World Triathlon has announced that the RaceRanger drafting detection system will be used at the Ibiza 2023 Multisport World Championships in Spain, in order to assist technical officials with draft marshalling.
Following prior in-competition tests, the system will be used by all elite athletes competing in the Long Distance World Championships in Ibiza on May 7, 2023.
In collaboration with World Triathlon’s Sport Department, RaceRanger has continued to test under a trial period, where the system was integrated in four non-drafting events in New Zealand and Australia across various distances. Feedback and evaluation from athletes and technical officials was provided, and small adjustments were made to the system’s functionality as a result.
RaceRanger CEO & Co-Founder James Elvery said “We learned a lot from our trial events. Not only did we encounter some system bugs that needed to be corrected, but more importantly, we got direct feedback from the athletes and technical officials about their experience of the system in race conditions.
“The main things we have adjusted have been the buffer zones. We changed what the different coloured lights refer to, and also the distance thresholds for them to change colour.”
“We now have a red light for riding within the 12m draft zone, a blue light for a 2m last warning zone from 12m to 14m, and finally an orange light for a 3m ‘first contact’ zone from 14-17m.”
He continued, “The product that is available now, and that will be used in Ibiza, is finally ready to be applied to top level competition as an officiating aid. We’d like to thank World Triathlon for the opportunity to be part of the Long Distance World Championships, and for all their support and input from the beginning of our journey to this point.”
The process of adding to the World Triathlon competition rules, to account for RaceRanger or similar technologies in the future, will be part of World Triathlon’s standard technical process for reviewing rules. This process can take several months of work, before submission to the World Triathlon Executive Board for ratification.
“We see a huge potential for the RaceRanger system to improve fairness in non-drafting triathlons around the world, by removing the subjective nature of drafting penalty decisions,” said Gergely Markus, World Triathlon Sport Director.
“This includes a number of paratri categories that could feature the RaceRanger system, which we will test at the 2023 World Triathlon Para Championships that will take place in Pontevedra in September.”
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