Mountain Goat said:
...What about a relegation system similar to the Premier League?...
I agree with some of thinking behind this idea - a team has a genuine basis on which to start planning, cyclists have a little more control of their future and vital information when planning it, if done correctly, teams cannot come from nowhere without having proven themselves to be reasonably well run with a proper youth development footing, must have their anti-doping frameworks seriously examined by an independent source before moving up, and comply with the other rules and regulations.
However, this is more along the lines of a footballing set up - one whioch works very well in football, but will it work as well in cycling? Discovery died suddenly as they couldn't get a sponsor when they were maybe in the top three or four protour teams. Credit Agricole too. If a team were facing "relegation" their sponsor might reconsider the following year's sponsorship if they thought it a divisional set up. Also, team reconfigurings, a la US Discotana into Radio Shack, and brand new "Superteams" like Sky (Katusha were at least built on top of Tinkoff) would be highly unlikely as they would not be able to justify themselves on a hope of a wildcard - I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, just pointing it out.
Furthermore, having to have a set size for the Protour is a double edged sword - what if the top six Pro Conti teams decline, because of the financial and travel commitment, or if the only one that fulfills the criteria is 12th, because they concentrated on the criteria, not the racing, but one of the teams that finished in the "relegation zone" was more consistent, more attacking but just could not win, yet came second on, say 15 occasions in GT stages and overalls, and in Paris Roubaix and the Giro di Lombardia?
The thing is it is a very good system to implement in sports like football or rugby, where there is always a clear winner and a loser and a league table and the conditions are fixed, and the sponsors serve the club, not the team serve the sponsors. Cavendish pulled out of the higher ranked Tour of Britain to race the Tour of Missouri which is more important to the sponsor. On a different squad, losing a cyclist of that short arsed stature would wreck their hopes of picking up the points they might need to stay up but depriving their sponsor of their jollies might be even more suicidal. Cycling is a very different sport to the ones that use this system, and allowance must be made.
It also does remind me that there are plenty of ills in many other sports, so much so that I think most of them believe that they are permanently on the verge of crisis, and those that do not are generally in the middle of one. Cycling does need some work to be done to sort out a number of problems, I fear the problem will have to be a great innovation rather than reverse engineering. However, making the leap of thought to at least challenging the current system is something that needs to be done, so I am going to say Chapeau for escaping the box, and propose here that Mountain Goat be elected to the UCI council!
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