The olympics don't really set the protocol for any of this. the rules and procedures for each sport are set by their respective international sport organization. for cycling that's the UCI.
the olympics is only one event, and only happens once every four years. the rest of the season, that happens every year, is much more important and doesn't have an olympic host to provide bikes. so there needs to be some procedure that catches motor doping at all the races, not just one infrequent race. The olympics is just going to follow the same procedures that are used for all the rest of the worldtour level races. and while the olympics might not care about keeping the rider's bike sponsors happy, the rest of the races do.
if riders weren't out there promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors, pro bike racing wouldn't be a thing.
> promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors
Therein lies an answer - change the disincentives - instead of banning cheating riders, ban all of the sponsors of those riders for a time. Now the onus is on the sponsors to discourage cheating.
The sponsors aren't partners who are tuning up the bikes. It's companies who cut a cheque and expect logos everywhere.
Individual riders/teams are motivated to win and get sponsor dollars, so may resort to cheating. They know they will lose sponsors forever and be banned if caught, so they try to hide it from sponsors and officials. Basically: the same disincentives exist today. They just need to catch folks. It's just doping v2.
Surely this just moves the incentive from the sportsperson/team to the sponsor - who have significantly deeper financial resources to undermine WADA's testing regimes.
WADA's budget is something like $50m. The likes of Ineos & Red Bull have sports marketing budgets well into the billions.
Seems like they would have a lot more to lose as well. A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation. Much bigger deal than the athlete themselves getting caught.
The sponsor isn't punished when their reputation gets associated with a cheat? US Postal sued Armstrong for $100M (settled for $5M) after he got caught. Guilty by association with a PED athlete is the dominant economic risk of sports sponsoring. At least in sports that have dropped the "just pretend we did not notice" attitude that's still going strong in e.g. football (both of them, I suppose)
I mean we are talking of an overrated "energy drink" that no one actually needs to consume but yet manages to sell billions of dollars worth of every year.
I don't think their target market is that susceptible to reason.
It is important to separate the teams vs. the company itself. The Ineos cycling team has a total budget closer to $50M. That's the budget to support 20+ riders and all the support staff.
You wouldn’t ban a sponsor, but a team. People typically refer to a cycling team by a sponsor’s name, but teams can (and do) change sponsors from season to season (or sometimes even within a season like “Jumbo Visma” -> “Visma Lease a Bike” did this year between the Giro and the Tour).
Jumbo Visma is the same team as Visma Lease a Bike. They have the same riders, managers, athletic director, staff, etc. Just a different name on the jersey.
As for how a team is banned: you simply ban them. In most of cycling you need to be a member of a team (professional) or club (amateur) to even enter a race. Your racing license will name your team/club. If your team is banned you may not register for the race.
Also, at the World Tour professional level, your team would have several cars driving within the race to support riders with food, bottles, and mechanical assistance. Since the race will be on a closed course, only official vehicles can drive with the riders. Even if started the race, you would be at a serious disadvantage to race with no team support.
(Just an aside, doesn't invalidate any of your reasoning)
The name change from Jumbo Visma to Visma | Lease a Bike didn't happen between the Giro and the Tour, it was a lot earlier. I would say, but I'm not 100% certain of this, that the name change happened between the 2023 and 2024 seasons. I think teams have to register their name with the UCI, and can't change it during the season.
For example here is a photo of Jan Tratnik finishing first in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on 2024-02-24, long beclearly wearing a Visma | Lease a Bike shirt.
The team did change the design of the shirts before the Tour, because their old shirts had a lot of yellow which conflicts with the yellow jersey of the GC leader. Maybe that's what you were thinking of?
Tons of teams are still run by folks who were heavily involved in the 1990s and 2000s doping scandals. They all claim they're all clean and reformed but most of them were never really punished.
Maybe it's a bit circular but the organizers could disqualify the racers being sponsored which would mean either the banned sponsor doesn't sponsor anyone or it's done under wraps. The latter would defeat the advertising purpose the sponsor would have for the sponsorship.
“Red Bull caught cheating at $event in sprawling plot; banned for 6 years” - they might invest some dollars to avoid such a disaster. According to the quote in the article, curbing this is only a matter of will and $$$.
Of course it's a matter of $$$. Sports doesn't actually make anything. It's entertainment that's paid for via ads. But that's also why hitting the sponsors wouldn't work, because without them the (professional) sport might not survive.
