Putting an end to 'waiting'?

[Netserk]

Re:

During WW1 artillery batteries would usually refrain from shelling the enemy's field kitchens because they knew they would retaliate in kind. A certain degree of this always goes on, quite naturally, and any attempts to regulate it will fail.

Yep, riders will often have less to gain by attacking a group piss than they would lose in the future by pissing the others off, but once in a while a rider will see his only chance to win big, and in that situation no future punishment would outweight the gain.

In a way, it can be compared to wheelsucking. It's frowned upon, and won't get you any good reputation, but sometimes it is worth it. Other times, your future reputation is more important than the tactical advantage of not pulling. It's all in the game.

edit: another example; battling an opponent for his teammate's wheel. In a sprint you will see it sometimes, but for most races it is not done. Which makes sense, since one often doesn't have much to gain from it, but plenty to lose as no one likes to fight for position constantly.

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

Re: Re:

No most mechanicals are not down to poor set up or technique - an absolute majority of them are punctures to people riding inside a peloton minding their own business and not doing anything particularly silly. Trying to blame riders for that is absurd. Crashes are not a gray area either. You can be taken down by random road surface problems or someone else's error or countless other things. You can spend energy minimising some of the risks, or you can have excellent bike handling, but you cannot eliminate the risks. Everyone gets taken down through no fault of their own some time. Regardless of the etiquette riders choose to observe around crashes, those who minimise those risks already get the reward of being less likely over time to smash themselves over the road and pick up injuries.

What you are doing here is using the undoubted fact that rider's behaviour can influence luck to some extent to treat luck as irrelevant. You need to do that in order to justify the unjustifiable idea that everyone gets what's coming to them and that therefore it is undesirable that rider's should feel any sense of obligation to sportsmanship or fairness.

That's quite a leap you've made from what I've written. And a pretty childish and disingenuous way of trying to steer the discussion to different waters.

Do try to be a little less petulant and self-righteous. Your starting point is that there should be no observation of unwritten rules of sportsmansmanship and no feeling that riders owe some degree of fairness to each other. In the service of that unworkable and I humane argument you systematically downplay the arbitrariness of both most mechanicals and most group crashes and instead push a pretence that both are usually about the skill of the individual rider effected. There is no leap involved in noting that the second part is complete nonsense argued only to bolster the first part.

 

[Zinoviev Letter]

Re: Re:

During WW1 artillery batteries would usually refrain from shelling the enemy's field kitchens because they knew they would retaliate in kind. A certain degree of this always goes on, quite naturally, and any attempts to regulate it will fail.

Yep, riders will often have less to gain by attacking a group piss than they would lose in the future by pissing the others off, but once in a while a rider will see his only chance to win big, and in that situation no future punishment would outweight the gain

Yes this is precisely right. The peloton is a society. Like most societies it has both laws (rules) and unwritten codes of behaviour and social obligation. Like most societies neither the hard rules nor the softer ones are perfectly and consistently applied but they are real and to a significant extent shape expectations and behaviour. When it comes to the "unwritten" rules they are socially enforced and the punishment is social opprobrium.

Most of the time that works, but sometimes the incentives to break those obligations outweigh those consequences. In which case riders make a choice to take their social lumps for the sake of immediate gain. And of course a few people are just anti-social undesirables who aggravate their peers for little gain. That last type, from the type who works against his own leader to the type who continuously attacks a breakaway that needs to work together, are rarely at all popular within the peloton but can sometimes be highly amusing for the rest of us.

 

[Netserk]

And exactly that aspect, that the peloton is a microcosmos of society, is one of the biggest appeals of cycling to me. There just isn't any other sport like it (to the same extend, certainly not that I am aware of).