Please UCI, let's try reduced teams.

[veji11]

Re:

When you take into account the road surfaces and, most importantly, the gears, it's hard not to conclude that cycling has never been less hard than nowadays. A solution to all this boring racing would be to increase the hardness, not to reduce it.

very true too : Bikes are super light and super rigid, roads are a lot smoother (which now makes organisers look for unused goat paths to avoid all those great smooth roads) and distances ridden are a lot shorter than in the past. This means that this sport has dramatically changed. Except a few times a year like in Paris Roubaix or in this olympic race, riders don't ride from 150kms out at close to peak level, they wait and wait and wait and unleash all they got in the last 3 or 4 decisive kms (the Saint-Nicolas/Ans duo in LBL, the Vieux Quaremont-Paterberg duo in the Ronde before those 10 kms of flat)... They can produce phenomenal watts there, but they have a hard time sustaining their efforts because the sport has changed. But making routes harder isn't necessarily the answer if the riders keep just controling it until the last kms. Bringing endurance back into cycling is important and smaller teams help in that regard.

 

[veji11]

Re: Re:

I think we need to identify what problem we are trying to solve but not as happens with Government policy solve one problem and create another

Riders are humans with limited endurance ...to ride 3 weeks in a 6 man team is very hard
To inlcude a stage like Rio in an GT is very very hard

What you do is you get a team to employ the riders who have best enduraance and then they dominate
And races become boring as riders are holding on rather than racing
Domination is controlled by money and teams with money adapt to the requirement

It might be a start to take a race like the Dauphine or T/A and test some principles and then see what factors come in to play , ie 6 man teams and no radios

9 man teams work very well in the classics because these are very hard races with spills

9 man teams have worked well in the GTs as many riders crash out, etc and with smaller teams you may handicap a team if they say have a rider crash and another get sick

I personally would like to see more done with parcours, bonus seconds, radios, power metres befroe reducing team size in GTs

They tried 6 man teams in Poland in 2013 and the results weren't great.

gne ???

It was a great race on the contrary, considering the participants of course : you had an Aquila style breakaway that meant a rider like Riblon got himself in GC contention, you had Phinney winning a stage à la poursuiteur attacking from a few kms out of a predicted bunch sprint and resisting because sprint teams were weaker.. it was a great race really that showed the potential of reduced teams !

 

[veji11]

Re:

The issue isn't team size with Sky it's that other teams with similar budgets haven't really spent it well or tried to be all things, Sky are so focused on the tour that there best nine riders are always at top wack in July.

And this is why team size is key : Having 9 very strong riders on one team defending their one objective makes them comparatively stronger than the rest of the field because they act as a cohesive unit. You want to make the cohesive units, aka the teams, weaker so that the race becomes less predictable and dictates the need for offensive or defensive coalitions. That a single team (whichever it is) can control many stages in a GT by its own sheer strength is a massive problem.

 

[veji11]

Re: Re:

And that leads me to the point that I don't really understand in which world 9 men teams work. Look at the tdf or LBL. Those were horrible races because they got controlled. The only really good gt's and monuments in the last years were good because the leaders or favorites were in bad teams (Kruijswij, dumoulin and contador in gt's, sagan and cancellara in classics). Imagine if sagan would ride for sky. The ronde would be great with Thomas, Rowe, stannard and kwiat controlling the race, right. :rolleyes:

+ lots.

Strong teams are a bane, even if all their work leads to nothing because the leader can't finish the job à la Liquigas 2012 for Basso or BMC for Gilbert on the ardennaises for a few years where you could see BMC controlling until Saint Nicolas in 2013 for example.

The goal is simpler, make it impossible for a team to control a race : on a one day race teams need to be weak enought not to be able to control that one day race. And on stage races and GTs teams need to be weak enough that they might control a few stages but it saps their energy massively for the rest of the race.

If you ride one day classics with say 6 or 5 riders per team, there will come a point where a leader has to go with attacks because he can't count on his team reeling it in Orica for Gerrans style. Then the race opens up.

 

[Volderke]

With smaller teams, riders are not necessarily unemployed, as more teams can be erected, no?

 

[hrotha]

With smaller teams, riders are not necessarily unemployed, as more teams can be erected, no?

It's more complicated than that. First you need the extra sponsors, and then you can only fit so many teams in the existing races (logistically, it's not as simple as "22 teams, -2 rider per team means 44 free spots in the peloton that can be filled with 6 extra teams", because that also means extra cars in the race and hotel rooms for the staff). With smaller race rosters across the board, teams would need smaller squads, which means plenty of riders would find themselves without a team.

