Is the Event type suitable for running races? - schema.org

Question

I have inline Schema.org code via itemprop attributes, on all event pages on a website.
Search Console is flagging up recommendations that I use performer and various other properties, however due to the nature of the events (they are races), there are no performers.
Does this imply that event is the wrong type of Schema.org here, or can the warnings be safely ignored?
The tags used are:
type
image
name
location
type
address
type
streetaddress
addresslocality
address country
type
name
aggregaterating
type
reviewcount
ratingvalue

Answer 1

The Event type is perfectly suitable for races. But you should use the more specific SportsEvent.
Schema.org never requires any property, but consumers (who offer features based on Schema.org structured data) have their own requirements. If you want to get the feature, you would have to comply; if you don’t want the feature (or you can’t get it because you can’t provide all the required data), you can simply ignore any kind of errors/warnings from this consumer.
The consumer Google Search offers the event rich result feature, which has required and recommended properties. The performer property is just recommended, so it should be possible to get the event rich result without providing a performer.

Answer 2

Note that the guide of Google for Event requires the use of the following property that are not in the markup scheme you specified: startDate.
There are also many recommended properties out there that you are missing and these lower the value of the rich results of Google in the SERP:
description
endDate
location.name
offers
Note that the property executor can have the embedded type PerformingGroup, e.g.:
"performer": {
"#type": "PerformingGroup",
"name": "McLaren"
}
This way you can create markup for the team but not for each rider.
More detailed markup with structured data enriches the SERP of your web pages.

Answer 3

Beeing a webdeveloper and racedirector, I have been looking into this for some time now. If you take a look at the races website (no, this is no advertising for the best race on the planet), you can see that I have an event (SportsEvent) and six different competitions on that very day: 100km ultramarathon
What you see here is what I assembled so far to make my race as machine readable as possible. I have the adress, the different competitions, the place, the entry fees and the offers, the dooring time and all the stuff I might need google to know.
The only thing that is missing is the list of the competitors, the runners of each race. I am doing research about how to do this right now, but "sports" in microformats seems to be a team based thing. If I found out how to do it right, I'll post an update here. And you'll see it in the websites source code of course.
I have copied the LD-JSON here for future reference in case I'd edit the code of the website.
FYI: I am getting the participants data as XML feed directly from the raceresult registration website.
<script type='application/ld+json'>
{
"#context": "http://schema.org",
"#type": "SportsEvent",
"#id": "https://whew100.de/wettbewerbe/whew100.html",
"name": "WHEW100 Ultramarathon",
"image": "https://whew100.de/assets/images/WHEW100_transparent.png",
"url": "https://whew100.de/wettbewerbe/whew100.html",
"description": "WHEW100 Ultramarathon in Wuppertal über Wülfrath, Velbert, Heiligenhaus, Essen, Hattingen und Sprockhövel. Auf alten Bahntrassen zwischen Wuppert und Ruhr.",
"startDate": "2019-05-04T07:00:00",
"endDate": "2019-05-04T22:00:00",
"doorTime": "2019-05-04T06:00:00",
"maximumAttendeeCapacity": "200",
"aggregateRating": {
"#type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.9",
"reviewCount": "84"
},
"location": {
"#type": "Place",
"name": "Utopiastadt",
"sameAs": "https://www.clownfisch.eu/utopia-stadt/bahnhof-mirke/",
"address": {
"#type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "Mirker Straße 48",
"addressLocality": "Wuppertal",
"postalCode": "42105",
"addressCountry": "Germany"
}
},
"competitor": [
],
"offers": {
"#type": "Offer",
"description": "Anmeldung zum WHEW100",
"url": "http://my.raceresult.com/105067/",
"price": "75",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"availability": "200",
"validFrom": "2018-09-01T00:00:00"
},
"superEvent": {
"#id": "https://whew100.de",
"name": "WHEW100",
"startDate": "2019-05-04T07:00:00",
"endDate": "2019-05-04T22:00:00",
"location": {
"#type": "Place",
"name": "Utopiastadt",
"sameAs": "https://www.clownfisch.eu/utopia-stadt/bahnhof-mirke/",
"address": {
"#type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "Mirker Straße 48",
"addressLocality": "Wuppertal",
"postalCode": "42105",
"addressCountry": "Germany"
}
}
}
}
</script>