UCI President admits 2010 tech rule "clarification" all about stopping Team GB

How long before our world class velodromes are deemed an unfair advantage.

Until "UCI" demand all support staff carry the "national passport" and bikes are built in the participant's country they will never achieve their lofty dreams!
"Sailing equipment" is given to the "sailors", "rowing hulls" given to the "rowers" so why not "bikes" !
Grobler was the force behind Redgrave, Pinsent and others, he was German at the start of his connection!
An aussie shook up the Brit swim team, so it is obvious that there are ways to defeat the "Olympic Ideal"!

Dream on Pat concentrate on the "passport" and leave the trimmings to sort themselves out since some athletes will get out of bed and still have a "bad hair day"!

This is all rather daft in my opinion. The UCI is looking at banning prototype bikes because they want a 'level playing field', and a £50k prototype is more expensive and less available than a £10k production bike. So, that's forty grand. Or possibly £190k if you believe that any of the bikes being ridden cost £200k. they don't.

All this for an advantage over a 4km pursuit of what? a tenth of a second? a hundredth? I guess it depends on the technology and how much it differs from 'production' bikes. So I guess at the very highest level, say in the pursuit final between Australia and Team GB which was decided by hundredths of a second, it could make a difference between gold and silver.

But why is the final between Australia and Team GB? not because we've got the most naturally talented track cycling athletes, but because we've poured millions upon millions of pounds into our track cycling setup over the last two decades. Built a world class velodrome and probably the finest training facilities in the world. Given riders salaried contracts to allow them to live and train full time with their team mates. Brought in world leading sport scientists, analysts, psychologists, nutritionists to hone their training and diet to perfection. That's a massive commitment, it cost a lot of money and it has brought results. Any national squad that was given the resources that the track cycling team has had at their disposal should be able to do a similar job in the same time.

That's where the playing field is most uneven. To bleat about some special bike is completely missing the point in my opinion. What is this Olympic ideal? How does it square with the fact that one country has ten, a hundred times more to spend on developing a team than another? it's irrelevant that some of his money is spent on the bike. It's small beer, it really is.

If you really wanted to level the playing field you'd have to give each country a budget: spend it however you want, that's all you've got for everything: athletes, training, equipment, faciities. And it's have to be a very small budget so it didn't exclude any poorer nations. Will that happen? no. So what we get instead is, as neilwheel rightly points out, a dick swinging contest between the powers that be and the rich countries. which proves nothing and solves nothing.

The first homologation special rally car was the Lancia Stratos, introduced in the early 70s. Power came from the 2.4litre v6 developed for the Ferrari Dino, also part of the Fiat Group. Under the rules of the time, Lancia had to build at least 500 and the car was sold to the public in a slightly softer state of tune. The rally specials of the 80s were 'silhouettes' and in reality had nothing to do with the road cars of the time, other than vaguely resembling them from the outside and using a few of the same nuts and bolts in their construction. The 80s cars were eventually banned because they were too fast. The Stratos at least was similar in road and racing rally forms as it used the same basic components. The answer to all this may lie in the bicycle firms following the same route taken by Lancia with the Stratos and Porsche with its 917 racer, both of which were able to qualify as production racers because they were built in sufficient numbers to qualify.

Those were the Homologation Specials, like the RS200, Audi Quattro Sport, Lancia Delta Integrale etc of the early 1980s. I think they had to build 5000 examples for sale to the public that matched the profile of the real thing then they could modify anything inside the envelope.

The problem with governing bodies is they think that only they know how to run their sport when most of them are 'placemen/women' out of touch with what goes on in the real world.

I think rally teams once got round a similar bit of legislation by selling souped up cars to the public at a huge loss- let's hope team GB will do the same with their superbikes.

This is nothing more than a willy waggling contest between the UCI and the bike trade.

The UCI believe that without the racers and races (who they govern) there would be no racing bikes. The bike trade think that without (their brand of ) bikes there would be no racers, teams or races. They both have their own interests at heart.

Take a closer look at what's been happening at the BC since the run-up to Beijing and where they are now with regard to equipment and suppliers. Don't be too surprised if by the time 2012 comes around, you see the GB squad on branded bikes sourced from outside the UK.

