Rule change

[HF2300]

I suspect there will be some serious tinkering with the rules in the near future. If you want a sporting spectacle you need well matched teams

If there is it has to be for the long term health of the sport. Start tinkering around with rules just to make individual teams more or less competitive in individual seasons and you end up with the madness that is F1 governance.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Reducing team sizes would be great, not only because it would make it more even, it could also allow a couple more teams to be added.

 

[T4tomo]

Haven't we just had one of the best Tours in years, in terms of something of interest in virtually every stage.?

 

[ColinJ]

I like the idea of smaller teams, for the reasons stated above. The problem would be if something happened to a couple of riders in a team. Losing 2 riders from a team of 9 in a crash would be pretty unfortunate. Losing 2 from 6 would be a nightmare.

Long stages with no major climbs and just a sprint at the end can be very tedious to watch. I can see that they are often needed to avoid long transfers and are part of the wearing-down process which is a feature of 3-week stage races, but shorter stages are usually more interesting.

I like the relay idea!

How about an undulating stage where each rider is only allowed to ride a singlespeed/fixed gear bike? They have to decide whether they would lose more time grovelling on climbs or spinning out on descents and choose their gear ratio accordingly. Any spare wheels/bike would have to stick to that ratio.

 

[coffeejo]

Investment in women's cycling, from Grand Tours to salaries to prizes to TV time.

(Suspect my suggestion in another thread that they have to ride with fully loaded panniers etc would have more chance of becoming reality.)

Edit: Also love @Crackle's jousting idea.

 

[Hont]

...I can see that they are often needed to avoid long transfers...

How about combined Train/Brompton stages? That would make the transfer part of the race and should see a lot interest in the pro scene from commuters.

 

[winjim]

Investment in women's cycling, from Grand Tours to salaries to prizes to TV time.

Obviously this, as well as ditching the podium lovelies.

 

[Booyaa]

As the question was about pro cycling and not the tour, I like the idea of restricting the number of riders in a team. This would work over most races.

The salary cap idea would not work and seems to be a way to curtail Sky more than anything, and this is only really relevant in the TdF. It's not as if they are dominating EVERY pro race and making all the races dull. They have only really dominated in three of the major one week races too. I think in time the domination may spread to more races but at the moment it's not at that stage.

Looking at the difference in budgets for tour teams then putting a cap in place would not be a good idea.

 

[Buddfox]

Require all world tour teams to run parallel women's teams, and if you need reduce the size of the teams in the men's events to pay for it (presuming smaller teams means smaller squads).

Or get rid of race radio.

 

[nickyboy]

How about having a stage where you have to neck a beer every 10km?

Then the quandary is do you go with the skinny climber as your GC hope, but he might not last the 160km (and thus 16 bottles) or a proper unit like Stannard who could probably just about manage it. Quintana of course wouldn't even enter but I have a sneaky feeling Dumoulin could put a few away

There would be heavy time penalties for tactical chundering and/or adding lemonade to shandy-up your drink

 

[Dogtrousers]

How about combined Train/Brompton stages? That would make the transfer part of the race and should see a lot interest in the pro scene from commuters.

Love it. Put in lots of stairways too, make those skinny noodle-armed whippets really suffer. And ensure that the UCI minimum weight for Brommies (say ... 12kg?) is strictly enforced.

 

[mjr]

Then the quandary is do you go with the skinny climber as your GC hope, but he might not last the 160km (and thus 16 bottles) or a proper unit like Stannard who could probably just about manage it.

I think you may be underestimating just how little booze most pro cyclists now can cope with in-season.

The salary cap idea would not work and seems to be a way to curtail Sky more than anything, and this is only really relevant in the TdF. It's not as if they are dominating EVERY pro race and making all the races dull. They have only really dominated in three of the major one week races too. I think in time the domination may spread to more races but at the moment it's not at that stage.

The trouble is that many of the field-levelling ideas like salary caps, drafts, long protected franchises and so on are from the Americans who want to turn cycling into another Major League Boring-ball clone... but ASO favours a more typical European promotion/relegation system, so that's hopefully not going to happen, but the latest move to let teams who lose their World Tour licence enter World Tour races for a year afterwards seems a lot like a step in that wrong direction.

One of the biggest things that could be done is to package and promote the other races up closer to the level of the Tour de France because no team dominates the whole season across all formats and I'm not sure they ever can... but ASO seems unwilling to let its Vuelta challenge its Tour and seems a bit distracted/haphazard about promoting its shorter races (maybe because it's already concentrating on pulling the Tour together), while RCS reportedly asks for laughably high amounts of money for coverage of the Giro.

The UCI has an opportunity with women's pro racing (the Women's World Tour) to build a model that works, get it carried on some free-to-air channels and then wait for all the men's teams except a dominant two or three to be begging to copy it... but it seems like only RAI and Youtube are covering much of this season... and then there's scheduling goofs like this Saturday evening's RideLondon Grand Prix (which is more like a criterium than a road race so IMO barely deserves UCIWWT classification anyway) which gets almost no live coverage

 

[Smokin Joe]

No support cars. Have a mechanical? Fix it yourself. Think you'll be thirsty? Make sure you carry enough to drink. It's all part of riding a bike, especially in a so called Grand Tour.

On a forum where half the posts seem to be desperate pleas for help on applying handlebar tape or adjusting the cable tension on the gears that's a bit rich. The ability to ride to professional standard does not go hand in hand with the ability to replace a broken fork or rebuild a wheel by the side of the road. It would turn the race into a farce with few finishers. On some of the other suggestions, salary caps would probably be illegal under European employment laws. A reduction to eight riders per team would probably be a good idea as would the banning of radios, but you have to be careful not to go too far in tinkering with the rules. There used to be ten riders per team in the past, and in the late seventies when the TdF was dying on it's backside the organisers had trouble persuading enough teams to take part, at least once running with only eleven teams with a total of 110 riders. There have always been teams who were way ahead of the field on budget, La Vie Claire, Banesto, Renault, Discovery, Molteni, etc. That occasionally happens in every sport but it levels out again in time.

It's funny how the calls for a change to the "Unfair" rules only come during a British period of dominance. We seem to be embarrassed when we have winners at the top in sport whereas the rest of the world appreciate their heroes. The Tour is probably more competitive in recent years than at any time in it's history, with winning margins being measured in handfuls of minutes rather than being over by half distance which it often was in the past. Leave well alone.

 

[brommers]

but ASO favours a more typical European promotion/relegation system

I thought that the UCI runs cycling?

 

[SWSteve]

Whenever you pass through a city or town, you must consume a sizeable portion of their local delicacy before you can start/continue e.g. A pint of Chantily cream, or if competing in a time trial, a bottle of Chianti. That would sort the men from the boys