Worlds Qualification system

[kurtinsc]

How about a slight modification of the original proposal.

First, decide on the number of riders (180 maybe?).

Second, the defending champ gets an invite. After that take the top individuals as was proposed earlier, but cap each country at 9 or 10. Just keep moving down the list until you get to 180 riders.

Once the numbers are set, if one of those riders passes on the event, then the country can choose any replacement they like. But if those riders WANT to ride, they can't be excluded because it doesn't fit the plan of their country.

 

[avanti]

Is the idea of national tems obsolete?

Assume you have several riders from the same pro-team but riding for different national teams, and one of your fellow pro-team riders is in a break away - do you chase or take it easy and hope your pro-team mate wins?

I say allow trade teams to compete.

 

[simoni]

We have world and area ranking list don't we?

Why not allocate, say 120 riders from the world list allocated according to rank (up to a max of, say, 9 per nation) and go down the rankings until all spaces are filled and then allocate another 80 riders on the area lists (keeping the 9 per nation stipulation) - probably 20ish per area (not sure how many continental tours there are).

Keeps the quality of the race high and fair giving a chance to the very best riders irrespective of nationality and gives a chance to the best south americans, asians etc. to promote the sport.

EDIT - similar to kurtinsc's idea above! Also, the way I see it, you don't have to select your best 9 riders but if you have 9 qualifying from the worlds list that gives you a right to use any 9 you see fit (to avoid having to select Contador on a pan flat course for example)

Also, I like the nations aspect of the worlds. Its the only way to ensure "mondialisation" and the continual soap opera of the Italian team makes it worthwhile for that reason alone!

 

[ScottyMuser]

the problem with the rankings is that they are nonsensical. Take Britain as an example:

They were, at the time, 12th in the *WORLD* rankings just missing out on having 9 riders; because the majority of their riders rode for PT teams (one of which was set up with the aim of introducing cycling to a wider audience and giving more money to the sport), they were confortably outside the top 20 in *EUROPE*. I mean, come on, how does that add up? It made it almost irrelevant how well Cav/Millar et al actually did, because unless they were to scrape in the top 10 (and that *is*, lets be honest, a pretty competitive race), there *couldn't* end up much higher then 25th because their riders all rode for the PT teams. Unlike, say, France, were 2/3 of their big teams, due to agreements with the ASO, don't have to be PT and therefore, if necessary, would have got a bucket load of European points.

Then they go and invite 6 riders from the top 4/5 Asian and African countries, places with hardly a *single* pro rider between them, who despite 1 of them getting in the break (Morrocco), did absolutely *nothing* in the race and had less then a chance in hell?

A better system would be to extend the top number of riderds (8/9) riders to maybe the top 15 in the world rankings - , and drop the number of Asian/African enbtrants to make up for that. And *expand* the definition of which races count for the world traces, as the majority are pointless PT races - Qatar ahead of Burgos for instance. And have it counting for a whole calendar year, rather then 9 months, so lombardy, paris-tours etc count.
Actually, just scrap the World ranings (as they are utterly pointless as they stand), and come up with a single unified ranking for all races on the calendar, but obviously differentiate a bbit more between, say, the fdifferent levels of .2 races etc