The Radio Ruling

July 17, 2009

After a sustained complaint campaign by teams in this year’s TDF, the race organizers have backed off their plan to disallow race radios during a second stage of this year’s race.

The second non-radio stage was supposed to be today’s Stage 13, but now the discussion of radio use will take place after the Tour de France.

I think it would be much better to have all teams WITHOUT radios or to have race officials impart less information to the teams during the race.

That way the riders and teams would really have to race instead of relying only on tactics dictated by where every other rider is on the course. Stuff they wouldn’t know unless they truly paid attention during the race.

Right now it’s almost like the teams operate in an info tunnel until the final sprint. They focus on their strategy and are only shaken out of that tunnel if there’s some incident on the road. Those incidents could be crashes, breakaways or attacks.

I want to see the Tour with the racers making their own decisions whether to attack without hearing in their ear whether to go or not.

I guess I’m a new school, old school cycling guy. What would you like to see happen with this issue?