It's definitely possible, it just means the professional level of the sport can't be funded mostly from the amateur level of the sport.
cycling is getting there, a lot of the big teams have petrostates or oil companies as sponsors now, but the bike brands are still too important to cut out.
I myself have sailed several of them. Currently the laser. Previously the 49er and 470. There's actually lots of great second hand boats because of the competitors selling them after 1-2 seasons.
The race organizers actually don't care about the bikes or sponsors the same way. The race organizers (at the world tour level) have a solid income stream. The biggest races are bigger than the World Tour and are older, and will still be around when the current World Tour setup folds.
It is the teams that are begging for money, all the teams need sponsorships for bikes and everything else. Teams in cycling have no home stadium and have no place they own and can sell tickets. They aren't in control of TV rights or anything like that for races that are big enough to be televised.
It's one of the unique things in cycling. Even at the grassroots levels clubs were often volunteer but race organizers might have been or are for-profit. Even at the grassroots level the organizer charges entry fees.
Alternatively it would be interesting to have a race or series of races where it's anything goes, including drugging. It's already such a cat and mouse game so why not just embrace it.
This would just mean the teams with the biggest budgets win. Doping is expensive.
Not to mention, every person responds differently to doping protocols.
What if you're a C rider who becomes an A+ rider when doped? And you race against a B+ rider who becomes an A minus rider when doped. Still not an even playing field.
This is effectively what lance did. He had record levels of hematocrit naturally, and an extremely high vo2. It meant he had a magnified sensitivity to doping protocols that the other riders didn't. So his doping advantage actually increased his relative abilities even -higher- than his also-doped competitors.
Not to mention kids coming into the sport. Would be a massive mountain to climb to go from a prodigy 16 year old against doped pros.
And even that still wasn’t “no holds barred”, leaving aside what little safety rules it had (and how weakly enforced they were) Group B did have rules on minimum weight and displacement classes (with negative offsets for turbo and super charging).
There are high level competitive sports leagues that effectively allow doping. Pro bodybuilding is probably the most obvious. There are tested federations, but they're virtually ignored because the guys competing are half the size of the guys doing drugs. Powerlifting also has untested federations, and strongman I think might do token testing just to appease law enforcement since you can't openly allow something that is illegal is most jurisdictions, but it's designed to be easy to beat and everyone is well aware that the top competitors are not only using drugs but have to use drugs to do what they're doing.
Notably, this is probably part of why the Olympics doesn't have bodybuilding, powerlifting, or strongman on the program, as sports need to have a WADA-approved antidoping program to qualify.
Also, the Olympics itself from the 50s to the 80s basically was what you're asking for. This is the time between when synthetic steroids were first widely available and when tests for them became possible. In the meantime, with no way to catch anyone, it was anything goes. I wouldn't say that led to pretty outcomes. Records that stood for 40 years, sure, but eastern bloc nations with mandatory athletics camps were injecting 12 year-old girls with testosterone and telling them it was vitamins. At a reasonable dose, most performance enhancing drugs are fairly safe for men but virtually none of them are safe for women because of the masculinizing effects. The changes to a female body are permanent.
beacuse what will really happen is, some nation desperate to make a statement on the world stage will take a thousand small children and force feed them drugs to make 10 athletes
100 die of the drugs during childhood
700 suffer the rest of their shortened lives from consequential medical issues
perhaps its easier to just throw the 'failed' 990 into a meat grinder to ensure there is no controversy later
but sure, its fun to watch the 10 athletes at the peak of their game!
Different riders have different preferences, and there's a lot of money and technology that goes into improving the bikes every year (or at least every decade). The materials, the construction, the electronics, the aerodynamics, the fit, the saddle, the tires... they're all constantly evolving. It's like car races, manufacturer sponsorship is a huge part of it, and the races in turn advertise those bikes.
Would it make for more equal footing if everyone had the same model? Yeah, probably, but does that happen elsewhere in the Olympics? Does the host supply skis, shoes, bows, bobsleds, etc.?
To me, the olympics are about determining who is best at a sport. It's not a technical problem like a car race where bending the rules with creative engineering is expected and encouraged.
The trouble is that people have different preferences for different equipment and by mandating one particular bike, you disadvantage a lot people based on who does better on a particular bike and aren't judging people solely based on who is the better cyclist. Consider the absurd extension of using exactly the same equipment where even the size of the bike is exactly the same, saddle height is the same, pedal length is the same, etc. There will be maybe one person who that is ideal with and whole lot more people suffering injuries from riding incorrectly sized bikes.
