Not all Team Directors can watch TV, talk on the radio, direct the team and drive simultaneously
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A little piece from Bike Race Info about the current race radio debate:
At the first race of the Challenge Illes Balears, the riders and teams were looking to provoke a confrontation with the UCI and refused to remove their race radios. The teams said they were just looking for a little respect, that the race-radio ban should not have been imposed without deeper consultation with the riders and teams. In addition, they trotted the same baloney they have been spouting for some time, that the radios are needed for rider safety. I won't waste your time refuting this stupid argument, which has been statistically demolished over and over again. This reasoning should have long ago been tossed in the garbage along with, "I passed every dope test, proving I was riding clean". Or worse, one rider said, "This is progress, we can't go back." Yes you can and you should.
Of course the team managers want to keep control of the race with their radios and many pros seem to like letting someone else do their thinking for them.
But they don't have to watch the sorry thing pro racing has become. They don't care about the quality of the product they are producing, they want to win today's race.
We spectators know bicycle racing is getting more conservative and more predictable. Breaks during flat stages are usually caught just before the finish. Riders are told by their managers to wait until the final climb before attacking. Racing is formulaic and boring. Toss in doping (remember also that the riders were at the forefront of the fight AGAINST controlling drugs in cycling. The code of omerta regarding drugs was a rider invention) and you have a sport that just lost an entire nation's TV audience. The German networks will not be carrying the 2011 Tour de France. If pro racing were really compelling, the German public wouldn 't stand for the loss of coverage.
The change in racing was really brought home to me as I wrote my history of the Giro d'Italia (should be published late this month or early next month). Bicycle racing used to be filled with exciting breaks, often with some of the greatest champions racing together to escape the pack. Fiorenzo Magni and Fausto Coppi (on different teams) took off late in the 1955 Giro and crushed the peloton, winning the Giro for Magni. Jacques Anquetil escaped with Italo Zilioli more than once, or how about a break of Vito Taccone, Enzo Moser and Zilioli? You won't see that stuff today, but it used to happed regularly and you would probably do almost anything to see it today if you could. Racing was better before radios, when there was the "fog of war".
It's impossible to defend the status quo when you know what racing used to be like. Get rid of the radios. Please UCI, don't listen to the riders and managers because they do not have racing's best interests at heart. They are like any other business entities, they are working for themselves. For once, the UCI is right.
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