Well, Celia, you're opening a can of worms here and the power to determine
winners will lie in the hands of the handicap determiner. But then that's
always been the case. Some might argue that the time given for each year of
age is too generous. I can see the gears of a mathematician turning in your
head and I think that what you propose will be very difficult, but not
impossible, to implement.
You can make the handicaps any form that you like of course, but whether it
will be fair is up to debate. In the example you gave of the local Pro
female and the local top man, a baseline can be determined perhaps by
subtracting a percentage of the women's times, not subtracting the raw
number. That would be 112.5% or if you take the world record for the hour,
the woman comes in at 117.1% of the man. But if we take it to a ridiculous
extreme, what if we tried to adjust for all factors. If I show up with a
sore toe that day, should I be given a further 2 second bonus or what if the
TT is in the morning when I personally don't ride my best. Give me another
20 seconds there, perhaps. What about factoring in how many hours I have to
work per week and how physically demanding that work is? An unfortunate
result of this is that when a rider wins in the corrected results, there
might be some consternation that the handicapper gave them too much of an
edge.
Handicaps are rarely won by the fastest rider, if they're set up properly,
and that is probably the reason for this kind of event - an attempt to
reward the effort rather than the talent or natural ability. I would
support a more comprehensive handicap, but the complications of making it
perfectly fair is what keeps it from happening, I think.
Bob Simpson
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