Originally Posted by grolby

Oh, and I sympathize with Fudgy's cry for data, but memory and anecdote is just the best we've got. There's no way to reconstruct, for example, crash rates from the old days. USAC could start a crash-reporting system tomorrow and still be unable analyze the success or failure of racer training from any date prior to 6/10/14 with that data. So we just throw away the limited info we have from old-timers (sorry CDR...) because we think they're just old fogeys? Do we take them 100% at their word? Or is there a way to incorporate the recollections of people who have been racing for decades while acknowledging that memory is imperfect and rose-tinted by nostalgia? After all, what we know about how racing and cycling culture have changed in the last 30 years is almost entirely from the living memory of people who have been riding that whole time. There's just not a lot of this stuff written down in books. But we believe at least some of it, surely.