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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

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.?

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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.

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.

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.

...and pro-cyclists get told which bikes and bits to ride.

The athletes can customize the bikes they are given by the sponsors as the sponsor is interested in winning the race even more than the athletes.

> 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.

https://invidious.incogniweb.net/watch?v=9GWw31J60cM

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.

In your view, are activities like cycling and snowboarding valid as Olympic sports? Neither could exist without a significant amount of creative engineering.

There's a difference between creative engineering enabling the whole sport and creative engineers competing with each other behind the scenes.

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.

Bicycle-tech wise, little can stay behind the scenes in cycling.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/761l7gh5x5an/6cmP3f8KY4mTfI6hAY...:

“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.

Other sports have similar regulations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you have any examples? I'm not a racer but a bike commuter, and I'm curious about what technologies we could've gotten but didn't.

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.

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