For this post, let’s take a break from hearing about my mortality and middling abilities as a bike racer and delve into my concept for a new level of competition for the New York peloton (which also means another opportunity for NYC racers to jump on a step and do their best podium pose—arms up is the best position, you can’t argue with me here, that’s just a natural fact). 

My proposition is that we institute a teams competition at the Tuesday night FBF races. This isn’t an earth shattering proposition, of course. Most professional stage races have a teams competition, and cycling fans as a group ignore it almost completely. But you know who desk’t ignore the teams competition? The team winning it—and the team in second place. This is because bike racers, no matter the level of competition, are super thirsty for results—any kind of results. Racers will do anything to come out ahead in the final tabulations of a race series. It doesn’t matter if it’s due to sorting out the results so finely that nearly everyone one who clipped in during the series ends up a winner, that’s besides the point. Every racer has a twisted need to be able slyly slide a “Yeah, I ended up being the cat 2.75 New York 33+ intermediate champion for that series” into a coffee stop conversation.

And—great news—having a team competition at FBF would present another opportunity for racers to humble brag amongst themselves. And even greater news—racers can take credit for the team’s accomplishments, even if they didn’t necessarily contribute points.

Naturally, I would only recommend the teams competitions for the 1/2/3 and women’s fields—I wouldn’t recommend giving cat 4s another reason to be sprinting for 35th place. Points used for the individual series competition would be used for the overall, so there’s only the extra work of tabulating the team competition separately. (This is once again a case of racers finding another way to make more work for promoters, you’re welcome, Tom.)

Would this change the nature of the racing at FBF? Maybe? But my feeling is “not really”. Teams could start racing to get as many racers into the top ten when they realize they are in contention for the team prize, but I would think good old fashioned racer selfishness would keep the teams instincts at bay until they realize they have a shot at the team classification. Then it would become the race of diminished expectations.

I know what you’re thinking—what about the clothes? Would there be a jersey? Lord, no! You would need SO many jerseys. So how would we mark which team is in the lead? I have no idea. An old school Major Taylor-style sash? An arm band? Colored numbers like those at the Tour would be unpractical. Maybe we could shoot each team member in the butt with a paint ball gun before each race? My thinking is that there would be no easy way to identify the leader in the team competition, teams would just look up the standings and figure out where they stood, and then racers who don’t obsessively check the weekly results (I guess there are racers out there like this, but they seems like a small percentage of the total) would be confused about the full team leadouts for 10th place.

The fun part about this competition is that we can present this season’s winner retroactively using the magic of the internet and spreadsheet data. So without further ado, I bring to you the final standings for the 2022 FBF 1/2/3 team competition.

Congratulations to the Foundation team for their win this year (Finally, that team has something to celebrate, am I right?). I added the (probably) qualifier behind their name because there’s an astonishing amount of NYC racers that do not add their team name to their USAC listing (and not just won Foundation, it’s for many teams).

And the 2022 women’s team winner is Veselka. I didn’t create a table because math is exhausting and Veselka won running away.

So there you have it. Foundation and Veselka wear the paint ball butt shot crowns for 2022. Will there be a team competition next year? Officially? Who knows? Could I tabulate it myself each week? Yes, I could. Would I want to do that? Dear God no! I barely made it through one table for the entire season in this post.