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Comment by dmckeon | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation.

Well, either that or it would triple sales overnight. "Hey, this stuff really DOES give you wings!"

They would just funnel it through some other company that they can blame.

In GP's proposed scheme, the sponsor gets punished whether or not it knew or assisted

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.

Energy drink is an arbitrary category. Caffeine + sugar + water is the root of a lot more than 1 billion in beverage sales because the combo works.

Energy drinks additionally contain taurine.

Several call themselves energy drinks and don’t like C4 Smart Energy.

At least as far as the Federal Trade Commission is concerned that’s not an issue.

It's good iff you mix it with Vodka.

I had to look up Ineos bc I’m only familiar with the Grenadier truck. Turns out to be a 20b English chem/energy chaebol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineos

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.

The biggest world tour team has a budget of $50 million

I don't know much about sponsorship. How would a sponsor be banned? What sort of activities or relations would be off-limits during a ban?

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?

UCI has barely ever had the willpower to do this.

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.

How does it work now? Are teams banned if caught cheating?

They can be. For example, Team Astana’s license was initially not renewed for 2007 following a doping scandal.

Unfortunately, the UCI usually reissues the license if the team pinky promises not to dope again.

Team Astana signed Lance Armstrong in 2009 and we all know how that went.

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.

I imagine they would be unable to sponsor participants in that organization for a time, and their name would be dishonored.

It’s hard enough for bike teams to get sponsorship. Adding that burden on the sponsor could kill the sport.

Because the Olympics organization would never want to pay to outfit athletes with non-sponsored gear (whether for cycling or any other sport).

“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.

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