Christopher Bara wrote:But see there...that's a big part of the problem....basic...prime...this whole bastard stepchild that's been created...basic or prime mean NOTHING...they have nothing to do with the difficulty of a race, nor of the skaters who sign up...AND THEY NEVER HAVE!!
It's just some bullshit assigned by this ridiculous committee that "sanctions" races...
The Buckeye that Cat referred to could have been a Basic and the same people still would have shown up, the courses would have still been gnarly and rookies still should have been kept off some of it, such as the TS...
the status of a race has nothing to do with it.
Unless, we reach the point where....Basic races are easy, on easy hills, Prime are tougher, then Mains and so on...As for this whole thread....If we MUST keep these race status(es?).... absolutely...Basics should be homegrown and fun....and anybody can enter...maybe even Prime....but Mains should get tougher and some people may have to qualify in....and Majors should be gnarly as hell...If we're going to keep the statuses......there needs to be progression from one level to the next...and absolutely qualification....
You're right Chris. Totally agree with that.
Christopher Bara wrote:
And Rick....good point, but not necessarily true....case in point is the 08 Dixie and the monster ramps...there were people there that never rode transition coming off those ramps...and some of them were pretty sketchy
Goodnight
Also right - forgot about that. The Dixie big ramps were even gnarlier for the uninitiated than Johnny's Thunderdome IMO.
However, I think the issue raised above is that if some noob gets hurt, we are afraid of losing a venue because of it, or having a liability issue. I get that we are most often different from a ski/snowboard race in that we are not using an area reserved for our activity and covered by insurance for it as part of the overall picture. But, aren't we kidding ourselves if we think nobody will ever get hurt no matter how high the talent level is? What if somebody had snapped a kingpin on Turri and gone down, through no fault of their own (except maybe not replacing kingpins often enough), and really got messed up? There was one of my runs at the Dixie GS where I had to wave off the "racer ready" because people (OUR people
) were standing almost in my course further down with their backs to the start ramp - glad I looked! The point is, S can happen.
I guess I don't have a solution to all this, but that's more to consider anyway.
-RF
"All the money in the world can not buy sharing the excitement of life with other people. Nothing else matters."
- Jason Mitchell (Criddlezine Interview)