“Bullshit” – Wout Van Aert responds to Chris Froome’s suggestion that time trial bikes be banned

Then why not open the class up completely and allow proper aerodynamics 0 instead of small dinosaur lids?

Maybe allow recumbents to take part?

It seems hugely unlikely that a professional cyclist will die of omicron. I am not aware of any sportsperson who has died of any variant of covid, let alone the mildest one.

Possibly true, but allowing it to simply run through the peloton unchecked puts other team members, Soigneurs, coaches, drivers, mechanics, family members etc. at risk.

As has been the case right through the pandemic ... testing and isolating if positive is not about protecting that individual (they are, after all, already infected) but preventing the infection spreading to others as far as possible. 

The previous point about long Covid is also well made, and does put this virus on a different plane to colds and flu. For example, I have a 15 year old student in one of my classes, still suffering the effects of the virus 7 months after catching it. They are still missing from school regularly and cannot yet take part in any of the weekend sporting activities they did before, with no idea when (or even if) that might change. 

Longer term effects from covid may be more prevalent than other viruses, but are hardly unique to covid. Post-viral fatigue has long been recognised as an issue, particularly when it comes to continuing training/racing in athletes. 

Preventing spread is something which is less important the lower the consequences are of becoming infected. With omicron and vaccines this has reached a point where the disruption of self-isolation is outweighing the risks of infection, especially among anyone who is vaccinated. I don't imagine that there are too many 75+ year old hangers-on to the pro-peloton.

AidanR wrote:

It seems hugely unlikely that a professional cyclist will die of omicron. I am not aware of any sportsperson who has died of any variant of covid, let alone the mildest one.

I'm not sure that's a particularly relevant observation, though, since, for the most part, they will have been getting tested and not competing if positive.

It seems unlikely to me that an athlete would die of covid by competing whilst positive, given that by definition they would have relatively mild symptoms in order to be competing in the first place. Where are all the athletes who have died of flu because they were slightly sick with it during a competition? Covid is not that fundamentally different that it's going to kill you because you exert yourself.

That's not to say that it would be wise to compete if feeling unwell. Covid does appear to have higher incidence of post-viral issues (i.e. long covid) than something like flu. But that doesn't mean that blanket testing for one particular virus should continue in perpetuity.

That may well all be true. My only point was that the fact (if true) that it hasn't happened so far doesn't really tell us anything one way or the other, given that hardly anyone's been in the relevant circumstances.

For covid specifically that's true, but there are plenty of other viruses that people will have competed when infected with. And I'm sure that there will have been athletes who continued training with covid, so perhaps the data is out there. But either way, the uncertainty doesn't seem like a strong enough reason to keep testing forever.

Quite possibly - I'm not arguing that your conclusion is wrong - only that the original premise is weak.

The premise is only weak if covid is somehow uniquely deadly if one competes whilst infected, even if one doesn't have sufficient symptoms to warrant a test. Possible, yes, but vanishingly unlikely.

But now you're making an entirely different argument. Your original argument was that competing when you don't know if you have Covid was safe, because no sportsperson had died as a result of competing with Covid. That was weak, because most sportspeople were being routinely tested and therefore not competing with Covid.

As I say, that doesn't rule out your conclusion being correct, or there potentially being good arguments (perhaps including some of those you've put forward since) for why it's correct. It's just that your original argument was flawed.

In cycling it still needs to be pedaled. There has been a lot of feedthrough to "standard" road bikes from TT in the past.  Areo frames, Deep section wheels etc.  Should we now pull those back as well?  Maybe electronic gearing etc?

rct wrote:

In cycling it still needs to be pedaled. There has been a lot of feedthrough to "standard" road bikes from TT in the past.  Areo frames, Deep section wheels etc.  Should we now pull those back as well?  Maybe electronic gearing etc?

You think if TTs were ridden on normal bikes nobody would have thought of deep section wheels or aero frames? If anything using normals for TTs would accelerate innovation in road bikes and these would be passed on more quickly to the consumer. Not quite sure what electronic gearing has got to do with it, it wasn't invented for TT bikes and doesn't make you any faster.