I believe that's called "Eroica" (add prefixes, suffixes and locations as necessary). I'm guessing no TV network is interested in paying for broadcasting rights for that.
We should probably also consider the fact that for professional bicycle racers (and the teams/crews/sponsors that are components of professional bicycle racing), riding bicycles is a job, not a hobby. The pros will ride on whatever equipment the sponsors buy them, according to whatever rules are in place; most of them have few other talents to sell. If the rules were rewritten to require all riders in the Tour/Giro/Vuelta to ride Eroica-style (one steel bike only, no teams, carry your own spares and fill your own bidons at the water fountain), you'd still get riders. You'd get a lot fewer of them, no TV time and the prize money would be a lot lower. Presumably, the times will slow way down, if only because an extended stage race without sponsors pumping money into it may demand more money to fill a rider with the calories necessary to finish than the purse pays out. I'm not deliberately trying to be a buzzkill about this retro-idea, which I admit I find very appealing. But there are reasons that big-time bike racing works the way it does, and it's fairly similar to most spectator sports. If the Super Bowl was played by chunky 12-year olds in blue jeans, nobody would watch it except the players' parents. I suppose that one way to distinguish between a professional athletic competition and a leisure event is to see which way the money goes; does the promoter pay the athletes for competing, or does the leisure participant pay the promoter for permission to participate? On Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 11:11:37 AM UTC-7, cyclot...@gmail.com wrote: > > I'm all for bike races, but as Andy noted, noted, not team cars. > Riders should have to finish on the bike they started with, repair their > own flats, pick up food at neutral area. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
