World Triathlon have teamed up with a Kiwi company called RaceRanger to develop a new anti-drafting technology for use in events. Interesting.
There’s also a lot of good info on the RaceRanger FAQs page which could answer a number of questions
Being lazy and not reading this (yet), my immediate instinct is that this is going to be expensive, and a faff to administer these ‘units’ ?
Pricing isn’t finalised and will obvs depend on volume manufacture. As for admin - probably no worse than managing chip handout and recovery.
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Surely just start with the pros, and then feed down from there?
Maybe a ‘pay the more expensive version if you want a shot at AG podium or Kona and have this piece of kit’, the rest of you carry on?
nope - plan is to use it extensively once it’s been live tested in some NZ events this summer
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Yes. The tech is basic. Its practically a lazer tag system for the bike. So they havent invented anything spectacular.
Their website says they cant put a price on it due to the volatility of electrical components currently. That’s the equivalent of “competitive salary” on a job advert.
Roughly though, it’s going to need a couple of light emitters and receivers per unit, a processor (wont need to be that powerful), battery, casing. They say they dont want to rely on a 3/4/5G network, but also that it has a 3-10km range to the referees, so that indicates a radio transmitter, and also a number of base stations to receive the signal, that’s going to need some decent wedge to receive and process multiple radio signals at once in real time. Assembly costs, shipping, the initial code, website etc
Presumably they will go with a rental model, but with multiple IMs in different countries they are going to need thousands of units up front. Logistics of getting the out and back is going to be hard, and expensive.
They want $50k from GoFundMe for an MVP.
Nice idea, but Im ooooout!
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The tie up is with World Triathlon not IM so WT will get 1st dibs at this and probably be used at major a/g champs (Worlds and Continental non-drafting races)
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This is part of the faff I’m thinking of. Obviously the units have an unique ID code, I guess if one unit sits behind another for x seconds it’s a ‘ping’. I wonder how reliable & accurate the Tech is though; thinking geography, tunnels, tree cover etc. Suck-it-and-see I guess.
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They say they have been working on it for 6 years so I assume they have done some decent testing and fine tuning. But as they say no plan survives contact with the enemy so I suspect they are going to have to run a fair few live simulations in real races to see how it works, without actually using the result of in that race.
I guess they only need to transmit just before the penalty tent if the unit stores the transgressions.
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I’ll probably just wrap it in tinfoil once out of T1 
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My anti-draft technology is more primitive 
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Think it was Chrissy Wellington who had a slash on the bike when someone was too close. Or have I made that up?
Just one of your fantasies.
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But it’s all defeated by some silver foil surely?
Details in the article are sparse and I only skimmed it, but it seems the lead bike is the one deciding if there has been and infringement and no indication that it communicates with the bike behind, so it cannot flag who is drafting, only that someone is and the system then needs to work out who is behind at that point in time.
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320 mix to their face
Wire it up to shut off their di2 and we’ll have a winner 
But good luck to them, it’s the obvious tech thing to do. I’m more concerned about how they can handle the output rather than wether the tech works , ie will they just realise there is too much cheating going on to manage
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That can easily be addressed through tolerance management…. only penalise the worst culprits to start with, then slowly tighten the screw as behaviour changes, rather than draw a hard line at the start and cause chaos. If you don‘t publish the tolerances, then you won’t get too much gaming of the system. That’s what I’d do (with years of change management experience) anyway.
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that will be learnt during the testing in NZ this summer (our winter)
I also suspect that once the system goes live in testing and athletes become aware that they are effectively being “watched” for drafting, then there may be more compliance from the off rather than risk a penalty.
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