On Friday, USA Cycling announced the merger of the National Racing Calendar (NRC) and National Criterium Calendar (NCC) into one road calendar for 2016. It was an idea that Sebastian Alexandre, director of the US-based Continental team Jamis p/b Hagens Berman, originally supported until he found out that it included 24 events, making it a calendar that he says teams can’t afford to contest.
“There are too many races,” Alexandre told Cyclingnews. “It’s a problem because of money. If you look at how teams are now, they are struggling with money and a couple of teams folded, like SmartStop.
“We all need to try and make this [national] calendar work and to keep it continuing, but it doesn’t help the teams by having 24 events. Instead of creating excitement about a national calendar, it has gone the other way.”
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The merging of the series’, which were separated four years ago, will bring together five stage races, two road races, and 17 criteriums and omnium events into one racing calendar in 2016. USA Cycling is expected to release the ranking system in the near future.
According to USA Cycling's Vice President of National Events, Micah Rice, the merging of the two calendars was decided upon after USA Cycling was given feedback from race directors of US-based teams at the National Symposium held in October. He noted that Alexandre could not attend the Symposium, along with some of the other teams, but much of the information about the national calendar was discussed at that time, even though the exact number of events on the calendar was not compiled yet.
"We push out a ton of information and try to get as many people to come so that we can discuss things together," Rice told Cyclingnews."That is were the decision was made to pull these two calendars back together. We pulled in all of the applications, from all the people who applied, and the people who made the cut from the two calendars, their events were put up for discussion."
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