Therefore, since we can't all have exactly the same bikes, we need to come up with a definition of what is "fair" to adjust for the bike that someone races on. Sure, this allows for some degree creative engineering, but is that really a bad thing so long as money doesn't become the determining factor of who wins? It pushes the science of bikes forward and eventually that new tech will make its way to everyone, including amateur cyclists.
> The trouble is that people have different preferences for different equipment and by mandating one particular bike, you disadvantage a lot people based on who does better on a particular bike
This is not backed by fact.
Most world tour riders have very little choice on their equipment, nor do they choose the team sponsors. They have some leeway on a few third party components of their choice and can usually which frame model they use among a tiny selection of less than 3 models but that doesn't change drastically how the bike ride really as long as the bike fits. You could totally make a race where everybody ride the same kind of bike, and riders would be able to choose the frame size, saddle, stem and handlebar size, and possibly clipless pedal models that would make everything more standard.
Actually in Japan they do something similar in keiring. All frames are built with steel tubes, they use old styles of pedals with clips, and only parts stamped by NJS, following design and construction principles of track bikes of the late 70's, are approved. Sometimes regular olympic track racers spend a few months in Japan in the off season to get some additional money, they swap their high end carbon bikes prototypes to what looks like vintage track bikes of the 70's, you can actually see the bikes bending under load, yet the best riders with the best strategy of the day still win.
3 models and a bunch of sizes as well. The Giant Propel Advanced SL 0 has 6 different size options. Even for cheap bikes, it’s common to have a small, medium, and large frame size.
As far as restricting technology, stopping at 70s tech seems really arbitrary. There are already rules and regulations for what you can use.
One final note: I’m pretty sure UCI would get a big lawsuit if they mandated one bike from a particular manufacturer due to antitrust concerns.
> One final note: I’m pretty sure UCI would get a big lawsuit if they mandated one bike from a particular manufacturer due to antitrust concerns.
I don't think so. It happens all the time in lower series of Motorsport and even the highest for tires. Formula 1 and Motogp are working respectively with Pirelli and Michelin if my memory is correct.
For esport world championship the UCI used Zwift in the early years and now it is their competitor MyWhoosh.
The keirin regulation using 70's tech was just an example to illustrate that controlling specs is possible. Same could be done but with a single make of bikes and just various frame sizes available for world tour. The issue is mostly that team would lose sponsorship so nobody has anything to gain. In the grand scheme of things, the difference between pro bikes is rather marginal and doesn't decide the outcome of the races.
Engineering is part of many sports, skiing, snowboarding, swimming (albeit limited after those floating suits), running. Even if you say they should all be about the sports performance only, there's engineering behind training schedules, equipment, diet, techniques & posture, etc.
It's not actually, though. For the majority of these sports, the professional leagues often have superior competition and performances than you see in the Olympics, with the notable exception being many of the individual sports where there isn't enough global interest to drive commercial organization outside the Olympics.
For example, the quality of basketball, soccer, and baseball you find in the pro leagues is all MUCH better than in the Olympics. Track & Field has a regular annual season that's already international (Diamond League), plus many standing invitationals, any of which are as likely to see records broken as the Olympics.
Diamond league may be more likely to see records broken, frankly, because it allows pace setters and the light indicators on the infield rail telling the runners exactly where the world record pace is at. But most athletes don't compete in every meet, so the field isn't usually as competitive, and nobody plans a four-year training peak around a diamond league meet, so maybe that makes up for it.
Yes, but where equipment is involved it's often very personal. In tennis a top professional can't just switch rackets, for example. Even I have problems playing with other people's rackets.
Is it that black-and-white? Many sports are a mix of athlete ability and equipment (alongside other variables like training, diet, etc.). Everything from running shoes to swimsuits to climbing shoes are engineered to heck and back, and the training regimes etc. are also super-scienced.
It's not like we just have naked people wrestling each other these days. The equipment is a part of the package now.
In your view, are activities like cycling and snowboarding valid as Olympic sports? Neither could exist without a significant amount of creative engineering.
“Equipment shall be of a type that is sold for use by anyone practicing cycling as a sport.
Any equipment in development phase and not yet available for sale (prototype) must be subject of an authorization request to the UCI Equipment Unit before its use. Authorization will be granted only for equipment which is in the final stage of development and for which commercialization will take place no later than 12 months after the first use in competition. The manufacturer may request a single prolongation of the prototype status if justified by relevant reasons”
So, that gives manufacturers an incentive to innovate, but won’t give teams an advantage for long.
