POWER METER BAN AT TOUR DE FRANCE?

Lack of radios might make more breakaways successful (you won’t be able to do the catch in the last 500m as easily). The meters I just see as a way to track your progress (and point out why you’re thrashed the next morning) that can be paired to a HRM that keeps a record. IMHO.

"There was nothing noble in his motives, ...

There was nothing noble in Frank Nitti's motives either but he still brought down Alphonse Capone.

There are certain crimes you can't help but engage in when running a pro cycling doping ring, for instance, international drug smuggling, practicing medicine without a license and distributing pharmaceuticals without a license. But ever the overachiever, Pharmstrong went above and beyond. He also committed serial perjury, serially suborning perjury, money laundering, defrauding the US Government of $32 million, conspiracy to commit all the former, witness tampering, bribing sports officials, extorting silence from his minions by means of financial harassment, and siphoning off potentially hundreds of millions of dollars that might otherwise have gone to legitimate anti-cancer charities.

FLandis might have been a dirtbag but Pharmstrong was il capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses, the head on an international crime syndicate that spanned three continents. FLandis in comparison was a choir boy.

Despite this, Pharmstrong, the greatest sports fraud in the history of the Milky Way galaxy, remains not just a free man but also a multi-millionaire.

To: Fightin Whitey

"Thanks. I wondered about that. I couldn’t recall if he came away scot-free on the PED issue or if there was still doubt."

He spent $2 mi on his defense, much of which he'd raised with the (fraudulent) "Floyd Fairness Fund," but in the end CAS upheld the UCI's original verdict and gave him a 2-year suspension. And the stress caused his best friend, long-time mentor and the father of his wife to commit suicide, after which his marriage broke up, too.

IronJack is right about one thing (but only one). If Pharmstrong had put him on his team, FLandis probably would never have snitched. But Pharmstrong had a career history of intimidating and abusing his support staff. It stands to reason eventually one of them would stand up to him. The simple fact is he picked the wrong Mennonite to piss off and finally got up his comeuppance. More's the pity it was just a flesh wound.

To: PrairieDawg

Lack of radios might make more breakaways successful (you won’t be able to do the catch in the last 500m as easily)....."

Lack of radios definitely would make the racing more energetic and less predictable.

I have long held the opinion that Lance Armstrong is one of the greats in the sports world.

Yeah he may have used drugs, but he beat the hell out of a mass of people who were also using drugs, and he did it over & over & over etc... Never failing a drug test along the way.

Armstrong also remains one of the strongest, most successful cyclists to ever throw a leg over a top tube. Yeah, he doped. Yeah, he was a jerk and a bully. He wasn’t competing for Miss Congeniality. He was racing against other dopers — Contador, Ulrich, Pantani, et. all. — in the most grueling endurance sport on earth. He was a cheat; he was just a better cheat than the rest.

And all that aside, for better or worse, he made the sport interesting. And collected millions for cancer victims. Landis, like Tyler Hamilton and David Walsh, has made a cottage industry of Lance-bashing, by publicly virtue posturing and self-flagellating until it’s sickening.

Get over it already.

"Yeah he may have used drugs, but he beat the hell out of a mass of people who were also using drugs,..."

Agreed.
What ruined his legacy and reputation was the inescapable trap of having to lie.

i don’t understand how, in this day and age, a radio would matter for that particular task.

Would they ban GPS trackers, because you could put them on your own team and know exactly where they are all located.

The race coverage is already giving you the distance information for breakaways, and if they stopped that, why couldn’t you use drones to track it? Or pay Google for a real-time satellite feed, if it is big bucks to know it?

Now, if you eliminated the use of radios and phones for ANY support whatsoever, that might make a difference, otherwise you just get fans for a few bucks, you text them the information, they write it on a chalk board and hold it up.

Having a complete lack of knowledge of where the breakaway is would make a difference — but how would you keep that information hidden, even without radios?

I had imagined a sky-writing plane, each few miles they would just write the new information for all to see.