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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Technology is an integral part of cycling, just as it is in motorsport. There are some one-design motorsport racing classes, but they are far from the most popular. Fans like to see innovation, we like to coo over the beautiful new machinery on display.

Some of the greatest moments in cycling are directly related to technical progress, most obviously the Obree/Boardman battle for the hour record. On one side a professional champion with a million pound superbike, on the other an unknown amateur with a bike he built himself. Many fans complain that the current regulations are too conservative and provide too little opportunity for technical innovation.

Cycle racing exists in a symbiotic relationship with cycle manufacturing. Race wins sell bikes, bike sales fund race wins. Cut the manufacturers out of the sport and they take a huge chunk of sponsorship with them.

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If technology is integral, then why ban motors at all? Small motors and powerful compact energy supplies are technological advancements.

It's a balance between man and machine, between tradition and progress.

F1 racing cars would be faster if they replaced the driver with a computer. The fans want to see the skills of the driver tested, so the sport bans common driver aids like traction control and anti-lock brakes.

Cycling with motors isn't cycling, it's motorcycling. Allowing motors would change the sport in an undesirable and irrevocable manner.

In cycling, technological progress is governed by the Lugano Charter. Technology is an intrinsic part of the sport, but it is not allowed to play a dominant role.

http://oldsite.uci.ch/imgarchive/Road/Equipment/The%20Lugano...

Interestingly though - those now-banned-in-F1 driver aids are all over showroom floors and making regular cars safer. (as are older technologies initially developed in top level racing - disk brakes, fuel injection, radial tires, etc...)

Racing in all it's forms is nearly always conducted under some entirely arbitrary artificial constraints (even when the rules don't enforce it, money ends up taking the same place). Sometimes those constraints are "we'll sell more cars if they all look a little bit like Fords or Chevys", sometimes they're more like "we've got home-team advantage, so we'll make the rules say you've got to sail your America's Cup contender to Newport to compete, even if you come from Europe/New Zealand instead of Rhode Island...". Sometimes the constrains are "these new 4WD supercharged Group B Rally Cars are killing too many people, lets stop racing anything that fast thru the trees - lets race showroom floor shopping trolly hatchbacks instead..."

Keep in mind that "Cycling with motors" isn't motorcycle racing either - in motorcycle racing there's engine capacity limits, number of cylinders, number of gear ratio limits, minimum weights, restrictions on brake materials, even things like limits on the number of motors used for a season and work allowed to be done on motors between races, and MotoGP are now "standardising" the engine management electronics/software as well... WorldSBK have homologation rules, where you need to sell a certain number of your racing motorcycle to the general public as road bikes to be allowed to race (modified) version in the race series. (I'm currently riding round a two stroke 125 Cagiva Mito that's a roadgoing version of the now banned/superseded 125GP bikes... These day's you've got no choice but to compete on a 250cc four stroke in that race series/class. In the past there were 8 cylinder bikes, and bikes with 16 speed gearboxes - all just history/legends now...)

A lot of "the balance" seems to end up being about money - either to stop the guy with the deepest pockets from wining everything (who'd want to go sail boat racing against Larry Ellison without some rules about how much he can spend?), or to make sure the sponsors keep pouring money into "the sport" (how many F1 rules do you suppose there are relating to drivers meeting corporate and sponsor hospitality and media requirements, rather than technical regulations about what you're allowed to race on the track?)

> Technology is an intrinsic part of the sport, but it is not allowed to play a dominant role.

I can't make any sense of this. Any bicycle is 100% a product of technology. I can't think of anything that plays a more dominant role in bicycle racing than... bicycles.

I fairly sure the cyclist has a fair amount to do with it. You can't just buy a £10k rig and win the Tour.

If we vary a bicycle race one way, by replacing the bicycles with walking sticks, which require no technology as long as you're willing to put in the time to find one rather than carving it; and vary it another way, by replacing the cyclists with monkeys -- which of those two resulting races (humans with walking sticks vs monkeys with bicycles dimensioned appropriately to the monkeys) is more similar to a "bicycle race"?

You can have a bicycle race without cyclists; you can't have one without technology. Technology is playing a dominating role.