Famously difficult to draw a satisfying line between these two things. The history of every sport is a conflict about exactly this, entire modern sports are the relics of people being unsatisfied with how the line was drawn at one particular time.
I'm not saying it's not a good goal to have, just you kind of have to view it as an inherently unsolvable problem to get anything productive out of it.
Yeah, probably, but does that happen elsewhere in the Olympics?
Yes, sailing. I believe all but Formula Kite are one-design classes (Laser, Laser Radial, IQFoil, Nacra 17, 49er, and 470). A few have options between licensed manufacturer (but to same spec) and a few are true one-make (Laser, Laser Radial), not sure about the others.
As someone else pointed out in another thread: for any given sport the olympics is just one competition. For it to remain prestigious it needs to have most of the best competitors in each sport competing in it, and for that it needs to stay fairly close to the mainstream format and constraints of each sport.
Single-design classes are standard in sailing, so the olympics uses them also. They are not standard for cycling, and it would be a huge deviation from conventions of competitive cycling for the olympics to demand them.
That doesn't mean they can't or that it wouldn't possibly be worth while. But there are huge costs to doing that, like possibly few or none of the major competitive cyclists competing.
100% agree. Just a literal answer the the question.
I’d love to see track cycling get more standard equipment. As it is today, some nations pump a ton of money into aerodynamics and RR to substantial advantage. More so than the difference between a Cannondale or Specialized road bike. Or so it seems to me.
And to put a point on this, the top professional road cycling teams in the world only have annual budgets of about $50m (covering 30 cyclists, all the coaches and directors, mechanics and any other crew they may need - physical therapists, chef, etc). Barely the top ten of the top road cyclists earn >$1m/yr. Compare that to mainstream sports that might have a just salary cap of $250m/yr.
> They are not standard for cycling, and it would be a huge deviation from conventions of competitive cycling for the olympics to demand them.
The Olympics (or, perhaps more generally, national team cycling events) _do_ make a huge deviation from the conventions of competitive cycling already: no team radios. One of the reasons they are so fun to watch :-)
That is indeed an exception, but IIRC it's not the only event with that exception: I think the world, continental and national championships also don't allow team radios.
Another exception is that the Olympics and world and continental championships are ridden with national teams instead of the various commercial teams. That makes quite a difference too.
Everything about the equipment has been a charade for many decades.
All the real improvements in bikes have been banned for a very long time and pro racing is used these days to sell all kinds of things which have been sideways moves at best.
I'm not an expert here, but a lot of aerodynamic improvements were banned, and disc brakes were banned until they weren't. At an extreme, recumbents. Triathalon handlebars in mass-start stages. There are minimum weights.
In track racing, the bikes are required to have fixed gearing.
The earliest Tour of France required riders to be self supporting, meaning they had to carry their own spare tires etc.
One thing I've observed is that for us commuters (me too), bikes are no longer tied to racing. We can have anything we want. The ubiquitous "hybrid" is used in no racing discipline, and the classic mountain bikes that are favored by many computers are largely obsolete for competitive mountain biking.
A big part (possibly the primary reason) is to promote and sell overpriced gear to amateurs. The Little 500 race is run with all riders using standard bikes, so it's not unprecedented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_500
Kinda quietly making fun of folks who show up on (e.g.) $10,000 road bikes and then get dropped 5 miles into the ride is a whole Thing.
True life, I'm not sure there's a good reason for a person spending their own money to buy a new road bike that costs more than $4-5K new. You can absolutely get started for way way less (probably $1500 new retail), but once the hook sets and you decide This Is Something I Like, there are things you'll want.
Carbon frames are far more comfortable to ride than aluminum. This extends to handlebars, stem, and seatpost.
Lighter-weight wheels -- also carbon -- are an upgrade you can feel IMMEDIATELY. I think it has to do with rotational weight vs. static weight. Nicer wheels have nicer bearings in them, too.
Electronic shifting doesn't make you faster in and of itself, but once you've used it you'll fall in love with it. Shifting is effortless, and combined brake-and-shift actions become viable in a way they aren't with mechanical shifting.
My Giant was just under $5k, and that's after an upgrade or two (mostly the addition of a power meter). Do I ride with folks on $10-15k bikes? Oh yeah. MOST of them are pretty serious riders, but they're not any faster on that Pinarello than they would be on (e.g.) my bike. It's effectively jewelry at that point.
