No Radios on Two Stages TdF?

[snarls]

Cool! I hope this becomes a growing trend, especially in mountain top ending stages where everyone is split top to bottom, no one is any longer sure where everyone is and it is pure mayhem.

Is there any real amount of truth to the safety issue?

 

[clementcrit]

Hope it's true.
Would Armstrong have won 7 TDF's without a radio link back to Bruyneel?
If riders need safety info via radio links, can't the TDF organisers do this with general broadcast messages to all riders?
Actually maye not if you need to broadcast in all the different languages spoken in the pro bunch these days.
Anyhow, taking them out for a few key stages would help sort out the safety issue and if they make racing boring.
I guess a rider can still get his DS to come alongside in the car if he needs to know what to do.

 

[BroDeal]

I will stand by the posts I made in the other five or six threads about radios.

 

[Anonymous]

Cool! I hope this becomes a growing trend, especially in mountain top ending stages where everyone is split top to bottom, no one is any longer sure where everyone is and it is pure mayhem.

Is there any real amount of truth to the safety issue?

i remember a tour stage where a team in yellow suddendy moved to the front of a flat stage. the announcers where stumbling all over themselves trying to figure the stratagy.

the team's recon of the course had showed a particularly difficult set of angled rail road tracks.

warnings of crashes can be a very real safety issue.

it's hard to believe now that auto racing resisted the ideas of radios in cars for a long long time. it was stupid.

i can admit cycling is a bit different so i'll try to keep an open mind in these two tour stages.

it's probably going to be very strange for the riders.

 

[kloftus1044]

I believe they chose the stages quite skillfully. Bastille Day, perfect for that French breakaway to victory and a VERY lumpy stage that should allow for attackers to disappear out of sight and never be seen again. And by picking the stages right in the middle of the Tour, they're forcing some teams to pay attention.

I love the idea of no radios. The riders get to use their heads, their intuition, their actual racing skills to win a race rather than having everything fed to them by the team directors.

But, I won't be surprised if the peloton pulls some sort of protest. I can see that happening.

 

[Alpe d'Huez]

I will stand by the posts I made in the other five or six threads about radios.

+1

Also, broadcasting road hazard info in French and English would cover the languages the vast majority of riders speak enough of. Or you can just have gendarmes or officials waving their hands 500m before any hazard, like the old days.

 

[philcrisp]

It's difficult to beleive that you can't get round the saftey issue with GPS technology etc. Garmin let CycleSport follow them around on a recce at last year's tour. If they can do it it must be possible to produce some sort of audio road book. And then we can have a bit of tactical chaos and confusion like the old days.