XC-steve and njee20 – you admit to being litter-droppers then?
Insofar as I can think of an occasion where I’ve got home and found there’s fewer wrappers in my back pocket than I’ve eaten. They could well be in the car. I merely posed a situation I can see where they’d fall out, and weighing nothing you wouldn’t notice.
Things can fall out of your pocket when you crash too.
Judge me as you see fit!
Would you be more careful if they were all counted out and back in again?
That really is impossible to implement. Yesterdays Gorrick (the race in question) had 580 entrants. So you need an army of people to count everyone’s gels, and then like I said above, what do you do about the people who take them in the feed zone? There’s no policed feed zone or area at the Gorricks anyway, so you’d need marshals on every inch of the course counting the riders who take gels and how many. And what about riders that don’t finish and don’t come through the finish? Where do ‘count them in’ as it were?
Instead of employing the army of people, you could just send a couple of them out afterwards to pick up the litter. You shouldn’t have to, but it would be a far easier solution to implement.
Thinking about it some more… how do disqualifications work? Is it just on word of mouth? I’m having a good tussle with someone, he wins, can I go to the commissaire and say “he dropped litter” and get him DQ’d, or does it have to be a marshal that sees it? If so surely it’s easy to circumvent?
It’s always been a problem, I reckon much less so than a few years ago, organisers are much better at saying “don’t drop litter” and what not, but I’m not sure how you’d ever stop it fully.
What do we do about water bottles and things falling out of cages too? Disqualify? They’re more damaging! Pumps, tubes, multi-tools? They all get lost.