 

[el chava]

Re:

When you take into account the road surfaces and, most importantly, the gears, it's hard not to conclude that cycling has never been less hard than nowadays. A solution to all this boring racing would be to increase the hardness, not to reduce it.

This. Combined with better (equal) training methods and nutrition, deeper talent base and general professionalization of the teams and more information/science (radio/powermeters) available, too many races result in miniscule differences between the best riders on the last k and even in the GC. I mean top 2-10 in the tour were more or less equally good over 3500km! How can this be in the supposedly 'hardest sports event in the world'?

I miss true epic stages like Nieve's Val di Fassa win in the Giro (almost 7½ hours for the winning time!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKpLmYKky68

 

[HelloDolly]

Re: Re:

I think we need to identify what problem we are trying to solve but not as happens with Government policy solve one problem and create another

Riders are humans with limited endurance ...to ride 3 weeks in a 6 man team is very hard
To inlcude a stage like Rio in an GT is very very hard

What you do is you get a team to employ the riders who have best enduraance and then they dominate
And races become boring as riders are holding on rather than racing
Domination is controlled by money and teams with money adapt to the requirement

It might be a start to take a race like the Dauphine or T/A and test some principles and then see what factors come in to play , ie 6 man teams and no radios

9 man teams work very well in the classics because these are very hard races with spills

9 man teams have worked well in the GTs as many riders crash out, etc and with smaller teams you may handicap a team if they say have a rider crash and another get sick

I personally would like to see more done with parcours, bonus seconds, radios, power metres befroe reducing team size in GTs

I disagree with basically all points.
If someone can't ride a gt with 6 teammates cycling is probably the false sport for him. A gt should be about endurance anyway. And no, teams which have money can't just adapt and dominate like before and honestly I have no idea why one would think thats the case. Sky right now has 8 riders in the tdf who are trained to control. Why should those riders suddenly get stronger only because there are less of those riders. What I understand even less is why it should lead to passive racing. Do you think its a coincidence that riders in bad teams are usually the ones who get attacked most.
And that leads me to the point that I don't really understand in which world 9 men teams work. Look at the tdf or LBL. Those were horrible races because they got controlled. The only really good gt's and monuments in the last years were good because the leaders or favorites were in bad teams (Kruijswij, dumoulin and contador in gt's, sagan and cancellara in classics). Imagine if sagan would ride for sky. The ronde would be great with Thomas, Rowe, stannard and kwiat controlling the race, right.

First of all I made what is if you read it correctly and legitimate point...

Secondly what some people on here don't seem to realise you can dominate with 6 riders if you have the 6 best riders and the others have only 2 great guys and 4 not so good...
And so many key board warriors on here including yourself who think its fine that riders ride 3 weeks with littlle supprt as if machines... there is a good possibilty that most stages will not be raced and therefore just as boring
Its as if you approach cycling as if they were gladiators in the arena ...it must be so hard and there must be so many spills for there to be any entertainment !!
I guess you cannot see very far in front of your nose

LBL and co are horrible rase becuase of the parcours
The GTs you talk of were great becasue it was a strong rider against a strong team...there were a david v golaith element to it. Contolling the teams reduced that

 

[veji11]

Re: Re:

Secondly what some people on here don't seem to realise you can dominate with 6 riders if you have the 6 best riders and the others have only 2 great guys and 4 not so good...
And so many key board warriors on here including yourself who think its fine that riders ride 3 weeks with littlle supprt as if machines... there is a good possibilty that most stages will not be raced and therefore just as boring
Its as if you approach cycling as if they were gladiators in the arena ...it must be so hard and there must be so many spills for there to be any entertainment !!
I guess you cannot see very far in front of your nose

LBL and co are horrible rase becuase of the parcours
The GTs you talk of were great becasue it was a strong rider against a strong team...there were a david v golaith element to it. Contolling the teams reduced that

1/ It is harder to dominate with 6 great riders in a team than with 9. That's not that complicated to understand : If you have a smaller team any little issue (one of the riders having bad legs, a crash or mechanical) has a far bigger effect, the workload is shared between less riders so they all work more (you can't let Poels, Nieve or Henao have days off because you don't have 5 riders with your leader do control everything) and get more tired. there is a geometrical effect in quantity : 9 great riders in a bunch of 198 isn't equal to 7 great riders in a bunch of 154, you have far greater control over the race with 9 even if proportionaly the field is just as big. To take an absurd example : compare a situation where you have teams of 2 (aka 44 riders on a GT) and teams of 9 (198 riders in a GT). It is plain obvious that you don't have the same capacity to control the race with the first case even though you have the same proportion right ? Smaller teams means more variability and unpredictability.

