Quote:
Originally Posted by prototoast
The specific problem for the women is that non-elite amateur men are faster than many of them, and so if you give The women 20 minutes on a 10-hour race, that's really not enough. On the other hand, if you give them an hour on a 10-hour race, that pushes back the start of the amateur who might be taking 16 hours to do that race, which really stresses the organization. And they also need enough time between them and the elite men, because if you give the elite men a 15-minute Head start, that's usually fine, but if a few riders have crashes or flat tires early in the race, they can get caught by the women and then the women can hang on their wheels. So then you need even more time between the elite man and the elite women, and even more time between the elite elite women and the amateurs, and the end result is that the entire event starts getting unpleasantly long.
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This type of thing has already been an issue in road racing, and they already have rules to address it. Many road races have multiple fields on the course at the same time, the fields separated by staggered starts. And as you say, sometimes racers from different fields will happen across each other on the course. In which case the rules explicitly say that riders from different fields cannot work together, and face disqualification if caught. Each field will have race numbers with either a different color or a different range of numbers so that riders can distinguish if they are in the same or different fields. Distinguishing between men and women racers should be even easier. And yes, I've seen racers disqualified by mixing in with riders from other fields.