(Now, the exception is if you're shaped in a way that makes off-the-shelf frames difficult. I know a couple folks -- one very well off and very short, the other decidedly middle class and VERY tall -- who got fully custom frames, but for both of them it was really the only way to get a bike that fit. For the middle-class guy, this means his bike is worth more than his car, but it's a forever-bike (titanium frame), and he's an 8-10,000 mile a year guy, so...)
They basically already did, forced the bikes to be heavier than 6.9 kg, killed almost all design innovation that didn't results in 2 triangles on the frame, etc.
Everyone is essentially riding very expensive version of the same bike. 90% of riders will be on Dura Ace and equipment that the biggest distinguishing qualities are paint and size.
You're reasonably close to right: 18 of 22 teams ran Dura-Ace, which surprises me because in my enthusiast circles locally the split with Shimano and SRAM is much, much more even. (I personally prefer the latter.)
What REALLY shocked me is this:
"2024 marks the first year that the Tour de France has been without a team using a Campagnolo groupset. This means that it was a two-horse race between Shimano and SRAM for stage honours."
I mean, I know Campy wasn't what it had been. I only know a few folks who run Campy groups, and I don't know anyone who uses the Campy electronic groupset. It's all so expensive, and most shops don't have someone with any experience with their gear anymore, which becomes a death spiral for people who buy their own gear. Still, the idea that the only Euro maker got shut out of even participating in the Tour is amazing to me.
SRAM decided to do something clever : instead of giving money to pro-riders to promote their products and hope regular people will be convinced to buy the products ; they invested in partnership with bike manufacturers, since most groupsets are sold already assembled to a frame.
More and more new bakes are sold with SRAM components than it used to be.
So people have now more opportunities to pay for SRAM products on a new bike, and afterwards buy replacement parts when required.
Also, for each given price category, SRAM is usually a bit cheaper than Shim.
Meanwhile Campagnolo is more and more expensive while offering nothing more than the two others. Also less partnerships with bike manufacturers, even Italian ones.
And some Asian brands are starting to be more and more reliable.
Every rider IS effectively on the same bike. They're either running Shimano drivetrains, or SRAM. I don't imagine the Olympics could spend the millions in R&D to invent their own drivetrain system for a once-every-four-years event.
If you were referring to the bike frame itself, it's kind of the least-important part of the bike.
That's some Team Sky logic ;) It doesn't matter when you have to ride your sponsor's bike.
Example: Pogacar's Colnago is decidedly not aero; Cavendish's Wilier ain't the best sprinter bike.
But they're all competitive, because like I said, the role the frame plays in the overall "system" is negligible. It's marketing. The aero gains on the new Madone are entirely in the handlebar, and are erased if you add a rider to the bike.
Bikes are sized to the individual rider, even at amateur levels. You can't give a bike designed for a 5'4" guy to a 6'4" guy or vice versa, they physically won't be able to use it. Proportions makes this even worse: the cycling equivalent of Michael Phelps won't be able to use a bike designed for a normally-proportioned person.
Because not all have the same size and some like diffrent handles, seats and so on. For racing bicycles are already a lot rules in place. Shape, geometery, weight. That's why some fancy by bicyles are ok for Triatlon but not for bicycle races.
There are certain motor racing categories where things like engines (or even entire cars) are provided by the race organiser and teams are not allowed to make any modifications. Formula A1 comes to mind as an example.
These categories are much more focussed on the driver, as the racetrack and cars are all identical.
I'm pretty sure that something like this can be brought into cycle racing. Everybody gets the same frame, wheelset, crankset and groupset, and you install your own cockpit (saddle and handlebars).
F1 Cars are completely custom built by the team, and even different drivers within the same team drive essentially different cars. The suspension setup, handling profile, seat, steering wheel and button layout are all custom done for the driver.
Because the most likely doping they still use is self blood-infusions, as described by Infuentes recently. Not detectable.
And those incredible new records by the top riders can only be explained by doping. Faster than with EPO.
Mechanical doping is still an additional possibility, sure. Esp. after several riders complained about those motor noises last year.