2/ LBL and co are not horrible because of the parcours. The parcours have been tweaked and latered over the years to try and counter the evolution towards greater control of the race by the big teams. So they have become increasingly backloaded, but makeing them less so would result in today's cycling into a bunch of 50 arriving in the center of Liege. The Parcours lever has been used to breaking point on GTs, Classics, etc.. It has become plain obvious that it isn't the main issue anymore, you could keep changing them effect would only be marginal.

3/ Fun GTs (or partly fun ones anyway, we forget how boring this year Giro was for 2 weeks and a half) were fun because the strongest rider didn't have a strong team to control everything indeed. Smaller teams make it harder for a single team to control the race

 

[MatParker117]

Re: Re:

Secondly what some people on here don't seem to realise you can dominate with 6 riders if you have the 6 best riders and the others have only 2 great guys and 4 not so good...
And so many key board warriors on here including yourself who think its fine that riders ride 3 weeks with littlle supprt as if machines... there is a good possibilty that most stages will not be raced and therefore just as boring
Its as if you approach cycling as if they were gladiators in the arena ...it must be so hard and there must be so many spills for there to be any entertainment !!
I guess you cannot see very far in front of your nose

LBL and co are horrible rase becuase of the parcours
The GTs you talk of were great becasue it was a strong rider against a strong team...there were a david v golaith element to it. Contolling the teams reduced that

1/ It is harder to dominate with 6 great riders in a team than with 9. That's not that complicated to understand : If you have a smaller team any little issue (one of the riders having bad legs, a crash or mechanical) has a far bigger effect, the workload is shared between less riders so they all work more (you can't let Poels, Nieve or Henao have days off because you don't have 5 riders with your leader do control everything) and get more tired. there is a geometrical effect in quantity : 9 great riders in a bunch of 198 isn't equal to 7 great riders in a bunch of 154, you have far greater control over the race with 9 even if proportionaly the field is just as big. To take an absurd example : compare a situation where you have teams of 2 (aka 44 riders on a GT) and teams of 9 (198 riders in a GT). It is plain obvious that you don't have the same capacity to control the race with the first case even though you have the same proportion right ? Smaller teams means more variability and unpredictability.

2/ LBL and co are not horrible because of the parcours. The parcours have been tweaked and latered over the years to try and counter the evolution towards greater control of the race by the big teams. So they have become increasingly backloaded, but makeing them less so would result in today's cycling into a bunch of 50 arriving in the center of Liege. The Parcours lever has been used to breaking point on GTs, Classics, etc.. It has become plain obvious that it isn't the main issue anymore, you could keep changing them effect would only be marginal.

3/ Fun GTs (or partly fun ones anyway, we forget how boring this year Giro was for 2 weeks and a half) were fun because the strongest rider didn't have a strong team to control everything indeed. Smaller teams make it harder for a single team to control the race

Or in a three week race you seriously risk gassing the peloton and the race dies in the second week meaning a predictable procession to the finish. The problem with the tour was Sky paralysed the race with strength and tactical nous. It's up to other teams to find a way to beat them, no way will the teams and riders allow smaller teams of less than eight.

 

[Valv.Piti]

The most realistic scenario would be to reduce the teams to 7 and 8 for GT's, I think its too drastic to want 6 man teams already now. I understand thats a goal, maybe, but it needs to be done over many years.

 

[veji11]

Re: Re:

Or in a three week race you seriously risk gassing the peloton and the race dies in the second week meaning a predictable procession to the finish. The problem with the tour was Sky paralysed the race with strength and tactical nous. It's up to other teams to find a way to beat them, no way will the teams and riders allow smaller teams of less than eight.

You forget one key element of GT racing, the one that made lots of difference in the past : recuperation. The riders who would win would be the ones who didn't end up completely gassed after a weak or two of racing.

And when you say that the problem with the tour was that Sky paralysed the race with strength.. well indeed and smaller team have less strength proportionnaly. A team of 7 in a field of 154 is more vulnerable to problems, to tiredness, to attacks than a team of 9 in a field o 198. And again to use my ad absurdum, if you had teams of 2 in a field of 44 they wouldn't be able to control the race at all.

