If like me you love the sport of cycling, perhaps you don’t think it needs reinvigorating, but I am for anything that makes the sport more popular. Jonathan Vaughters, one of the best thinkers in the world of cycling has come up with a 10 point plan to make the sport more popular:
1. More races of the highest level outside of Europe.
2. Consistent, understandable formats for cycling fans.
3. Long-term guaranteed entry to the Tour de France for professional teams.
4. More focus on prevention of doping, in the first place, as opposed to catching cheats.
5. More team-time trials more often.
6. Technical innovation, such as cameras on bikes, inside cars, helmets, inside team buses to make the “craziness and danger of the peloton more real to the viewer”.
7. Equipment innovation to see if the the smartest team wins sometimes, rather than the strongest.
8. Open radios to the public and listen to your favourite team and what they are doing.
9. GPS tracking of individual riders to make races fun to watch.
10. Have an understandable and consistent way of determining the best rider in the world and the best team in the world. That might mean riders have to ride Paris-Roubaix, and if they do not finish they would be docked points.
Sounds good to me – its about time cycling started moving with the times….
