PBP is a magnificent example of French Committee work. It's only matched in my experience by Semaine Federale. There were a number of changes in the way it's run, largely the change from St Quentin to Rambouillet. I thought the venue worked well, and can foresee that the park could become a perfect site if the experience of Sem Fed could be applied.
The problem in a critical appraisal of events such as PBP is what I call 'amateur dramatic syndrome'. PBP gets close enough to a purely professional experience for some to forget that it's voluntary, and forget to make allowances. By the time you've had the medal placed over your head, you tend to have forgotten and forgiven any glitches on the way. If you're out of time, you dwell on the problems more.
The danger is that specific bottlenecks get under-reported, and you can be left over-time and wondering why you were never told about what would seem to be obvious pitfalls.
In filming this time we tended to avoid controls. There are two reasons for that. There are too many potential subjects to focus properly on what is happening, so we'd just go for people we know. Control restaurants are also very noisy. So we couldn't tell if 2015's problems had been solved.
The state of the £ made it inevitable that the Brits found control food expensive. Other English-speaking riders didn't report that. I had a few reports of payment problems, with one rider reporting 25 minutes in a queue while a till glitch was rectified. There were inevitable contrasts with LEL, where food payment was upfront. I have broached this subject in the past with controllers and French riders. The problem is that with so many French clubs supporting their own riders, it would be unfair to tie them in to using controls.
The controls are also run by local clubs, so they aren't completely consistent. The same is true of LEL, as controllers have a lot of leeway. There seems to be a problem in re-purposing the cafeteria tills to PBP, I have seen a reversion to manual systems in the past. As we largely avoided controls this time, I'd be interested to know what the experience was.
I sampled the food at the end. That followed the pre-payment model, and was served promptly, and I enjoyed it, although the marquee was getting a bit hot. That didn't seem to stop people hanging around, and it was good to see Danial performing his duty in shooing the stragglers out.
Others reported that the course changes increased the amount of climbing, and that late diversions were on poor roads. There was a feeling that group riding had declined, but there were also reports of sidewinds, which would have favoured small groups forming echelons.