May I remind you that in the olympics we had teams of 5 at most in a field that was officially 143 but really only about 100 were somewhat competitive at the highest level. Well guess what a team of 9 in a field of 198 is a bit less than 5%, same as a team of 5 with a field of 100ish.. And the teams couldn't control the race. Even better, because here you could argue the route made all the difference, take the 2012 olympic games. You had a Team GB with Wiggins, Froome (the 1st and second of the tour de France by a massive margin) and co trying to control the race for Cavendish.. Well they were never able to control the race yet their team was super strong compared to others. But the smaller the team the harder for one team to control a race.

 

[Gigs_98]

Re: Re:

I think we need to identify what problem we are trying to solve but not as happens with Government policy solve one problem and create another

Riders are humans with limited endurance ...to ride 3 weeks in a 6 man team is very hard
To inlcude a stage like Rio in an GT is very very hard

What you do is you get a team to employ the riders who have best enduraance and then they dominate
And races become boring as riders are holding on rather than racing
Domination is controlled by money and teams with money adapt to the requirement

It might be a start to take a race like the Dauphine or T/A and test some principles and then see what factors come in to play , ie 6 man teams and no radios

9 man teams work very well in the classics because these are very hard races with spills

9 man teams have worked well in the GTs as many riders crash out, etc and with smaller teams you may handicap a team if they say have a rider crash and another get sick

I personally would like to see more done with parcours, bonus seconds, radios, power metres befroe reducing team size in GTs

I disagree with basically all points.
If someone can't ride a gt with 6 teammates cycling is probably the false sport for him. A gt should be about endurance anyway. And no, teams which have money can't just adapt and dominate like before and honestly I have no idea why one would think thats the case. Sky right now has 8 riders in the tdf who are trained to control. Why should those riders suddenly get stronger only because there are less of those riders. What I understand even less is why it should lead to passive racing. Do you think its a coincidence that riders in bad teams are usually the ones who get attacked most.
And that leads me to the point that I don't really understand in which world 9 men teams work. Look at the tdf or LBL. Those were horrible races because they got controlled. The only really good gt's and monuments in the last years were good because the leaders or favorites were in bad teams (Kruijswij, dumoulin and contador in gt's, sagan and cancellara in classics). Imagine if sagan would ride for sky. The ronde would be great with Thomas, Rowe, stannard and kwiat controlling the race, right.

First of all I made what is if you read it correctly and legitimate point...

Secondly what some people on here don't seem to realise you can dominate with 6 riders if you have the 6 best riders and the others have only 2 great guys and 4 not so good...
And so many key board warriors on here including yourself who think its fine that riders ride 3 weeks with littlle supprt as if machines... there is a good possibilty that most stages will not be raced and therefore just as boring
Its as if you approach cycling as if they were gladiators in the arena ...it must be so hard and there must be so many spills for there to be any entertainment !!
I guess you cannot see very far in front of your nose

LBL and co are horrible rase becuase of the parcours
The GTs you talk of were great becasue it was a strong rider against a strong team...there were a david v golaith element to it. Contolling the teams reduced that

Sorry, I don't understand your first sentence.

First of all, how can one seriously think a 7 men team can control a race as effectively as a 9 men team? I just don't get it, imo thats common sense. Which 6 domestiques would Froome have had? Thomas, Stannard, Poels, Henao, Landa and Kiry? I think that would make most sense, and in that constellation Nieve and Rowe would be missing. Now please explain why the hell this team could be as dominating as the team of this year. Those other riders don't just get better because there are less other riders in the team. They actually even get worse because they don't get their unofficial restdays like Poels at the beginning of the tour.

The argument, LBL and co are horrible races because of the parcours is complete nonsense. Some races have always had the same route, some races like Milano San Remo would be even worse if they would still have the old routes, and races like LBL got route changes because the old climbs maybe made it less backloaded but today a short 6 or 7% climb doesn't create time gaps anymore. And the sad thing is that thanks to the introduction of the new climb in LBL, the group which sprinted for the win was smaller than in the years before so that route change actually even made the race a bit better. The route is not an explanation.

You are kind of right though about the David vs Goliath situation, that at least was the case in the two gt's in 2015 (Nibali's giro win had nothing to do with his team strength). However those races were only ever interesting when the rider in the weak team was in front, like the whole giro 2015, the last week of the vuelta 2015 or the last week of the giro 2016. But do you also remember the mtf's of the 2nd week in that Vuelta? There were 3 hard mtf's after each other and Aru was the leader, which led to 3 of the most disappointing stages of the year. The giro also was pretty boring as long as Kruijswijk, who had a bad team, wasn't in front.

