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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

Having done a lot of bike races you're even making deals with your teammates realistically.

It's an odd artifact of the sport awarding prizes to individuals when it is impossible most of the time to win without teamwork, and only one person on the team that works together can actually win.

I don't fault the racer in this story who reneged on his deal to win.

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If making deals is acceptable to begin with, then breaking them is wrong. I can't see any interpretation where Mike didn't do something wrong.

It's also arguably not acceptable. There have been allegations of fairly large amounts of money changing hand for in some of the deals, promoters and sponsors tend to frown upon that stuff, as do sports books and it might be against the law (sporting fraud) in a few European countries. The rules and the codes regarding this sort of thing are fuzzy. There is also a class system of sorts in play. When Lance Armstrong went to the media and claimed he let Marco Pantani win on Ventoux in the 2000 Tour, that's against the code too but because Lance was so dominant nobody said much about it. The fact was, nobody could make Lance pay for that on the road. In the romantic ideal world, a bunch of Italian teams would have worked together to prevent Lance's teammates from winning some monuments (maybe Hincapie at Paris Roubaix, but he was never really in it) that they were targeting but the fact was the team was built for one purpose and that never was an option. The ability to enforce the deal is part of it. Likewise, in retrospect, Lance going public with it was a scorched earth psychological tactic that made his image even bigger.

I would say, at least at some levels (u-23 national championship might not be that) that if you can get someone to gift you a win for an unenforceable deal, then you beat them and you did it mentally. It's like all the secret rules of baseball.

I don't think it is that unacceptable. I remember Jalabert giving the stage victory to the other rider at least once in the Spanish la Vuelta the year that he won it (they had been part of a 2-men escape) and more recently Contador did the same thing at least once.

> If making deals is acceptable to begin with, then breaking them is wrong

Making cycling an athletic version of diplomacy actually sounds pretty cool to me.

let me draft for the next mile and I'll support Sil->Ber from Kiel...

But yet we celebrate the individual, not the team.

I can't think of another sport that is quite so teamwork orientated, but so individualistic in celebrating the winners.

I'm not even sure if the winners are the 'best' riders. I'm reminded of when Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. He and Chris Froome had broken away from the other contenders, Froome was leading him up a mountain and Wiggins couldn't keep up, Froome had to slow down for him. Froome was the better man that day, probably that tour.

Formula 1 and most high-level motor racing is similar. Drivers get lots of fame but it is truly a team sport.

Well theres motorsport where they have identical cars. If we take F1 you can still race against your team mate. And team mates are fairly loose concepts in F1. Team orders weren't allowed for a long time, disobeying team orders isn't unusual. But yes most of the time it's the guy with the best car that wins.

I don't think the team aspect is as much about the two drivers who are on the same team as it is about the rest of the crew. The two drivers generally share most of the other personnel on a team, but even with the same car and the same crew, one driver on the team usually out-performs the other consistently. In some cases, especially as the season matures, one of the drivers becomes a support driver and will sacrifice his own race outcome to benefit the teammate with a better championship total, but it doesn't come into play all that often. Even when Botas let Hamilton by during a race last year because Hamilton might have had a better chance of catching the Ferrari ahead, Hamilton gave him the spot back after being unsuccessful, rather than taking the higher point finish for himself while he was battling the Ferrari for championship lead. So while they will cooperate if they can increase the overall team position, they try hard not to just hand position over to a team mate to benefit the individual championship points total. That kind of collusion would be heavily criticized even though probably not illegal under current rules.

An F1 driver is also part of team leadership and responsible for building the team. That was schumacher’s strength and a weakness of Alonso from what I have read.

The extent of the drivers role in the team varies drastically. Sure, as Schumacher move on in his career this was true. When a team brings on an experienced driver to a young team this is probably very true, such as Kimi this year. But even Hamilton, with several championships, is probably only somewhat involved in decision making, not leading it. And younger guys like Le Clerc are probably not involved in team decisions beyond the tech setup of their own car in any meaningful way. That's not to say either of them is not capable of contributing in that way, but they are on teams with plenty of proven experience at all levels, so it's just not as necessary. Alonso was on a team that struggled for several years at McClaren with a lot of leadership turnover, so they would have probably benefited from that quality, although I don't really know whether their failings had anything to do with a weakness of Alonso's in that regard, but I generally got the impression he was not the personality to really get everyone motivated or inspired.

Read about Schumacher. He made a point of shaking hands with every mechanic, he knew about their personal lives. Pretty much like a politician. He also was also able to take the best people with him. Like Ross Brawn and others.

The drivers aren't identical though, and that makes a huge difference. Skill matters a lot in racing.

