Watched Breaking Away for the first time in 25+ years

On Monday, 18 April 2011 06:08:55 UTC-7, Phil H wrote:
On Apr 18, 1:02*am, ilan wrote:
On Apr 18, 4:32*am, RicodJour wrote:

On Apr 17, 10:14*pm, Anton Berlin wrote:

Still a clever little movie.

Does anyone know how fast they average in the little 500 ?

The race itself or the time trials ?

*I'm pretty good with google but just didn't find anything.

No - no you're not. *I needed two links to put it together, but...

I imagine they'd be lucky to be over 25mph .

you're right on the money.

Track length and race distance:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_500

And records:http://www.iusf.indiana.edu/little50...k-records.html

R

It turns out the race is skewed so that no good riders can
participate:

"Any rider who has held, presently holds, or will hold a United States
Cycling
Federation Category I or II license prior to race day shall be deemed
ineligible for the Little 500
®", from the rules page 21:http://www.iusf.indiana.edu/little50...0Little%20500%...

If I recall correctly, this rule was instituted by jealous mediocre
riders to prevent actual talented riders from stealing the spotlight.
In particular, this implies that the Breaking Away scenario has not
been possible for at least 20 years.

No, the real talent got filtered by the 2.0 GPA requirement. You think
I'm joking don't you?
Phil H

The Little 500 should be seen in the context of what it is: an intramural event at Indiana U. It's a neat event, and a coveted prize, but it's basically a bunch of IU students riding novelty bicycles badly. If you watched this year's race, you saw that there were three teams seriously contesting, a few more also-ran teams, and a lot of non-competitive teams.

http://www.iusf.indiana.edu/little50.../2011MRace.pdf

33 entries, only 8 finished 200 laps (and considering that the 4-lap Qual times are 2:20-2:32 WITH bike exchanges every lap, only three of those teams finished close enough to the winner to be on the lead lap), and six teams finished at least 10 laps down in a 50-mile race (1/4 mile track, if you're wondering, so that's only 2.5 miles back, but this in a race that had at least 3 "yellow flags" that bunched the pack).

In other words, the Little 500 is the world's most famous intramural frat contest. It's still awesome, but the bottom half of the field is in Cat 3/4 territory at best.

Who cares if the riders are good? HDNet does a great job of televising it, and the combination of tri-bad bike handling, very low gearing, and the perplexing bike exchanges* makes for a great spectacle.

*One of the commentators mentioned that riders used to mount the bikes pedal first, but now the style is [obviously cyclocross-inspired] to hit the bikes seat first.