And last but not least, I'm extremely amused that you brought up the most stupid argument, which unfortunately still gets used way too often in this forum: You don't know anything because you are only a keyboard warrior. Absolutely every time someone says a rider made a mistake or routes should be harder or basically any kind of criticism, someone else says people have no idea because they are no professional cyclist. But since my opinion doesn't mean anything because I'm only a keyboard warrior I try to explain it in another way. GT's exist for more than 100 years, the riders used to be able to ride way longer stages, on way worse roads, with way worse equipment and way less support. So why do you think it would be absolutely inhuman to make races a little bit harder again?

 

[HelloDolly]

Gigs_98

If you really want to engage someone in debate you want to stop calling their arguments stupid.....its condecending arrogant and pointless because I now switch off and stop readign whatever you had to say

 

[Mr.White]

Re: Re:

I think we need to identify what problem we are trying to solve but not as happens with Government policy solve one problem and create another

Riders are humans with limited endurance ...to ride 3 weeks in a 6 man team is very hard
To inlcude a stage like Rio in an GT is very very hard

What you do is you get a team to employ the riders who have best enduraance and then they dominate
And races become boring as riders are holding on rather than racing
Domination is controlled by money and teams with money adapt to the requirement

It might be a start to take a race like the Dauphine or T/A and test some principles and then see what factors come in to play , ie 6 man teams and no radios

9 man teams work very well in the classics because these are very hard races with spills

9 man teams have worked well in the GTs as many riders crash out, etc and with smaller teams you may handicap a team if they say have a rider crash and another get sick

I personally would like to see more done with parcours, bonus seconds, radios, power metres befroe reducing team size in GTs

I disagree with basically all points.
If someone can't ride a gt with 6 teammates cycling is probably the false sport for him. A gt should be about endurance anyway. And no, teams which have money can't just adapt and dominate like before and honestly I have no idea why one would think thats the case. Sky right now has 8 riders in the tdf who are trained to control. Why should those riders suddenly get stronger only because there are less of those riders. What I understand even less is why it should lead to passive racing. Do you think its a coincidence that riders in bad teams are usually the ones who get attacked most.
And that leads me to the point that I don't really understand in which world 9 men teams work. Look at the tdf or LBL. Those were horrible races because they got controlled. The only really good gt's and monuments in the last years were good because the leaders or favorites were in bad teams (Kruijswij, dumoulin and contador in gt's, sagan and cancellara in classics). Imagine if sagan would ride for sky. The ronde would be great with Thomas, Rowe, stannard and kwiat controlling the race, right.

First of all I made what is if you read it correctly and legitimate point...

Secondly what some people on here don't seem to realise you can dominate with 6 riders if you have the 6 best riders and the others have only 2 great guys and 4 not so good...
And so many key board warriors on here including yourself who think its fine that riders ride 3 weeks with littlle supprt as if machines... there is a good possibilty that most stages will not be raced and therefore just as boring
Its as if you approach cycling as if they were gladiators in the arena ...it must be so hard and there must be so many spills for there to be any entertainment !!
I guess you cannot see very far in front of your nose

LBL and co are horrible rase becuase of the parcours
The GTs you talk of were great becasue it was a strong rider against a strong team...there were a david v golaith element to it. Contolling the teams reduced that

Oh really? And all those years (+100) parcours was great! Race become boring when teams started to control things up until the very end. LBL climbs are not hard enough for today's teams, BMC and Movistar easily controlled the field in last 3-4 years. The answer is maybe in reducing teams size and in banning radios from racing. I think radios have the biggest impact on today's (boring) racing. It's so easy to control things when you know exactly what's happening in every second of the race. So for me cut the teams to 8/7 in GT's/Classics and ban radios.

 

[Gigs_98]

Re:

Gigs_98

If you really want to engage someone in debate you want to stop calling their arguments stupid.....its condecending arrogant and pointless because I now switch off and stop readign whatever you had to say

I probably exaggerated in my last comment, but I doubt using the Keyboard Warrior argument is much more constructive than saying an argument is stupid.
Anyway I was only annoyed that you used the Keyboard Warrior argument I didn't even want call any of your arguments for 9 men teams stupid.

 

[Thepirateisgood]

Wow, people this latest posts was a very productive discussion I think we can agree to, or what?

I think too that smaller teams will be good, but ORR is a loner to discuss in context as it is very different than other bike races at pro level. For some it's really a once in a lifetime experience and chance - with the consequences from that fact..