I very much like and appreciate what goes on in cycling, due to physical differences one even does deals if just riding with mates, for instance, some people have the stamina to tow everyone home at the end of a long ride, some have the hill climbing skills, some can better cope with attrition, some can sprint, some can fearlessly descend. So much of it is actually due to energy conservation, and, in the sport these inherent things are part of the recipe that makes it so fascinating. No sport has the depth of tactics and intrigue that the Tour de France has, and yes that is a different event to the rest of cycling.

One common thing is to have the bulk of the team reign in a breakaway group so their sprinter can take the stage on the line. Or if the team have their man in the breakaway then they can slow down the peleton so the breakaway succeeds, there are so many goals to be gone for.

In F1 there are none of these advanced team tactics going on. Every driver wants to win, none of them are there to just win the 'high speed flat circuits' or just the 'street circuits', or to be a support rider, towing their team lead to the finish line to give way to them and let them get the points.

The fascinating bit of F1 is that every driver first and foremost has to beat their team mate on the other side of the garage. This is where the rivalries are. Teams can mitigate this by not having two Senna grade drivers (as if there is such a thing). Common patterns include having a junior rookie driver to partner with the gifted established star driver. Or, further down the grid, to have a pay driver who 'pays' for the team to have a premium commanding established talented driver. Sometimes the pay driver has something to do with the sponsor, so there was that Nakajima chap that Lotus partnered up with championship winning Piquet, keeping engine supplying Honda happy.

Moving on to today, Honda supply both Red Bull teams - Red Bull and Toro Rosso. Now you would think that there could be deals done to make the B team - Toro Rosso be a mobile chicane, maybe creating incidents to get the red flag and safety car out, or just tying up those Mercedes drivers during pit stops (where they don't have to be blue flagged to let the Mercedes guys pass). But there is none of this.

Or when Renault were supplying Red Bull they could have had deals with other Renault powered teams to achieve similar goals, keeping McLaren at bay (they were winning then).

Anyway, when you hear the excellent Lewis Hamilton talking about the team, he really means it. But the team is his side of the garage, not the Bottas side. Fortunately for Lewis, Bottas is a nice chap and he has respect for the guy that he never had when it was Rosberg (who has developed into a really nice guy now he has quit F1 and got into Formula E ownership).

One other difference in the team-ness of it all is that the cars are different. You ain't going to win in a 2018 Williams even if you are a born again Ayrton Senna. But in cycling it doesn't matter what bike you ride. Clearly my sit up and beg 3 speed won't cut it, but it makes no difference if you are riding Shimano, SRAM or Campagnolo parts. Even having a carbon fibre bike isn't a guarantee of performance over a hydroformed aluminium frame. What will make a difference is performance enhancing drugs, and, for most of the sport's history riders have been chasing prize money just so they can pay for the drugs. Sad but true.

There is irony in that cycling is so much dirtier in this regard compared to F1. F1 should be filthy with big oil and tobacco sponsors, million dollar salaries for starters and so many vested interests. But it is squeaky clean compared to cycling. It is also quite boring in comparison to the show that cycling puts on, I write this as a lifelong fan of F1. Cycling just takes so much to extremes in ways that no other sport can match.

>Anyway, when you hear the excellent Lewis Hamilton talking about the team, he really means it. But the team is his side of the garage, not the Bottas side.

Not sure on that. Either way, Hamilton, Bottas and Wolff often refer to the 100 or so Mercedes staff at the races and the 1000 at the factories.

Some of the teams are good at certain types of race track but it's often accidental or unavoidable. Red Bull (and before that Mclaren) had Adrian Newey designed cars which do well at slower speeds but both teams equally obsessed about engine power, with varying success, to compete at the faster circuits.

> I'm not even sure if the winners are the 'best' riders

That's part of what makes it interesting, because there are so many tactics and ways of winning. It's not purely about athletic ability, but also about racing smart.

But you still need to be very close to the top in athletic ability or you'll never get into the top races at all. Good bargaining strategy will only get you so far; you still need to be a great cyclist. No one's winning medals who isn't one of the top cyclists in the world (although they might not be the top cyclist).

But being at the top requires so much more than just physical fitness and races are routinely won by riders who are strictly inferior to 80% of the participants in every physical aspect of racing except for that one final 20 seconds all-out. And within that subdiscipline, marginally faster legs will always lose out to superior split-second situational awareness and positioning.

Roadbike races are inherently not experimental setups to identify the strongest rider, they identify the rider who passed the finish line first no matter how he got there.

It requires a shitload of physical fitness too, though. Yeah, the person who wins may not be the most fit, but they're still at roughly the same level as all the others who are in the final. That still makes one of the best cyclists in the world. It's not like you could possibly have someone not good enough to get into the top tier of competition somehow win a top tier race. Athletic ability plays into it way too much for that to happen.

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