I tend to suspect that jdietrich didn't mean to include things like metallurgy, rubber, and gears under the umbrella of "technology", but there is no actual line between the use of gears and the use of motors.

> there is no actual line between the use of gears and the use of motors.

There's a very clear line in this case. Cycling is a human powered sport. Battery, gasoline, nuclear, and other power sources are not allowed. This is why mopeds are not allowed. Also prohibited is temporary power storage like a capacitor or spring, which might be used for regenerative braking.

You can put all the motors you want on your bike (IMHO) so long as you don't energize them.

Only a specific set of technology is allowed in a bike race. Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick.

The rules attempt to describe the ineffable concept of what it means to be a "bicycle race". They are meant to encapsulate a mass consensus based on tradition and expectations, including the idea of how to balance "human" and "technology". The rules must also face the challenge of changes in technology, and ever-present rules lawyering. The Lugano charter, mentioned earlier, tries to capture and influence that mass consensus.

There are different interpretations of what a "bicycle race" means, which is why there are different rules organizations. If you want to run a race which allows a monkey with a walking stick to compete, feel free!

I thought the monkeys got bikes rather than sticks?

> There's a very clear line in this case. Cycling is a human powered sport. Battery, gasoline, nuclear, and other power sources are not allowed. This is why mopeds are not allowed. Also prohibited is temporary power storage like a capacitor or spring, which might be used for regenerative braking.

Doesn't a derailleur have to have a spring in it? And any chain will have a certain amount of tension that allows it to store a (small) amount of energy. Heck, even standing up on the pedals is a way of storing energy to use later.

> Only a specific set of technology is allowed in a bike race. Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick.

This makes me sad. Is there a formula/series that allows any kind of purely human-powered vehicle, whether it looks like a traditional bicycle or not? I'd love to watch that.

Like I said, "ever-present rules lawyering".

Even "purely human-powered vehicle" is suspect to rules lawyering. Rompelberg cycled at 268.8 km, in the wake of a dragster pace-car. Would your hypothetical race allow that, given that the vehicle is still human powered?

> Even "purely human-powered vehicle" is suspect to rules lawyering. Rompelberg cycled at 268.8 km, in the wake of a dragster pace-car. Would your hypothetical race allow that, given that the vehicle is still human powered?

The dragster wouldn't be allowed on the course - that seems easy enough to rule out.

Several organisations promote races for non-UCI bikes.

http://www.ihpva.org/ http://www.bhpc.org.uk/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR9Nykvp_-I

> Doesn't a derailleur have to have a spring in it?

Indeed, a lot of them now have batteries and electric motors. I was surprised how easily electronic shifting was allowed into the sport.

So yes, many pro-racing bikes already have battery power, even though it's not directly driving the bike. It could be argued that some kind of KERS would be a natural evolution of this.

>> which of those two resulting races (humans with walking sticks vs monkeys with bicycles dimensioned appropriately to the monkeys)

> Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick.

> If you want to run a race which allows a monkey with a walking stick to compete, feel free!

Consider reading my comment before you respond to it. If you want to argue that bicycles are more similar to bicycles than they are to walking sticks... that was most of the point of my comment, too.

I want to argue that "similar" is irrelevant to the topic.

You just pointed out that the rules of bicycle races, as a class, are intensely concerned with what counts as a bicycle. This is a question of similarity.

More, it just illustrates my point that it is nonsensical to claim that "technology is not allowed to play a dominant role" in cycling. All of those rules are concerned with which technologies are required in a race (say, wheels), which are allowed, and which are forbidden. If you eliminated technology from cycling, cycling wouldn't exist. If you took an anything-goes approach, cycling again wouldn't exist -- you'd have racing, but nothing anyone would recognize as a bicycle.

And so immense amounts of attention and effort are devoted to the question of which technologies to use. Using the wrong one will get you disqualified. Abstaining from the wrong one will get you disqualified. The technological decisions made by rules committees govern the performance of the racers, and everyone knows and acknowledges that. This is a dominant role for technology. If you divide cycling as a sport into several parts, and one of those parts includes "technology", that part is much more important than every other part combined can be.

