Electress said:
ray j willings said:
Oleg makes some good points, but what I don't want to see is
Pay to view races only ...so no GT'S on non paying TV
paying to watch a race live at the start and finish area.
Paying to get on to a mountain during a big stage of the Tour or Giro etc.
Even though I don't wear any sort of team Kit ,,,prices going crazy expensive.
Teams using tech that means we cannot ride the same kind of bike unless rich as F%%K
I don't want to see Cycling going the way of F1 or Soccer.
Cycling IMO is a peoples sport and a free one to go and watch.
Biggest fear is if Sky gets Cycling rights and it will turn into a pile of profit making take the people for all the money we can pile of sh%t.
I agree to some extent, and to some extent with Oleg, the problem is in not going too far. I have no wish for cycling to lose it's connection to its history, or its fans by turning it into a ticketed sporting extravaganza. I'm no football fan, but I know a number of peole who have fallen out of love with the sport because of the sense of disconnection from it now it is a massive worldwide industry with ludicrous amounts of money changing hands. Cycling benefits in some ways from not being too mainstream and going the sky ppv or 20:20 cricket route isn't what I want.
What turns my blood cold, however, is this bit:
Managing a team is not just about issuing instructions from a car radio or about casting a spell over the riders at which Riis was unsurpassed, for example. Managing a team is about boring, monotonous work in the office. The day of the boring and meticulous managers has come - guys like Dave Brailsord and, I hope, our new Director Stefano Feltrin.
Directing the team and its riders from preparation today must be driven by mathematical and statistical analysis and data mining. Sport science is the king now!
I appreciate that you need to do the numbers and use modern methods, but please God, I want there to be room for risk taking and panache in the sport. All teams work hard, but hearing all about power ratios and nothing about passion or enjoyment kills the fun for me. One of the reasons I loathe Sky is the corporate management / mood of accountancy that colours everything. I like to think that guys like Riis have a personal, even paternal connection with their riders, and share human qualities and failings with them. I want to hear about inspiration, leadership and charisma not power metres and working out the stats. I want the riders I support to come over as people, not robots, and able to still make individual choices and have a life outside the sport.
I like to think that all the training just sets up the rider to work from the best possible base during racing, but from then on its about instinct and risk-taking and a feeling for race-day tactics, not only will-to-power / crush any resistance in some dreary well-executed strategy planned with a gantt chart and calculator three weeks in advance. Winning is important, but it isn't the be all and end all. How the winning is done matters to me. Daring to do things differently and taking chances; even at the cost of being erratic / inconsistent but occasionally mercurially brilliant, has much more appeal to me. One of the reasons I loved Sagan when he appeared on the scene was his willingness to prat about - it was enjoyable to watch someone who was clearly enjoying what he was doing. There's not enough of that as it is, IMO.
This is such a good assessment from so many points of view. You have expressed beautifully the ineffable aesthetic quality, which is "soul," not "mind," without which sport - and not only sport - looses its beauty. This you did through all the reasons stated. You effectively used the Nietzscheian "will-to-power," as a metaphor for that dreary over-corporatized and hyper-scientific sport method of automatized cycling that currently Sky personifies. Naturally this is not all Sky's fault, nor did it begin with the British cycling team. Corporate professionalism and scientific method in reality goes back to the Philadelphian buisnessman, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose "scientific method" was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management, to of course maximize profit and reduce expenses. In fact the factories already de-humanized by machines, now further reduced workers to mere pawns in a greater scheme. Sky has simply established the modern paradigm for this in sport. Sport is a business for sure, however, as someone once said: the more business takes over, the less humanity remains. Using this as a metaphor, I think helps us comprehend the decline of sport - even though paradoxically at no time has it been more popular, nor commercialized, which though are concomitant phenomena.
I suppose it was inevitable that in today's business dominated world sport should move ever further along this path. Though anyone is free to voice his or her disapproval. After all it is just somebody's investment and a microcosm of what has already transformed society and the state. What? Society is just another corporate entity on a larger scale. Thus what is good for the corporate model and business praxis, must also be good for governance. In fact the market has invaded the State's apparatus and the schools too, for which managing a company is no different than how the government leadership should approach managing society, or how the schools and the new pedagogy should form the minds of its students and orient them toward being productive and economically useful model citizens. This has come with the consequent erosion, where it has not effectively been reduced to total rubble, of the fundamental role the humanities once played, the didactic aim of which was to elevate the culture of society to the enrichment of democracy. In this sense cultivate its soul, because with the business and economic hegemon such an ideal has become obsolete, when it is not seen outright as bloody subversive. In fact the GNP has grown, but democracy has never before been in such a sad state, nor have vulgarity and baseness played such pervasive roles in history, as in today's consumer society.
Well, if you ask me, Oleg represents for cycling today this business epiphany in its most crude and elementary state, just as basic (as in base) in its uncontaminated purity, as it is uncorrupted in its form; devoid that is of those ineffable qualities and tedious (and meddlesome) humanity such as you describe that used to make sport great. He lies, though, when he says cycling doesn't need star managers, since his team is full of star staff members. What he really means, therefore, is that cycling needs despotic owners like himself and yes-men beneath them fighting for the just "revolutionary" and "transformative" causes, to save the sport from its own irrelevant and even worse detrimental history. The arrogance and the self-aggrandizing persona of Tinkoff knows no limits, and is typical of today's businessmen who have allowed money and power to blow up their egos, intolerable enough even before they ventured into such messianic causes.
Like I said by the time Oleg's vision takes over the sport, and I suspect it is only a matter of time before it will, I will have long since stopped watching thank you.
Lastly if cycling has lost its romantic appeal, it is because such mental habits as performed elsewhere in contemporary society have diminished its soul. Whereas Oleg is only kidding himself by arguing that the arms race has gone on in cycling simply because of the old, wicked ways, when it has been the result of the increased hegemonic force of the same corporate and scientific business paradigm that he himself, as its promoter, incarnates.