Ride London Surrey Classic

[Ruthie]

The road race just caught up with the sportive, and had to wait for them.  Oh, dear 

[Jurek]

There's been a couple of serious (Air ambulance involved) accidents. GWS - All affected.
That'll give the organisers something to think about for next year.

[mcshroom]

Two Air ambulances, one at  Ripley and one at Thames Ditton

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/31/ridelondon-accident-cyclists-surrey-london-course-diverted-pyrford-ripley

I hope he's ok, but the ambulance service spokeswoman's description of the first incident did make me chuckle

It is not known whether he hit the tree on his bike or whether he came off his bike prior to hitting the tree.

[Ruthie]

27,000 riders?!  On one sportive?  That is an awful lot of people on the road, especially if lots of them aren't used to riding in groups.  I wouldn't want to do the risk assessment for that event. 

Hoping those affected by injury come out the other side without lasting effects 

[mattc]

I think if you do the "math", 27,000 people riding 100k-ish on public roads spread round the year are going to have a couple of serious prangs between them. i know I've had more than 1 every 2.7million km

(I am no fan of sportives generally, but I suspect they are mostly quite safe ways to use the road. Although the organisers usually insist on lid-wearing, so perhaps they know something I dont! )

[Jurek]

I think if you do the "math", 27,000 people riding 100k-ish on public roads spread round the year are going to have a couple of serious prangs between them. i know I've had more than 1 every 2.7million km

(I am no fan of sportives generally, but I suspect they are mostly quite safe ways to use the road. Although the organisers usually insist on lid-wearing, so perhaps they know something I dont! )

I think Matt mostly has it.
It's a question of numbers.
No surprise that there were 2/3 fatalities on the 27,000 participant BHF L2B - not for the first time.

[TimC]

The BBC coverage of the race is dire. Looks like they did no research into where they'd have trouble with mobile camera signals, and had no plan of what to do when they lost said signals. Pathetically amateurish.

[mattc]

BBC coverage of road-racing always has been rubbish. Is Hugh Porter still commentating?

I didnt even bother watching; I am now feeling rather negative about the coverage of the Olympic road race, which is annoying, as we have our best shout at medals in a very long time 

[TimC]

No Hugh P! The most interesting bit was having TV's Super Dave Millar on the back of a motorbike giving commentary from beside the leaders, but again the connection was intermittent and unreliable. The guys commentating from the Mall (Simon Brotherton with Rochelle Gilmore) couldn't see anything when we couldn't, and were obviously getting only patchy info by other means. Of course, we all missed the most important bit of the race wne the peloton caught Stannard and G about 5km out from the finish after G had made a great 100km solo break.

[TigaSefi]

Bbc coverage was pathetic. Truly pathetic. Geraint was marvellous

[woollypigs]

I have seen how people ride at the London Freewheel, the Tour de Commute along with how they ride in the various parks around the smoke.

There is no way I would release 27000 in one go before a pro race. Even without accidents there will be bottlenecks, punctures, hills, random stopping, people who have never ridden in a group bigger than five, etc etc

I really doubt they had a chat to BHF about their wee ride, with more riders, deaths etc etc.

As for the beep, it sounds like they asked the people who runs TdF and other races for help. Just like they did at the 2012 race/time trail where Wiggo came across the line without a clue to how he had done. Asking as in - yeah I have seen a TdF highlight on C4 a few years back, I'm sure we can do this too, looks easy enough.

[eck]

Bbc coverage was pathetic. Truly pathetic. Geraint was marvellous

I didn't watch the BBC coverage, but Eurosport lost pictures in the last last few kms so, if that's what made their  coverage pathetic, maybe not BBC's fault.? Or was it something else?   
But, yes, G played a blinder.

[David Martin]

I had to go out at 5:20 at which point G was off on his own with 45 seconds and another 2 mins to the peloton. I thought the BBC coverage was good up to that point - very good having David Millar on the motorbike, even though he was occasionally incommunicado. His insight and being able to span between the groups on the road gave a really good insight into how the breaks formed and how riders bridge the gaps.

Gutted for G. And Etixx finally get their tactics together and win a classic (instead of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory).