1.0001 is very close to 1. But if the rules say that the the value must be between 0 and 1 then the similarity doesn't matter. Only the rules, as interpreted by the judges, matter for the decision of if a motor or a monkey is allowed in the given race.

I believe you do not understand what "dominate" means in this thread. It's clear that technology is an essential component, not only for the bike, as you mentioned, but also the paved roads. It's clear that humans are an essential component, not only as a power source but also the efforts of many to develop better training methods.

It's also clear that the legal system is an important component, since the force of law helps keep people off the otherwise public roads during the races.

All of these are essential. Do you consider them all to be dominate?

I don't. Most people don't watch a bike race to see how well the road is maintained, or look at the barricades set up, or marvel at the supply chain to support a cyclist from stop to stop.

No, most of them are there to watch the riders, and to a lesser extent the gear. The Lugano charter makes it explicit that a UCI goal is to reflect a certain historical and sociological understanding of what cycling should be. It even says that the technology used should be subordinate to the physical qualities of the rider.

You can use a different interpretation of what "dominate" means, but note that your objection was an interpretation of a summary by jdietrich, who also provided a reference to the source document. Your interpretation since then is not compatible to the source document.

In my opinion, you misunderstood jdietrich's comment from the start and continue to argue against a viewpoint and interpretation that no one actually asserts.

In cycling culture, some things are definitely legal or illegal, but there's a considerable grey area of "don't take the piss". It's technically illegal to draft team cars, but you'll only get penalised if you're a jersey contender or you're being blatant about it. The sticky bottle and the magic spanner are the stuff of cycling lore.

That attitude partly explains the historical prevalence of doping. There was no honour in using drugs to win a race, but there was no dishonour in using drugs just to get through a tour. Nobody minded very much if a domestique took a few pep pills. Doping only really became a major issue after the Festina affair, when it transpired that leading riders from a successful team were systematically doping to win races.

I'd love to see an autonomous F1 series!

That would actually be very interesting. Instead of drivers competing, it would be code competing.

or, even better, AI competing.

AI is code

And code is speech. Does that mean AI is speech? Man, that's a weird thought.

Are they considered legal persons then?

There's an initiative to do just that.

http://www.roborace.com

Great comment, thank you.

It wouldn't be the same Tour De France if they used mopeds.

Because motorcycle racing is an entirely different sport.

It's hard to disagree from my own perspective of a commuting cyclist who would like to see racing drive cycling advancement in ways that trickle down to affordably solving the last mile(s) problem for the human race, but allowing more than a single human as the source of power would simply transform the sport into something else. It's not necessarily better or worse, but using a motor is a fundamentally different activity and begs all sorts of arbitrary dimensions/mass/power restrictions or else it turns into a motorcycle race. There might not be a more efficient animal than a human on a bicycle, but we don't hold a candle to a Ducati.

What about a flywheel? Probably a net negative. What about a motor with no battery. You pedal to power it? Just wondering what the limit of "human powered" is

A clutched flywheel would probably be an advantage in many kinds of terrain. Imagine being able to spin up the flywheel from pedalling or gravity (geared) while going downhill, and then when you hit an uphill section you kick in the gear and pedal easy. It would essentially turn most tracks into "flat" tracks.

No the extra weight of a flywheel plus motor/generator would far outweigh any small advantage. The energy density is just too low for any flywheel small enough to fit on a bike. And the gyroscopic effects would mess with handling.

Bikes already have two really large flywheels.

They don't spin fast enough nor with enough mass to help you climb a hill ...

And people spend a lot of money to make them store just a tiny little less energy.

Except when they are chasing the hour record. Ondrej Sosenka ran 3.2 kg wheels in his 2005 hour record precisely for the flywheel effect.

Every tiny acceleration derived from a pedal stroke has to be transferred from bike to rider by hands and back. It's not "work" in the physical sense if you look at the bike as your frame of reference, but it requires biological effort nonetheless. As long as you don't need to brake, more storage in the wheels is better. This effect would be strongest in a climb, but there you certainly only want heavy wheels if you can compensate with a lighter frame or parts (and if the inevitable braking on the subsequent descent does not call for less storage).

