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Comment by angus-prune | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that the sport is about bikes. I think the sport is about cyclists. The olympics is particular is built around human athletic competition not technical competition.

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).

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> How do you find the best cyclist if the quality of the bikes is wildly different?

In that case, you should probably give everyone the same 'official' bike.

If bike manufacturers can't use bike races to help them market and sell bikes, teams will lose a massive source of income.

Excellent point!

I agree, but sadly when officials start trusting, they stop looking, and this opens it up to more widespread cheating.

I'm not sure what you mean by that?

Just produce the same identical bikes, and assign them randomly at the start of the race?

Ever go to a go kart track and notice that some karts are faster than others? They're all identical as far as the eye can see, but in reality tons of subtle differences pop up.

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.

Assign the bikes randomly, and swap them around often enough between legs of the races. The Tour de France is pretty long.

This would need to accommodate many different sizes, geometries, subjective preferences.

Why? The whole point is to standardise, I thought? They are already _not_ accommodating preferences for eg recumbent bikes. So what measure are a few more preferences not accommodated?

In any case, you can make a bunch of different official sizes.

> The whole point is to standardise, I thought?

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.

No, they aren't doing it wrong. They are just (effectively) optimising for something very weird.

It's about entertainment.

I genuinely see the point you're trying to make, but fitting a bicycle is like fitting an article of clothing. It's is laughable to suggest clothing be one-size-fits-all the same way it is for bicycle geometries. It doesn't compare.

In any case, you can make a bunch of different official sizes.

They already override plenty of individual preferences that people might have with their bikes.

> 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).

And even then the technology is severely curtailed, it has to compete within a fairly restrictive design envelope.

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