[Dibdib]

I had to go out at 5:20 at which point G was off on his own with 45 seconds and another 2 mins to the peloton. I thought the BBC coverage was good up to that point - very good having David Millar on the motorbike, even though he was occasionally incommunicado. His insight and being able to span between the groups on the road gave a really good insight into how the breaks formed and how riders bridge the gaps.

Absolutely. I don't particularly rate Simon Brotherton as a cycling commentator but Brian Smith was good, and Super D Millar [TM Teh Bear] was excellent. The issues definitely seemed to be technical though, with a near-total loss of pictures in the last 10km or so.

No idea whether it was being done in-house by the Beeb or outsourced (presumably the latter), but it sounds like Eurosport were picking up the same feed.

[David Martin]

There will be one host broadcaster who has priority access. Note the word 'host' on the TV camera tabards. This is then fed out to all the contracted parties to be overlayed with their commentary, choice of shots etc. for the host audience. I don't know if D.Millar was BBC only or also on Eurosport, I presume BBC only as the mike was branded. Between him and Brian Smith there was a suitable amount of excellent commentary and analysis, giving the perspective of how it appears on the road. I quite liked seeing it 'in the raw' rather than just the polished camera shots we get from the TV motos, a lot more perspective on the sheer number of vehicles around the race.

[TigaSefi]

Don’t get me wrong, The race itself was bloody brilliant and Millar on the bike showed much more of a perspective of the distances between the bikes than the sometimes ineffective display of time between head of the race and pelton/chasers in the top left corner. But losing the signal in London was a failure to check the strength of signal needed to broadcast with the tall buildings in the way and that was comically bad.

[David Martin]

The loss of signal in London may also be due to the possibility of having a comms plane flying in that airspace (right on the Heathrow flightpath). Usually the TdF has a (may be more than one) comms plane circling at about 10k feet above the race. This happily takes the feed from the motos and feeds it on to a ground network. There is a similar setup for race radio.

[Whitedown Man]

All things that were (1) possible to predict and plan for in advance (2) things that the BBC screwed up in their 2012 coverage but apparently failed to learn from.

[TimC]

There were no NOTAMs for unusual flying activity near Heathrow yesterday apart from a gliding competition. I don't have access to the London TMA notams (the database is live and archives aren't easily accessible), however it seems there wasn't any notification. Heathrow deals with quite a lot of helicopter and other traffic transiting the zone VFR to a whole host of airfields, and also sporadic Police and Air Ambulance activity. The race did have helicopter coverage at times, so some airborne effort was made, and you would have thought that dedicated mobile internet data connections could have been made available and should have been able to cope. At the very least, having a number of static cameras at known positions of signal difficulty should have been possible. The problems were predictable and have been overcome by other similar events, so it was a completely amateurish screw up by whoever was contracted to provide the coverage.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I have seen how people ride at the London Freewheel, the Tour de Commute along with how they ride in the various parks around the smoke.

There is no way I would release 27000 in one go before a pro race. Even without accidents there will be bottlenecks, punctures, hills, random stopping, people who have never ridden in a group bigger than five, etc etc

I really doubt they had a chat to BHF about their wee ride, with more riders, deaths etc etc.

As for the beep, it sounds like they asked the people who runs TdF and other races for help. Just like they did at the 2012 race/time trail where Wiggo came across the line without a clue to how he had done. Asking as in - yeah I have seen a TdF highlight on C4 a few years back, I'm sure we can do this too, looks easy enough.

They release them in many batches.You get allocated a start time, which seems fairly random, and released at ~10 minute intervals. This is from talking the week before to two guys who were going to ride it.

[David Martin]

When I did it last year it was pens of 200 riders released at 2 minute intervals over the 3 or so hours.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Ooh, like a mass start time trial! ( )

[Whitedown Man]

When I did it last year it was pens of 200 riders released at 2 minute intervals over the 3 or so hours.

Exactly the same this year

[sojournermike]

Friend of mine rode and said it was brilliant, apart from a few riders pushing through too narrow gaps in the odd silly place, eg up a narrow hill where there were already two lines of people pushing th eir bikes. She passed the first accident and said it looked really nasty, but still a few of the 'pushy one's rode past the queue to get past and on their way.

[TimC]

Which men's team was she racing for?