Yeah, we probably are. But this one might be your fault, too. First step, go to BikeReg.com and find your name on the results. If you're not there, then you never raced, as far as we know. Sorry bro.

Second step, is your name spelled correctly on the BikeReg results? Did you enter as "Dave" but your profile says "David?" Did they spell your name as "Daivd" because they were in a hurry?

Third step, are the results for that race formatted in the standard BikeReg way? Do they have crystal-clear columns? If not, then the whole race is probably being held up because I have to manually format the data.

That's right man, it's always their fault, it's never your terrible handwriting. In any case, you don't have to play the blame game because you can FIX IT YOURSELF. That's right. Head over to the report duplicate racer name page and fill out the form.

1) Put your real name in the first box
2) Click your real name when it comes up
3) Put the misspelling of your name in the 2nd box
4) Click your misspelled name when it comes up
5) Click "Merge Racers"
6) Rejoice

Points for a race get updated every 15 minutes, so one of three things is happening:

• The race was uploaded within 15 minutes of you looking at it.
• Your category had fewer than six finishers
• The category name was "new" to the database and requires a manual check before we run points on it.

It's probably that last thing. PROMISE we will take care of your points before the next list is run. But you can still email us about it if you want.

Depends. Are the result on a PDF? Because then the answer is no.

Are the results poorly formatted, inconsistent text? Probably not.

Are they excel or nicely formatted text? Now we're talking! Email us a url and we'll see what we can do.

Oh, but it's scientific crap. Don't be a hater. Go to your racer page and look at the points in green -- those are what's being factored in to your ranking. We take your best 5 results in the last 12 months (note: 24 months when coming out of a pandemic) and use that for your "ranking points," which get used for staging and points lists. This is our measure of how fabulous a human being you are.

We also take the average of your last 10 races to use as your "carried points" -- these are used for generating new points when results get added.

The real trick is how you score points in a given race. Really to rock some math? Ok, open up a race you did with points in another browser window, click the gear icon above the category name, then click the "Show Points" link. Above each category will magically appear a table listing five names, and "quality" and "median" scores.

For each of those five names, the high and low score is crossed out. They don't affect the scoring. The other three are averaged to get quality. Now, multiply that by 0.85 This is the number of points you get for winning the race.

Now get out your graph paper. Make a 2D plot with a horizontal axis that starts at 1 and ends at the number of racers in the field. Now make a vertical axis that starts at "Quality" and goes to infinity (hope you have big paper).

In the middle of the horizontal axis, make a point that is equal to "Median." This is the median point value of all the racers in the race. Now draw a line from the lower left corner straight through the median point, out to infinity. The points each place scores are equal to the value of that line above wherever they placed on the horizontal axis. Linear interpolation!

I'll add a picture here eventually.
Updated 9/3/2010! Look, I finally added a picture!

Haha, how much time do you have?

A long time ago, USAC had a hilariously nonsensical ranking system, so we started our own based off some ranking methods used in international ski racing.

Our system was surprisingly accurate, and people liked it and started it using it for staging races, and predicting who was the biggest fish in the smallest pond and other hugely important stuff like that.

So, USACycling changed their ranking system to basically be a copy of ours (we are very flattered), but they did a bunch of little things differently so their points end up being lower across the board. A 250-point race here might be a 130-point race over there -- and this isn't because we hate you (we love you!!), it's just that we're using different scales. It's like Celsius vs Fahrenheit.

Other people either jumped over you or got added to the list. As the season goes on the list gets longer -- it's really hard to move up when guys like Trebon get added at #1 mid-season. Just holding your place is pretty good, really.

Tell them to read the disclaimer on the bottom of the racer page about upgrade points. In general, the number to the right of any individual race is our best guess as to how many upgrade points you could have gotten. This number *does* take field size into account and also category (i.e. Cat 3 races have different points than Cat 4) but it's not magic. If you did a 3/4 race with 31 finishers, that race might look like it's a qualifying event because it has enough people -- but how many Cat 4s were in the race? We don't know, but I don't think 3s can get upgrade points by beating 4s, so that field probably didn't have enough Cat 3's in it to qualify for points. But we can't be sure. The best bet is always to talk to you your friendly USA Cycling official, or to sandbag really hard until someone slashes your tires.

You probably added a url that went to a photographer's site instead of a gallery from a particular race. If I can't hit a gallery with photos from the race in less than 3 obvious clicks from the url, it gets deleted.

Darn right it is. Drop some feedback and we'll get in touch.

Awesome. Tell us about it. Even if your idea is kind of sucky we might do it. It's a long offseason...

And well it should. We're pointing out the people who will haunt your entire offseason, after all. But maybe you're wondering exactly how that list is calculated...

First off -- data is limited to the last 12 months. I don't care whose butt you were whooping back in 2010 and you shouldn't either. Time heals all wounds.

Next, we introduce a stat called "defeats." A defeat is when Racer A beats Racer B by ten or fewer places. This makes Racer B angry, and makes Racer A boastful. Why only ten places? Well, we had to draw the line somewhere -- when you're getting beat by 20 places, it's hard to call that person a rival, hmmm? Each defeat has an attribute called the margin, which is the number of places between the racers -- the best margin for Racer A is 1, meaning he beat Racer B by one place.

So when we show Nemeses and Victims on a racer history page, we're showing who victimized you the most often/whom you victimized the most, and we break ties by lower average margin. Beating someone three times by 7 places might get you a note on their wall -- but do it three times by one place each time and they'll be having nightmares.

Oh no! Your points will be artificially high! The whole system is ruined!!

Just kidding. We actually have code to take care of this, but unlike the "duplicate racer name" function we don't trust you to do it yourself. Instead, kick us some feedback with your name, along with (1) what state you're from and (2) what team name we can expect to see on your results, and we'll take care of it.

Cross Nationals are in January, and World Championships are in February, so your cyclocross Racing Age is one year older than your road racing age, you old fart!

HEY DO YOU LIKE MATH? I HOPE YOU LIKE MATH.

So what we do is, we take all your results. Ever. Then we use some nonlinear regression to create a best-fit curve for your career's trajectory, based on the points scored in each race.

The we look at each race result and see where it fell relative to that curve. This tells us if you had a "good" or a "bad" race relative to your normal performance.

Then, we look to see how much the various course conditions (Technical, Hilly, Accelerate-y, Wet) correlate to you having good or bad results. Technically we do this by computing the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between the two datasets.

Lastly, we multiply the correlation coefficient ("R") by 20 so that we aren't showing you some boring number that is mostly decimals.

In the vast hierarchy of things that are made up around here, this might be the most made-up thing. But it's still interesting.

So there's a Chapelle show skit from back in the day where he ruins someone's couch. The language is... "colorful." For some reason, that language look hold in the New England cycling scene as a way to describe what happens when pros show up to amateur races.

Then someone said "you should get a flaming couch icon on crossresults if you beat someone enough" and we tried to call their bluff with "ok, make us a flaming couch icon that doesn't look awful..." but this person is actually a talented artist, so that didn't work and here we are:

The criteria to make the couch appear is that you must have finished within 10 spots of each other at least 5 times, and one person must have won at least 90% of those matchups.

Nope! Since a large fraction of the racing population spent 2020 holding their breath instead of inhaling aerosols in a desperate battle for 45th, we changed the points lists and race predictor to look back up to 24 months for results. So you'll get credit in 2021 for how good (or bad) you were in 2019!'