But there's a catch: even on a track, lighter wheels will _feel_ faster, because you get stronger feedback from oscillations I'm your pedal stroke.

No matter how heavy you made the bike wheels, any kinetic energy stored in them would be used up in the first few meters of a steep hill on any road course. Then you have to drag those heavy weights up the hill. So no, more storage in the wheels isn't better (outside of a totally flat track).

Citation? Flywheels can be very efficient especially with modern engineering. And it could be oriented so that the gyroscopic effects were stabilizing or destabilizing as desired, plus I think in any case riders would adapt quickly - I ride a "twitchy" bike with no front fork sometimes, and my old professor built a bike with a counter-rotating flywheel to disprove the myth that cyclists rely on gyroscopic effects to stabilize them.

That's really interesting about the gyroscopic effects myth, as it is one I strongly believe! Is there some documentation of the bike or some analysis of this I can read?

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/gyrobike.htm

Thanks!

It's not a myth that gyroscopic effects contribute to stabilization, but rather that it explains the stabilization fully. It's usually phrased as "scientists still don't understand how bikes work [in terms of their stability]", which is pretty amazing if you think about it.

Actually, since about 5 years ago bicycle stability is pretty well understood: http://bicycle.tudelft.nl/stablebicycle/

Prof Ruina? I loved his class.

No, Dr Hunt (see link in cousin). I actually only had him as a tutor but didn't want to complicate things.

Ah. I see that now. I had Ruina for Dynamics, and talked a bunch with Jim Papadopoulos. Fun Times.

What kind of citation are you looking for? This is just common engineering knowledge. The airtight safety housing alone would be way too heavy for bike racing. You can't have a flywheel spinning at zillion rpm sitting out in the open because it could kill someone in a crash. Plus the flywheel would need to be in a near vacuum to avoid air drag.

Or a motor + battery but the battery has to start discharged. Basically the same as the flywheel I guess, except you have a little more control over when the energy you store gets used.

As a fellow cycling commuter, I agree with your sentiment,but I would argue that the rules of cycling racing now prevent a much more innovative environment that could trickle down to us commuters. In particular, the frame shape limits that keep everything as a double diamond. For efficient human power, the best designs are usually recumbents, but very little money has gone into that area because recumbents are not allowed in races.

Why ban steroids? Why ban amphetamines? Whyban surgical modification? Why ban genetic engineering? Why ban motorised exo skeletons and nano technology? (I just read a great short story along these lines called ""Slipping" by Lauren Brookes - from the EFF'S PWNING TOMORROW short fiction anthology...)

The same question applies to all of those. If we allow technological enhancements, why is one enhancement too far? You couldn't run the course as fast as you can cycle it, after all. The same argument applies to all those other things - if we allow them then the playing field needs to stay absolutely level otherwise the person who can afford the strongest drugs, the newest gene-splicing, and the most efficient exoskeleton wins.

It's either about the athletic competition or it's not. If it's about the athletic condition, then the impact of technological factors should be minimized.

Then it'll be like, "why can I only have two wheels?"

Bicycle racing, whose equipment is required to have only one source of power, a certain minimum weight, and no disc brakes (and maybe a couple others) is probably one of the less-constrained pro sports.

Isn't there some secret conspiracy against recumbents? Some "tradition" rules disguising the "big diamond-frame" bike manufacturing cartel's absolute control over road racing rules, who know they'd get handed their asses by the Unix beard-o crowd on recumbents in a fair race? ;-)

The current bike rider position (on the diamond bike) makes riding less energy efficient, for one, and more agile - rider can more easily change direction or start sprinting or both.

All of this make bike riding sport more entertaining. I guess I can put it next to Formula 1 - low and high velocities, fast and slow turns, attacks, defense, etc.

The recumbent riding would be mostly technological and would have less action. I guess I can put it next to NASCAR - high velocities, slow turns, slow attacks.

I think that recumbent would be good for US, I also guess rest of world would prefer diamond bikes.

It's already about which country/team/city can spend the most money scouting the best talent, or poaching them from ever-expanding pools.

Then there's the matter of paying the most for the best coaches, best data analytics to optimize the bio performance of the human individual, etc.

