Back in May, Lorena Wiebes won Stage One of the Giro d’Italia Women. She did not get to enjoy it for long. Within two hours, she’d been disqualified for riding an illegal bike, and banished from both the stage and the entire race. Her bike had been under the minimum 6.8-kilogram weight limit, by 20 grams.
This whole affair made a lot of people very angry. Wiebes, her team, most of her rivals, and almost anyone watching the event. It’s hard to find anyone who really liked the outcome – it didn’t even bring much satisfaction to the race organisers or the commissaires.
If you want to grasp how little 20 g is, there’s about 10 g of air in each tyre. (That’s a sum I first did in 2008 when working out what advantage a mate of mine was going to get from a very expensive plan to fill his tyres with helium. I didn’t tell him.)
Naturally, I decided to work out how much of an advantage you get from saving 20 g on a flat sprint stage. It was 139 km long, with (are you ready?) 240 m of climbing. I ride in Cambridgeshire most of the time, and I can barely concoct a ride that flat if I try.
It turns out that if you do the maths there aren’t enough decimal places in the universe to quantify the smallness of the advantage gained on those gradients. It’s the same if you calculate the advantage in sprint acceleration. It’s a decimal point, and a whole lot of zeroes. By the time you get to a non-zero digit you’ve stopped caring.
However, there’s a problem with the outrage. That is, on this occasion, for once in their lives, the commissaries have applied the UCI’s rule exactly as written. The sanction for an underweight bike is expulsion from the race. That’s it. There was no fudging or looking the other way, even though I suspect they probably wanted to. For years we’ve asked for consistency and now we have it.
There’s even precedent for them to follow – as recently as last October they disqualified Jan-Willem van Schip from the Tour of Holland for a seatpost that hadn’t been registered with the technical committee. Absolutely no one (apart from him) minded, presumably because he’s not as famous as Wiebes.
There are many other illegal things that make a much bigger difference in a result than the nothing at all that 20 g makes. There are sticky bottles, illegal feeds, or stopping for a pee where a Belgian pensioner with binoculars might see you from the roof of their campervan. For those offences commissaires often just look the other way – one commissaire recently told me off for criticising a sticky-bottle episode because, as he put it, “If he hadn’t taken it he’d probably have been dropped from the break.” If they do take action, it’s a fine and a points deduction.
But we’d go mad if we started trying to work out sanctions on the basis of how much actual difference it made. How much did you gain from that illegal feed? How much did you use your sneaky alleged electric motor?
The issue here is simply that the rule is wrong. It’s disproportionate, and it would be very simple to change it. If a sticky bottle is a fine, then for a first-time offence of up to 200 g underweight the right punishment is maybe relegation at the finish and nothing more. For a margin of over 200 g, maybe relegation and a time penalty big enough to dent a GC hope.
Honestly, getting disqualified from a whole Grand Tour should probably require that when you arrive at the bike check, the bike is bobbing above your head on a string like a balloon.