The french love love love this idea....they see 20 sprints and DQ's at the rate ASO officiates! By the end ASO will have DQ'd every sprinter+ each crashed out each other out and boom the French in the green and hell maybe even yellow jersey! L'equipe may even pick this up and run with it!!!

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

This would be a great format to DQ every Brit, American, Aussie and German!

Probably won't be as exciting as you think because the breakaway will be comprised of non green jersey or GC competitors and they'll be the one's battling it out for meaningless time bonuses or green jersey points before the peloton sweeps them up in the last 5k for the real action.

Did you watch the Hammer series a few weeks ago? That's exactly what they did.

Stage 1 was a high number of very short laps with a climb, and each climb there were points. Note points are awarded to the team, not the individual rider.
Stage 2 was the same but a sprint instead of a hill at the end of each lap.
After stage 1 and 2, points are converted to seconds. Stage 3 was a team time trial. If you have the highest number of points, your team starts first. If you are 10 seconds behind you literally start 10 seconds behind team 1. First team to make it to the finish wins the race.

It was awesome to watch. Riders were hammering from the start and we saw big names suffer hard despite the stages being short. In the TT we saw 4 teams come together at some point, it was beautiful chaos.

So a kermesse?

The Giro tried something like this in 2009, I think, but He Who Shall Not Be Named led a protest and they didn't really race it.

I'm still waiting for a 100K team time trail.

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"one eye doubles my eyesight, so things don't look half bad" John Hiatt

5km loop means a 6-7 minute lap. With a predictably vicious start domestiques could be dropped and lapped within the first hour and would have to be time cut (I don't think anyone would be keen on prorating a GT). You would lose half the field in any kind of hard circuit of that length. An easier circuit, like a classic US crit would be a nightmare for 90% of the riders with nothing to be gained and a lot of skin to be lost. You can get away with that shit at Redlands and Gila when everyone is hungry for a pay cheque but World Tour riders aren't going to stand for it.

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Don't they do this already when they arrive in Paris? (Pink font)

To be fair it was because typical Italians hadn't made sure the course was clear and there were still parked cars on the course. He went with the safety argument as you are putting a lot of risk for mainly whippet built climbers in a criterium race. Sprinters have nothing to loose and a GC contender has everything.

As for this idea it's like asking to add sprints for points and KOM's to Kona to add to the excitement. Don't mess with tradition and a good thing. The winners from the tour make a lot of money racing criteriums post tour.

And nobody else did either.

This idea would kill the pre-race caravan, which is a big part of what brings folks out to watch the race go by.
That -- and also what about the rider who sprints ahead so he can dismount and hug his momma as the race passes by his house? Hugging your momma once makes for good television. Hugging her 20x, not so much...

It occurred to me that the Champs stage could work, but you could only have sprinter bonus points there. Nothing 9-13% to create an GC bonus seconds. Without messing with tradition there could be a few mountain stages where the first Col bags you 15-10-5-4-3-2-1 GC seconds. Like on the Queen Stage imagine if they do that for Croix de Fer, Telegraphe and Galibier. With 45 seconds on offer potentially there would be action from the start. As it stands, Ornon+Croix de Fer + Telegraphe are only there to soften everyone up before the final part of Galibier. Maybe even 15 seconds is too small, and perhaps you start this at 30 seconds to flip the TdF potentially upside down. Would ASO have the guts to do something like that?

It would be great to have it on a road course race track. Never have to worry about cars, nice corners with nothing to run into and fans can surround the whole thing to watch.

Perhaps the Monaco Formula 1 circuit with a short detour off the course for a big climb and decent. That would be awesome.

DP,

Like your outside-the-box thinking. I see 3 problems. The caravan, as previously mentioned, is a big deal and would be lost. 100k isn't long enough for a mass start stage. My understanding is that european crits are seen a show events with the outcome fixed. But I could be wrong.

A semi-parallel but possibly tangent or completely un-related thought I had ...

What if NASCAR adopted a "Miss & Out" format? Every 5 laps or so, the last car is out of the race

That way you get plenty of crashes in the back, but the favorites are safe up front

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

They should do the same for grand tours, except the elimination point is in the middle of a hairpin, in the middle of a Cat 1 or higher descent. You think that Sagan and Cav fighting for position near a barrier is bad? Imagine skinny GC guys sending each other off a cliff!

The Miss & Out is great watching for a track event. Maybe every km they pull the last guy from the field, and the winner comes down to the last two guys on course. They could sub this in for the worthless rest days, and the teams could strategically have their riders drop to the back when they want their day over.

I would love to see them incorporate the Madison into a stage race beyond the sticky water bottles from the team cars.

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Oui, mais pas de femme toute de suite (yes, but I am not ready for a woman straight away) -Stephen Roche's reply when asked whether he was okay after collapsing at the finish in the La Plagne stage of the 1987 Tour

I don't think you could eliminate guys in the back from a stage race because then that really hurts the follow stages, but you could penalize them with seconds, but they would not care, so you could doc their entire team seconds for being last man in the field. If your guy is last man then everyone in the team loses points LOL

This sounds like World's, minus 140km or so. But I doubt it would affect the race. The GC and green jersey teams would just let a big enough breakaway go to mop up the points every lap. Nice idea, though.

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They would just be eliminated for that day. It would be for points and prizes but not GC time. Teams could have their riders intentionally get out early to have a longer recovery day while their jersey contenders could stay in for some points.

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Oui, mais pas de femme toute de suite (yes, but I am not ready for a woman straight away) -Stephen Roche's reply when asked whether he was okay after collapsing at the finish in the La Plagne stage of the 1987 Tour