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Literally made a joke about that yesterday. Not the shit state of the roads but whether people still actually raced here. I guess I'm jaded.
It looks like this is the spirit of the times we live in - you're certainly not alone. There's not much racing left, but there is the question of how many people want to race.
I find it dispiriting that the busiest thread in the Rides and Races forum is the Pro Cycling column. Perhaps we have a lot of pro riders on this forum, but I suspect we have a large number of armchair cyclists.
Is this the result of monetising sport? You and I (plus many others here) have been lucky enough to get our racing careers in while it was still possible, but the future does not look hopeful.
clubman-
More people are cycling which is good, but they are doing different things from what they used to.
TT numbers are down, but, last time I looked, they were high for the fast courses but low for slow ones. And it must be very hard to put on a road race, especially in the south east.
But the whole sportive scene is pretty new and so is Ultraracing, which gets talked about plenty on here.
As a club we (Westerley) are going through a bit of strategy and objective setting now. I think most people recognise that we have to do different things to what we did in the past if we want to survive.
Eg We used to do loads of club TTs on the amersham road, but not many people want to do them now, especially new members. FWIW I haven't done one on there for a few years on there as the traffic is a bit aggressive on the SC bit near gt miss.
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the busiest thread in the Rides and Races forum is the Pro Cycling column.
Isn't that the same as every sport though? Football, cricket, etc are all watched by lots more people than actually play the games. Unlike those silly activities though there's probably a lot more people 'just cycling' with no interest in bike racing.
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the future does not look hopeful
I'm old enough (and therefore you must be) to have seen TT numbers go well below current levels and then recover to the point where even average courses get full fields. I'm seeing plenty of names I don't recognise on start sheets. People have been predicting the death of timetrialling since before the formation of the RRC, which is 99 years ago next week.
frank9755
hippy
gbj_tester
Literally made a joke about that yesterday. Not the shit state of the roads but whether people still actually raced here. I guess I'm jaded. I don't go out any more, I do most of my training on a turbo trainer now. London and surrounds and the drivers and roads within it have basically killed my enjoyment of cycling and racing.