The UCI have been updating their rules again

If you preferred the way cycling looked about five years ago, great news. The Union Cycliste Internationale has your back. They have announced some forthcoming rule changes that are designed to take us all back in time just a little. As the world’s foremost slightly-sarcastic appraiser of UCI rule initiatives, naturally it falls to me to run the measuring tape over the un-innovations. (Unnovations?)

The new rules have a simple purpose. They are designed to make road bikes and riders a bit less aerodynamic, and hence a little more old-fashioned.

First, wheel rims can be no deeper than 65mm, although few currently are. They’re going to do something about time trial helmets being used in road stages but haven’t really worked out what. Most interestingly, handlebars will have to be a minimum of 40cm wide, with the brake lever hoods set at least 32cm apart. This is quite a bit wider than many current set-ups, which have seen riders slim the bars down to even 35 or 36cm, and orientate the hoods to produce a width of grip that’s well under 30cm. In contrast, 40cm is an average male-rider set up from a few seasons ago.

You may like

Bike fitters are having a collective meltdown about this. They say most riders need a narrower set up for morphological reasons. There will be injuries, discomfort, sore shoulders and more. For the moment I’m going to overlook the fact that many bike fitters (though not by any means all) only experienced the epiphany about narrow bars in the wake of WorldTour pros adopting them, and most of those did so driven by wind tunnel testing rather than morphology.

The thing most of the critics are missing is that the UCI is simply trying to slow riders down by making them more parachute-shaped. Wide bars push up the frontal area and increase the drag. If slowing riders down to reduce the severity and frequency of crashes is part of your remit, and bike-fit isn’t, it’s a change that makes sense. Nor is it a new issue; UCI-governed riders already have to deal with regs that limit their dimension options, like the ones about saddle position and reach.

“It will mean the invention of a UCI shoulder-width measuring device”

Dr Hutch

The problem, and it’s not a small one, is that most women were riding narrower bars for years before most male riders made the change, and that was because “standard” 40cm bars weren’t just a bit sub-optimal, they were obviously way too wide to use comfortably. No one seems to have thought about this. There are smaller male riders in a similar position.

So what will undoubtedly happen is that the UCI will back down, to a rule that varies minimum bar width by relating it to rider size. Essentially they’ll have to measure the shoulders of the rider and specify a consequent width of bar. It will mean the invention of a UCI shoulder-width measuring device.

I have a better suggestion, though. If your Instagram has as many cat videos as mine, you’ll be familiar with a format consisting of a big bit of cardboard with a variety of different size holes cut out of it, and a cat who is encouraged (with food) to jump through one of the holes.

Then the holes are progressively closed off from largest to smallest to see what the smallest one the cat will fit through is. I want the same thing with bike riders. At signing on, there will be a big bit of plywood with holes in it. The smaller a hole you can fit through, the narrower your bars can be. People are looking for a way to liven up bike race coverage. I’ll just say, you’re all welcome.

What we mean by “pacing” depends on the event. For a 4,000m pursuit, it’s a very delicate sliding scale between “much too hard” and “much, much too hard”. Pacing a 4,000m pursuit is very similar to pacing your use of a fire extinguisher as your house burns around you.

For a time trial, it’s about something that is sustainable, but only just. You may like to use the old metric of “Can I sustain this till the end? Yes? Well, then I need to go a bit harder, don’t I?”.

For anything else, and especially anything longer, the secret to pacing yourself is just to slow down. Whatever you’re doing, you can almost certainly make it a more pleasant experience by doing it less hard. Most of us know that geometric nature of the velocity/drag equation means that going 10% faster needs 30% more work. What no one remembers is that if this also means that if you try a third less hard, you only go 10% slower. And outside a few very specific race scenarios, that’s a much better way to arrive.

If you simply have to hurry on a long ride, to be honest the secret is still to start slowly. If you just keep doing the same speed it will get hard quite soon enough. If you’re lucky, by the time it does you’ll have come to your senses and reverted to the previous suggestion and slowed the hell down.

An old team-mate recently reminded me of a junior event in the 1990s, involving a very popular 10-mile time trial course in Yorkshire. There was a very long, protracted argument about whether the course was short, and if times set on it should be allowed to stand.

Eventually someone arranged to have the course re-measured. To everyone’s horror it was 100 yards short of being 10-miles long. The mystery of how this happened was eventually resolved. The course description said the finish was beside lamp post 41449 (or something). And that is where the finish was. The problem was that a year or two earlier, in the dark of night and dead of winter, the council had moved the lamp post.