> What innovation? Mechanical energy storage is ancient technology.
The actual unwritten rule is not so much against inventions, as against having any fun.
Recumbent bikes are also forbidden.
The rules, written or not, are about trying to adjudicate a competition of people, if you want a no holds bared technology based competition nothing precludes creating a different one (or participating in one, there’s no dearth of alleycat races and other odd events like the singlespeed world championship).
Wouldn't this be best done by having one group make a bunch of identical bikes that are randomly assigned? Anything more than this and it is allowing some technology innovations and customization, regardless of if the reason is deemed justifiable or not.
Just like you couldn't make footraces fairer by making everyone wear the same shoes.
Human body variation far exceeds any kind of standard sizing. There's a reason that anything that fits a body often has hundreds of different competing designs and materials and size specs and different people are more comfortable with different ones.
It's bordering intractable to try to make a "standard" bike that fits the full variation of human bodies. Making that a requirement for a race would favor people who happen to have bodies more congruent with whatever your geometry and materials and sizing quantum are.
What irks me a bit is that they are supposed to be about bikes, but in reality they are only about bikes that look exactly like the ones they have in mind.
Eg (if I remember right) they also specify a minimum wheel radius, because at some point people started doing well with those, and the people in charge didn't like that.
And they might as well be right: they have an entertainment business to run. They don't care about finding the best or anything like that.
How do you find the best cyclist if the quality of the bikes is wildly different?
In any experiment, you have to control for the factors other than the ones you're looking to test. I don't think its fair to say that they don't care about finding the best, they're just trying to find the best of a different category than you're interested in.
As GP said. There is also space for different competitions about technology (in motorsport, formula 1 has both a driver championship and a constructor championship which is about the technology).
In that case, you should probably give everyone the same 'official' bike.
Just produce the same identical bikes, and assign them randomly at the start of the race?
You can have spec bikes, but there no way they'll all be tuned identically, all have the exact same lubrication in all the bearings, all have the exact chain tension, all have the axles torqued identically. All the derailers built exactly the same... One bike will get inevitably have an advantage over the others.
In any case, you can make a bunch of different official sizes.
No, the main point (as already explained by someone above) is that this competition is about the cyclists, not equipment. The idea is quite simple, but leads to complex, sometimes somewhat arbitrary rules, but they in the end work quite well to regulate the competition.
No offense, but you're clearly someone who doesn't know much about cycling, but are insisting that the cyclists (competition organizers) are "doing it wrong". Arguing with that is tiring, so I won't continue here.
It's about entertainment.
They already override plenty of individual preferences that people might have with their bikes.
And even then the technology is severely curtailed, it has to compete within a fairly restrictive design envelope.
Of course you are. If you’re against any rule you personally dislike or misunderstand you’re not for rules.
> What irks me a bit is that they are supposed to be about bikes
See that’s your problem: you completely missed what the competition was about.
The competition is no more about bicycles than an archery competitions is about bows and arrows.
The competition is about the athletes, the gear is only the means through which it happens. That’s why the name on the podium is that of the cyclist, not of the bike manufacturer.
> Of course you are. If you’re against any rule you personally dislike or misunderstand you’re not for rules.
Haha.