FabulousCandelabra said:Make it a true tour, where they ride a 3000+km route carrying their own camping luggage. No motorized assistance whatsoever. Get back to basics, have it be gritty and real like back in the old days. Camera crews move into the camp after every race and record the drama "MTV real world" style.. Maybe allow some outside assistance (medical perhaps)... but the less the better.
Todays modern surgicaly precise, planned out, high tech tour, is incredibly boring...
Cycling desperately needs some innovation.. it could be sooo entertaining.
Armchair cyclist said:Yep: Race Across America gets all the best riders and the level of coverage that the sport needs [/sarcasm]
What FabulouCandelabra describes and Race Across America have absolutely nothing in common except bicycles and riders. RAM is an extreme endurance event where riders go from coat to coast in the shortest possible time. The main things they have to worry about are the hallucinations induced by lack of sleep, and drifting into oncoming traffic for the same reason.
A "true tour, where they ride a 3000+km route carrying their own camping luggage" would involve actual stages just like they do now, but instead of the riders being totally supported by following vehicles, mechanics, and so on, the riders would be on their own, pretty much, even to the extent of putting up tents. This type of event would essentially be a multi-day brevet (known in the UK as an audax), and it would have a lot in common with the Tours of a hundred years ago. The riders wouldn't have to forge their own forks should they break (since the bikes would almost surely be carbon), but anything short of that they could handle themselves.
I think its an idea with great potential. (But as a separate event, not as a replacement for the Tour de France - this is more multi-day randonneuring, than it is road racing proper.)