The pinned rules

The Start Sheet is a reader's publication. Its notes are notes on a culture, written for general reading by people who watch the sport from the sign-in table and the roadside. Nothing here is professional, coaching, legal or medical advice, and no note is a recommendation to race, to ride, to join a club or to buy anything. A reader who needs a ruling should ask the body that governs the race; a reader who needs training should ask a coach. We keep a notebook.

Sources and honesty

Every note is checked against the public record before it goes up: the published rules and results of USA Cycling, the district association's own record, the park and bridge authorities that govern the roads these pages describe, and the archived record of the site that stood at this address.

The sources consulted are named at the foot of every note, so a reader can check the same record we checked. Where the record stops, the note says so rather than guessing. No figure is given without a source behind it, nothing is invented to fill a gap in what survives, and no rider's, official's or member's name is repeated from the old club's years.

Corrections

An note that is wrong gets fixed, and the fix is marked where the error stood. If you hold the record that corrects a page, write to letters@californiaroadclub.org, name the note and the source, and it will be checked against what you send. Corrections that hold are made on the page itself, with the sources line updated, never changed silently. The board would rather be corrected than be wrong.

What this site is not

This board is not the club that stood at this address, and it speaks for no former owner, member or officer of it. It takes no racenotes, holds no membership, keeps no roster, sells nothing and runs no advertising. There is nothing here to sign up for and nothing here to buy.

Links to other sites are reading suggestions, the way one sheet on a board points to another. They are not endorsements and they are not paid placements; no one has bought a line on this board and no one can.

Privacy

The site is a static board. It sets no cookie, runs no tracker, embeds no third-party analytics, asks for no account and keeps no list of readers. The host keeps the ordinary technical logs every web server keeps, the address asked for, the time, the browser's own description of itself, and the board reads them for nothing else.

A letter sent to the table is kept only as long as the correction or the conversation it contains still needs it, and then it is let go. Letters are never sold, lent, traded or added to any list.

Images and text

The photographs on this site were made for the board and belong to it. The text may be quoted briefly with a link and the name of the page, the way a results sheet gets quoted in a race report. For anything more than a brief quotation, write to the table first and ask.