Master50 said:Take a very simple and easy method of measuring gaps and make it so complicated that to explain it to the general public we need a math degree and finite element analysis. Try explaining any of this to the TV audience and people just change the channel. Your standing at the edge of the road watching the racers go by. You have a watch on your wrist and now we have to go out on the road to measure distance between gaps? Or you watch the ;eager go by and time the gaps. At that point on the road everyone has exactly the same climbing, decending and distance covered. How do you get their speed to calculate their distance apart? Ask? He andy how fast are you going? Time is the only objective method of knowing the gap. If the break and the chase maintain the same time gap the distance between them will change according to their speed and that is often changing by terrain.
BTW a timed crit is still a distance race unless the time ends exactly at the line. The winner is the fist guy to travel the next full lap and all riders are judged at a specific distance.
This thread while interesting has been an absurd exercise and I challenge anyone to make distance work as an easy tool to show TV audiences the gap. On a climb he is 200 meters ahead and on the decent he is 1000 meters with exactly the same time gap. IT is time we use and it is time we will always use. Distance is the length of the course.
Granted, much of the complicated math has, I think, been just for fun.
I don't think, however, that anyone (with the possible exception of Bavarianrider) has argued for distance since early in the thread -- certainly not any of the people doing any of the complicated math. All the complicated math has been designed to provide the exact same simple quantity as broadcasts already do, i.e. a time gap in minutes and seconds. The hard work would be for the producers to do behind the scenes -- the whole purpose (if any of it were actually implemented) would be to make things easier on the viewer by providing a gap which had fewer strange behaviors in edge cases. For example, when the leader crashes, the standard method-A gap remains exactly the same while the leader is off the bike, then later when the chasers pass the point where the leader had crashed, suddenly plummets. A gap using Magnus's correction, on the other hand, would tick down steadily at close to one second per second while the leader was off the bike, and wouldn't have a sharp discontinuity when the chasers later passed that point. I think that as a new viewer -- and even as an experienced one! -- I would find the latter easier to understand. (This is similar to the situation in countless industries where the producer accepts difficult and tricky work to make the consumer's life easier. All the coordination hotel employees have to do behind the scenes to make my stay pleasant doesn't require me to have a degree in hotel management.)