That said I believe to make it a point in UCI-rules with smaller teams it will make a small difference. 7, 8 or 9. Unless like three riders are gone by accident at one or two stages, a strong team is a strong team.

Radios, 5 persons teams - stuff like that won't go in UCI.

I'll root for ASO when they go for 6x (or so) teams in TdF as in most other ASO events nowadays, and when they demand every RR-racer to perform(finish) in at least two CX events every season to renew their racing license for the following season.

That is the only solution I will ever acknowledge.
(Not, really, I'm quite flexible )


Edit: Oh, I forgot what I was really to write: I don't think racing is more boring now than it was before, I believe that is quite wrong. I only followed from like '95, but it's largely the same. Some good races every year. Most are quite ***. Dunno what you're expecting?

 

[veji11]

Re:

Edit: Oh, I forgot what I was really to write: I don't think racing is more boring now than it was before, I believe that is quite wrong. I only followed from like '95, but it's largely the same. Some good races every year. Most are quite ****. Dunno what you're expecting?

You have a point, boredom is an integral part of what being a sports' fan means : whether it's football or rugby or cycling or tennis, you are often bored by what you see and great races or matchs only come once in a while.

Yet more than boredom, what is horrible in nowadays' cycling is that you often feel that even the mere act of watching the race is pointless : I know in my heart that there is no point watching LBL before the last 30ks... That's what is worse than boredom. You can be bored watching a football game, but at any time a fantastic goal might come. In the past you could be bored watching LBL but something could happen in la Haute Levée or Stockeu. Nowadays not only is there boredom, but mere hope is gone. That's what is so depressing sometimes.

 

[HelloDolly]

Re: Re:

Gigs_98

If you really want to engage someone in debate you want to stop calling their arguments stupid.....its condecending arrogant and pointless because I now switch off and stop readign whatever you had to say

I probably exaggerated in my last comment, but I doubt using the Keyboard Warrior argument is much more constructive than saying an argument is stupid.
Anyway I was only annoyed that you used the Keyboard Warrior argument I didn't even want call any of your arguments for 9 men teams stupid.

Fine

I wasn't suggesting you are a keyborad warior necessarily but there are some on here ...no one I can point out ...but in having read the comments over the years ...who love to see riders suffer ...the more the better ...deadly crashes, races where they can bearly stand afterwards, etc ....like watching gladiators

My point is that we have to be careful what we ask of riders ...if its too hard hard (in a 3 week race) they will not necessarily go all out (as in one day race) but instead go very conservatively

 

[HelloDolly]

Mr White I agree with you ...ban radios first

 

[PremierAndrew]

LBL is killed by Orica and other teams with large numbers of domestiques looking to control the race. The Redoute is a perfect launchpad for outsiders, but what's the point when you've got two or three entire teams pulling you back for 30k?

Smaller teams would sort out the Ardennes

 

[HelloDolly]

Re:

LBL is killed by Orica and other teams with large numbers of domestiques looking to control the race. The Redoute is a perfect launchpad for outsiders, but what's the point when you've got two or three entire teams pulling you back for 30k?

Smaller teams would sort out the Ardennes

Well maybe start with small teams at the Ardennes ...certaibly could do in a one day race...

Its the 3 weeks race I am not certain about to sove the problem of controlled racing , expecially before banning radios, power meters, changing parcours & including bonus seconds for GC guys on mountains, etc

 

[veji11]

Re: Re:

LBL is killed by Orica and other teams with large numbers of domestiques looking to control the race. The Redoute is a perfect launchpad for outsiders, but what's the point when you've got two or three entire teams pulling you back for 30k?

Smaller teams would sort out the Ardennes

Well maybe start with small teams at the Ardennes ...certaibly could do in a one day race...

Its the 3 weeks race I am not certain about to sove the problem of controlled racing , expecially before banning radios, power meters, changing parcours & including bonus seconds for GC guys on mountains, etc

Overall experimenting would be good, whether in one day races or stage races. What is hard is that there is often very big resistance even to that, see the strike threat some teams pulled in the Tour de France when ASO wanted to experiment with stages without earpieces.

I would really like to see the UCI announcing that some WT one day races and stage races, in accordance with organisers, would take place with 6 riders team for example. same for earpices actually.

 

[Red Rick]

I think 7 for GTs should be perfect. If you go lower, you almost have no team left in case one or two riders crash out.

 

[RedheadDane]

Re:

I think 7 for GTs should be perfect. If you go lower, you almost have no team left in case one or two riders crash out.

So you could with seven man teams. Just ask OGE at the 2014 Giro.