Saturday, November 11, 2006

More Bike-Racing Demographics

Category and age groups for men and women racers in Northern California/Nevada and Southern California/Nevada. Data is from the NCNCA and SCNCA websites.





There are about 1,000 more licensed racers in NorCal than SoCal, and most of that difference is in the category 3, 4, and 5 ranks. Does that imply NorCal does a better job of attracting new riders and providing grass-roots services? I think so. For example, every weekend in January Velo Promo promotes crits and road races with mentoring sessions for new racers, and the attendance is really good. We don't have anything like that down here. We do however claim the one-and-only woman cat 5 racer in California and that person happens to be SB's very own Carissa Horowitz!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Umm...isn't Carissa technically a Cat 4 woman? She can enter men's races up to 1 category lower, but she's not a Cat 5. That category doesn't exist for the wimmens...

Oh yeah...don't forget to mention that she's one of your new teammates too!

Marco Fanelli said...

I know that, technically, cat 5 doesn't exist for women. But if you check the USCF rider database at SCNCA you'll see that there is precisely one cat 5 female and she is Carissa! Ceertainly she's fast enough to be at least a 2, but that would require her actually doing a womens race now and then!

Lorri Lee Lown -- velogirl said...

how did that happen?

and technically, a woman can race down two categories and up 20 years.

Marco Fanelli said...

velogirl said:
> how did that happen?
> and technically, a woman can
> race down two categories and
> up 20 years.

Not sure about the category mix-up for Carissa--I'll ask her--maybe it's been fixed already.

Re the racing down and older... That's a good rule, as is anything that gives people more opportunities to race against similar competition. Although there are plenty of women who would crush the men two categories down or 20 years older!