 2, then you
would use the criterium table and 50+ starters. You should get 2
points. What if the 72 riders consisted of three category 1 riders, one
category 2 (the guy looking for the upgrade), and sixty-eight category
3 riders? That race then had only 3 other riders that were the
requestor's peers or higher. Alas, that race did not count for
upgrading as the table has a minimum of 5 to earn points.
*
Please contact Nebraska Upgrade Coordinator Kevin Burke at
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with any questions.
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