You bring up Formula One. That sport is a farce lurching from one financial crisis to the next precisely because it allows too much freedom to buy success. Special effort or talent – whether creativity of concept, natural driving talent, persistence, or other admirable sporting merit – isn’t enough there. You need to blow £20 million on engine-development drudge-work or you’ll be an also-ran. Consequently most of the drivers are chosen because they’re rich or famous rather than good at their nominal job.
There aren’t many sports looking at Formula One and thinking they’d like a bit of that. It’s no longer a sport in the traditional sense. To the limited extent that driving can still be considered a sport, it’s undermined by the fact that the cars are more significant to the outcome than the drivers. If it’s a sport at all it’s a game of business acumen: how can you hoodwink the rule-makers, scare up another £10 million in funding from your parent group, manage an agile organisation, write the smartest contracts, optimise your marketing spend, etc. Who cares? Fewer and fewer people, judging by its decades-long decline.
I understand technology and admire it more than most people. However, cycling is firstly an athletic endeavour, and road racing should pit men and women against each other in a competition of strength and wit. Otherwise it betrays its past and becomes another beautiful thing spoiled by American-style consumerism.
Since technology in cycling or any sport will always be limited by the rules, the line in the sand will always be somewhat arbitrary. I’m arguing for a line that reduces costs and therefore barriers to participation and helps develop cycling as a force for good in the world.
On the latter point, it’s depressing how many problems these fragile bicycles have today. Dropping out of a race because your Di2 derailleur glitches out has become downright common.
And disc brakes are even weirder because they positively harm performance even when they work correctly. It’s purely technology push with no benefit for anyone except the bike-manufacturing sponsors, which is why I’d like to see them replaced with supermarkets and sanitary-fittings specialists. At the moment
the tail is wagging the dog and the sport is too broke and incompetently run to protest.