In article <
[email protected]>,
Howard Kveck <
[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Ryan Cousineau <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > In article <[email protected]>,
> > "Cyrus De Kline" <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > Dan Connelly schrieb:
> > >
> > > > [email protected] wrote:
> > > > > UCI to shorten pro tours
> > > > > (http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2006/sep06/sep26news )
> > > > >
> > > > > UCI is at it again with more silly proposals. UCI wants to shorten
> > > > > pro
> > > > > tours to discourage drug use. This is one of the dumbest proposals I
> > > > > have heard of. This reminds me of the UCI weight limitation
> > > > > regulations.
> > > > >
> > > > The 100 meter dash is a traditional hotbed of drug use. How short
> > > > are they willing to go?
> > > >
> > > > Dan
> > >
> > > 0 (zero). No race, no dopers.
> > > But I am not even sure that this would be true.
> >
> > Given the amount of cheating that is assumed to have happened in Gran
> > Fondos, I'd say it definitely wouldn't be true.
>
> True, but you know that a lot of the riders in those events more or less
> consider them to be a race.
Well yes, but a lot of riders consider the Sunday morning Vets Ride to
be a race, too. Or the Paris-Brest-Paris.
> > Now, I remember when CART broke away from the Indy 500 (or vice versa),
> > and the lesson there was that the big race was more important than the
> > cars or drivers involved; the Indy 500 endured while the CARTistes waned.
>
> USAC (not the cycling one, of course) was the sanctioning body for all
> Indy car
> racing back then. The Indy Motor Speedway was the one track that stuck with
> USAC
> when the split occurred. A big part of CART's problem was they eventually
> began
> acting exactly like what they'd said USAC had been. Add in poor product
> promotion
> and (eventually) a lack of driver name recognition and there you have it...
The big break happened when USAC created the IRL, partly because they
disagreed with CART on what the future of the sport should be,
engine-and-chassis-wise. IRL was also conceived as an oval-only series
(spit!), while CART has continued with a large number of road
The big divorce's real result was that US-based open-wheel racing became
far less popular.
I would also point out the FIDE-PCA split in chess as a similar
sanctioning-body divorce.
I think the lesson for the UCI and the GTs is that they will likely make
cycling less popular if they contrive to split the sport between them. I
think the other lesson is that the golden asset tends to predict the
victor: IRL won because it had the Indy 500; PCA and FIDE were able to
reunify only after Kasparov (the best player in the world) left chess,
and I think the Tour de France can more easily do without the UCI than
the UCI can do without the Tour.
Think: if you were a pro cycling team, and you had a choice of the
ProTour sans any GT and the warm-up races run by the GT sanctioning
bodies, or the GTs and whatever day-races they could cobble on to that
skeletal schedule, what would you pick?
I think you'd see three Belgians interested in focusing on the ENECO
tour, a few classics-oriented teams that might do those, and everyone
else racing the Tour.
--
Ryan Cousineau
[email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos
