I think a much better penalty would be a 1 mile out and back run, with boxes of tomatos on the sidelines, with WTC employees encouraging spectators to get involved.

That would be for drafters.

For chinstrap, position violations, etc, throw them in the sin bin. Or at least, no tomatos for them in the run of shame.

My 2 cents – no drafting. As a crappy bike rider, I would certainly benefit. But I hate watching ITU and what it's done to triathlon. I guess I'm a purist – there are three disciplines, and you do them on your own. I would hate it if some bozo sat on my wheel for 5 hours and then dusted me on the run. Or some local tri club shows up and a mob of 50 people peleton up. Not my idea of a fun day. Not my idea of triathlon.

Then there's the danger. Do we then penalize people if they're drafting, and in their aero bars? Do draft legal IM's force people to only use the little ITU clip-ons?

I have to think that anyone being intentional about pack riding surely is more aware of the motorcycles than I am. This is an inherent flaw. Your idea of consistently trained “refs” will surely help, but not solve the problem.

I would like to think there would be a way to involve silent observers along the route. I don't think you could deputize people to hand out penalties, but you could deputize them to radio to the various officials that “there's a pack just passing mile 23 as of 9:05 a.m.” I don't know how effective this would be, but I would think it would be worth trying a couple of times before going public with the announcement that it was going to be the new policy.