I'd argue that you can't really say that money is the reason for not include or limiting technology. If it's about a level playing field, then money should be the first thing to remove.

How about a random sampling of a country/city's population? Have them compete against each-other. Otherwise, it'll always be about money as it's integral to sport.

This is exactly what I was getting at.

You have to ban things that are outright bad for athletes. You also have to remember, given a competition people will do whatever it takes to win, because someone else will. So you have to draw the line somewhere.

Why though? In many areas of life, people for example work themselves to death voluntarily. Why is there not a sport where there are really no limits at all?

Because at some point it stops being fun to watch if your race from point A to B is won by a supersonic fighter jet.

Also there's the pesky little problem of poor or up and coming athletes literally killing themselves to try to win big money, all for the benefit of some FIFA-alike and its sponsors.

>Because at some point it stops being fun to watch if your race from point A to B is won by a supersonic fighter jet.

Not when the opponent pulls out a surface to air missile.

ha! This is exactly the kind of out-of-the box thinking that jet cycling needs!

> You have to ban things that are outright bad for athletes.

You're assuming all those things are bad for the athletes.

That would probably be the first sporting event I'd watch! Imagine a race with three legged cyclists! That would be awesome!

The answers are not necessarily the same for all those, and for all future scenarios. The conventional answer today is that sport should promote, among other things, a healthy life. Taking large amounts of amphetamines is not so healthy, but some of the currently-legal ways that pro athletes prep for competition are also not very healthy, like the use of extreme and possibly dangerous amounts of caffeine in many sports. Maybe people will do more bike touring than bike racing because racing has become pointless and un-compelling to follow as a fan.

It may be that many professional and elite amateur sports will not survive genetic modification, for example, because anyone can access elite athletic potential if they wanted to. Or, more disturbingly, only if their parents had chosen a genetic combination for one outcome over another. What would be the point of "being a fan" of an athlete with characteristics chosen from a menu?

It crosses the border between using human muscles' energy output (and optimising the mechanical efficiency of that) and using some other energy source. Which is a fairly clear barrier for anyone to understand.

How about something in between? A rider and a manufacturer can work together to design a new bike for that rider, but for actual races the manufacturer has to build an instance of that bike under supervision of race officials and turn it over to them, and it is that instance that the rider must use in the race. Once the bike is turned over to race officials, no one is allowed unsupervised access.

That allows innovation, while making it much harder for a rider and team to cheat.

Wouldn't that be more work than just inspecting the bikes?

Those bikes tend to get stripped down every day. Some of the frame designs have at times been rated for less than 10k miles, meaning they wear out at some point, possibly before the end of the race.

For instance a commercial aluminum frame is overbuilt so that it doesn't vibrate itself to pieces, but if you are going to get a new one in a week why bother?

Frames are OTS products under current UCI regulations. But fitting that frame to the rider involves a lot of individual tweaking by the team mechanic, so you can't really lock them down ahead of time. But with IR cameras and a reasonable identification system directing post-race (our post-change) physical searches motor cheating should be easy enough to control, very much unlike PEDs.

Cycle racing exists in a symbiotic relationship with cycle manufacturing

How many racing teams are named after bicycle manufacturers?

Of the current world tour [1]: five.

  * BMC RACING TEAM
  * CANNONDALE PRO CYCLING TEAM
  * LAMPRE - MERIDA
  * TEAM GIANT - ALPECIN
  * TREK - SEGAFREDO

(I may have missed some)

But note that many if not all teams are sponsored by manufacturers (frames, wheels, geartrain, etc).

Edit: five. Forgot Merida.

[1] http://www.uci.ch/road/teams/

Lampre-Merida too. So 5 total.

4 I think: Cannondale, Lampre Merida, Giant Alpecin, Trek Segafredo.

Why are recumbent bikes banned then? They're entirely human powered, and far more efficient.

> Technology is an integral part of cycling

Cheating is an integral part of cycling

> There are some one-design motorsport racing classes, but they are far from the most popular.

NASCAR would like a word with you.

Edit to add: I know that NASCAR allows more than a single design, but it's in the same spirit. The options are extremely limited.

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