Self-transfusion can be detectable now that they have the athlete biological passport. At least, that's the intent of it. If your red blood cell count goes up faster than is naturally possible, they'll be able to tell. This can't keep you from doing it very gradually, of course. Plus, basically all of these guys sleep in altitude tents now to boost red blood cell production via low oxygen. I don't think anyone has been caught doing it yet, but it's also possible now to use a carbon monoxide inhaler to induce hypoxia and boost red blood cell production that way. Escape Collective did an investigation into a few months ago. That is pretty dangerous, but it's hard to believe not a single person would at least try, and it can't be detected. It's not even actually banned right now, though UCI did ban huffing xenon gas to do the same thing. Detecting carbon monoxide huffing seems undetectable even in principle, though, since it's a naturally occurring pollutant. You'd effectively be banning riders from ever smoking since that would produce a positive test.
Escape Collective did an article on this (https://escapecollective.com/what-would-happen-if-everyone-i...), and while at first glance there's a lot to like about a "spec series" for cycling, ultimately it would definitely advantage/disadvantage some riders. Plus, people just want to race a bike that works for them, not some spec bike.
One downside is that if (when) the equipment fails, it'll be unfair to whoever happened to be lumped with the bad one and it would sometimes be hard to prove if it was the equipment's fault or the athlete's. With their own bike, it's their own responsibility.
Another is there would be no pressure on the bike technology so the audience would know they're not performing as well as they could on some consumer bike, reducing the appeal of it. It's already stink that there are weight minimums.
doesn't really seem fair to me if you've practiced on what you own and perhaps have made it custom to fit to your limb/torso ratios for posture, have a handlebar grip you like, prefer the kind of derailleur and shifters you chose etc
its all a matter of equipment preference and for sports that involve using equipment i think that would be a personal choice of minor optimizations and preferences that you should be granted given you would have worked a lot with it to get to the olympics
There was a controversy in curling a few years ago where some curling teams were using new brooms by a new company that had significantly better tech. It was so good it made it unnecessary to have two sweepers. The resolution was to ban it and only allow brooms from certain manufacturers.
It seems reasonable that these sports could narrow down the list of approved equipment down to a few approved suppliers every year.
Shoes had a similar issue when Nike released their first modern super-shoe (Vaporfly, IIRC). The track and field body had to limit shoe sole height and the other brands had a lot of catch-up to do.
Same for swimming with high tech, low drag, bouyant swimsuits. Again, the international body had to step in and ban some materials/designs to prevent domination by nations that could sink resources into the engineering.
same thing happens in cycling all the time too. the UCI bans new equipment all the time, and the rules for what is allowed are very strict, to the point where there's a limit on sock height. there is a limited list of frames that can be used in UCI races, including the olympics
but rules around the type of equipment you can use, and the race host supplying specific equipment to all riders, is a very different thing.
Did you know that the Olympics used to be a strictly amateur competition? You would get disqualified if it turned out you'd taken payment for your sporting activity.
The idea is that different equipment is better suited for different individuals. By mandating a specific kind of equipment for all athletes, you'd be benefiting some individuals over others.
For example, road bikes have different frame shapes that are suitable depending on your torso length compared to leg length.
Of course, the natural next step would be allow some flexibility (different frame size but same material), but you can see how that could be a slippery slope of legislation and lobbying that would end up in a similar situation to where we are today?
You -should- be able to just mandate Hubs and cranks to get around this.
Or make sponsors provide a 'slew' of wheels and cranksets for all their riders (i.e. spares as well) that can get inspected before the race, and are randomly distributed between the riders sponsored.
Buuuuut UCI hasn't even figured out doping, so lol
Suggesting everyone should have to use a specific bike is exactly a suggestion like that - bikes have sizes and shapes that are suited to riders of particular body sizes and shapes.
Especially in the context of the original olympics, which were largely conducted nude. The idea that a rich country can field better equipment is absurd.
Would you expand that to nutrition, training regime, traing location (altitude), etc?
Then limit the amount each country/athlete can spend, make everyone get paid the same by different sponsors?
I don't think the Olympics were ever about equal footing or decreasing variables. To really level the playing field you'd have to have a clone army of athletes with the same genes, diet, lifestyle, training, coach, sleep, etc. Equipment is just one variable among dozens, and eventually the rules can change to limit their contribution (like with swimsuits).
That's because in the sport of cycling, the bike is main part of the athlete and therefore sponsors want athlete's to ride the bikes they ride all throughout the rest of the year.
It's purely a branding and sponsorship related piece.
Does Spec Miata have a spectator following? I have always taken it to be an accessible form of motor racing in which to participate, not something to watch.
Maybe technically, but most families in the US live in suburbs which are classified as urban areas but are really not. The drive to the grocery store from an average suburban home is probably 10-20 minutes.
