SRAM has welcomed the rejection of the UCI’s appeal over the suspension of its gear restriction plans as “groundbreaking”.
On Thursday, it was revealed that cycling’s governing body had lost its appeal against a Belgian Competition Authority (BCA) ruling which stopped its plans to introduce gear restrictions in the peloton, after a legal challenge from American component brand SRAM. In October, the BCA sided with SRAM over its argument that the proposed gear-limit rule hurts innovation and unfairly tilts the playing field.
Last year, the UCI attempted to introduce the Maximum Gear Ratio Standard for the Tour of Guangxi, which would have limited bikes to a 54×11 top gear. The proposal limited the maximum gear ratio to 10.46 metres in a roll out test which will almost certainly cap the highest gear that riders can use during a race situation.
Would gear restrictions have worked?
The gear restriction proposals emerged out of the UCI’s SafeR commission, a group set up by the UCI to make races safer after a series of high-profile incidents.
Speaking to Cycling Weekly on Thursday, Dr Xavier Disley, the owner of AeroCoach and a cycling performance analysis consultant, suggested that the proposed gear ratio rules would not work in slowing down cyclists, and would also be hard to implement.
“I think that my main concern with limiting gear ratio is that it then compresses the top end speed,” he said. “So if you’re worried about it on descents, I think that it doesn’t help because people are coasting much faster than they’d be pedalling in a maximum restricted gear anyway, so that doesn’t really do anything.
“In sprints all you’re going to do is see [all you would see is] more bunching up of the top of the faster finishes because they’ll be spinning out, not only bunching the riders up because their top end speed is going to be more similar, because everyone’s max cadence is like effectively going to be the limiter, but you’ve also got riders who are going to be more unstable because their cadence is so high, potentially higher than what they want to be sprinting at.”
“I think that the implementation of it, I think, would have been one of the trickiest things, which is why I think it’s probably not a great idea,” he added. “I don’t think it’ll make things safer in sprints, I think it’ll actually make things less safe, and I don’t think it’ll affect things on descents.”