The BC track bike design is hardly 'revolutionary' and in truth, it never was. All the 'secret squirrel' stuff was all about hyping up the team to the mainstream media and to gain a perceived psychological edge over other nations.
More importantly, it justified the money being pumped into the BC. In those respects, they've been highly successful.
However, compare the GB bike with the stuff that's being ridden by the likes of France, China, Poland, Belarus, Canada etc, etc, etc, which, by the way, is commercially available and within the UCI regs. It wouldn't have gone down too well with the UK mainstream media and UK Lottery if all GB's medals had been won on French or Chinese-made bikes, would it?

This latest spat between the UCI and outside commercial interests (if its not the TV people, it's the bike trade . . . yawn) will play nicely into the hands of the BC. They've got a ready-made scapegoat in the form of the UCI's 'Dr. Evil' tech committee baddies to serve up to the red-tops. So, they might just get the bikes they wanted to ride all along.
At the same time, the bike trade will be happy too. They'll (hopefully) have a whole pile of medals to claim as their achievement. Because after all, the riders wouldn't have done it without their bikes, would they . . . ?

I think that the interesting thing in these comments is that no one is supporting the UCI's approach.

Sailing is an interesting comparison - at the Olympics all of the boats are 'one design' and supplied to competitiors at the event but other events more than make up for this restriction in technical development.

The other events are largely due to the lack of a universal, all powerful, governing body as we have in cycling (and F1).

Cycling needs an Americas Cup type event where designers can push the boundaries of cycling speed with minimum restricitions. These developments then work their way in to the marketplace and eventually in to the 'one design' categories.... purity at the olympics and massive budgets/leaps forward on the cutting edge...

The rule is fair enough, but they have to come up with something less hand-wavy than "freely available" and "reasonable price".

I imagine that BC's partnership with Pinarello, who are developing their new track bikes, will enable them to comply with this rule.

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Seems to me the UCI has a point. Why should some riders have an unfair advantage because their country has deeper pockets? Not exactly the Olympic ideal is it? I realise this is probably hopelessly naive and I have no idea how to unravel the mess given all the real world complications but as far as the general principle goes I agree with them.

Sorry Martin but that is rather naive. The Olympic ideal of level playing fields and doing it for the honour disappeared when athletics went professional and every other sport followed suit.

The Olympics are now about who can spend the most money with very little actually going to the sports men and women. What could you do with £9 Billion or whatever the cost of 2012 is going to be? Forget the infrastructure and legacy projects, you could hold an Olympics without all that and the inevitable hangers-on.

If you stifle innovation and technological advances and the sport fails to move on and capture larger audiences then the big name sponsors will move on and the developments will end.

Seems to me the UCI has a point. Why should some riders have an unfair advantage because their country has deeper pockets? Not exactly the Olympic ideal is it? I realise this is probably hopelessly naive and I have no idea how to unravel the mess given all the real world complications but as far as the general principle goes I agree with them.

The UCI are like the FIA with F1. They lack the intelligence to understand the full impact of their rule changes and try to hold back innovation.

Most 'national' teams now have major sponsors who will foot the bill for the technological advances that are needed to keep track and road cycling interesting to the general public and moving forward.

Most sensible people know they can't buy the bike that Lance or Sir Chris or Vicky etc ride and it would make no difference to the performance of most of them if they could.

The UCI should concentrate on cleaning up our sport and getting rid of the drug cheats and leave the riders and teams to do the real work.

If the UCI are serious about making the best rider the winner then why do they allow any aero ad ons? surely the way forward would be to force everyone to use the same kit?

The UCI can write a standard specify the gearing, the frame tube sizes etc.

The current approach is a mess, either allow innovation or ban it.

If the UCI really wants to get serious about unfair competitive advantage they should ban training that's totally unfair and track world champs and the like should be decided by a random ballot of the competing nation's eligible citizens who could be plucked from couch, bar, or bed, and plonked on a bike and made to race around a velodrome in Copenhagen, Sydney or wherever as part of their patriotic duty. Then we'd have a level playing field and we'd get a true reflection of every nation's ability on the bicycle.

Anything else is just tinkering around the edges IMHO.