AFTER completing stage one of the Tour de France tomorrow, Chris Froome will settle down in a hotel room somewhere in Utrecht, as will the 200-or-so other riders who aim to complete the most arduous test in sport.
Bedding down in some dodgy budget hotel wasn't quite the British rider's plan though. Team Sky bought a motorhome for the 2013 yellow jersey winner to retire to each night, only for cycling's governing body, the UCI, to disallow it.
The motorhome was the latest of Team Sky's "marginal gains" - the theory of which is that if riders find a one per cent improvement in every area then it will add up to a significant difference overall. Over the course of the three-week long Tour, riders stay in whatever hotels are available whichever town happens to be hosting the start of each particular stage.
"You get into some of those race hotels and one night you're on a hard bed, one night you're on a soft bed and you wake up with a sore back," Froome said. "Some of the rooms don't have air conditioning and you're going to be sweating for 10 hours if that's the case."
So, the aim of Sky's motorhome plan was to eliminate as many of these variables as possible. Sleeping in the same bed every night is undoubtedly preferable to encountering a different one every night of the race.
But the UCI deemed a motorhome unacceptable and amended their rules against such a move. The regulations now state: "Riders must stay in the hotels provided by the organiser throughout the entire duration of the race. The decision was made in order to reaffirm absolute fairness between all riders."
This is an interesting move. The new regulation seems to be trying to protect against the teams with the most money manufacturing better conditions for themselves and therefore gaining an unfair advantage. Team Sky are one of the best funded professional cycling teams with rumours suggesting the British team have a £30m budget.
You might argue the UCI are trying to eliminate a financial equivalent of doping.
The problem is, however, that there are almost no sports in which nations or teams with less money can defeat teams with significantly more money. Elite sport these days is as much a competition of who has the most funding, the best resources and the most complete support team as it is about talent and hard work.
The GB track cycling team went from nowhere on the medal table to becoming the most dominant nation in the sport, all as a result of money being pumped into their programme. Manchester City, Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain are just a few of the football clubs that have transformed their fortunes through money. And Australia's swimmers have been hugely successful in the pool as a result of their Institute of Sport being handsomely funded over the past two decades.
How much impact will prohibiting Team Sky's motorhome have in terms of levelling the playing field? It is estimated that Bradley Wiggins' 2012 Tour-winning bike cost almost £10,000 and that doesn't include the cost of the research that went into developing it. Can every team afford that? Of course not.
MTN-Qhubeka, who will become the first African team to compete in the Tour de France, have a budget of around one 10th of Team Sky's estimated £30m. For the UCI to attempt to make all things equal is an impossibility.
Perhaps only long-distance running has, as yet, remained relatively untouched by financial doping; all other sports are dominated by the nations that provide their athletes with the most support. A number of sports impose salary caps but this only regulates spending to a certain extent. Formula One, the sport with the most money of all sloshing about, has touted a budget cap more than once but a revolt by the teams prevented it coming into force, meaning it One remains tainted by the constant accusation that the champion is not necessarily the best driver but the one with the best car.
So, is financial doping as damaging as drug doping? Should enhancing performance by financial means be treated just as severely as enhancing performance chemically? It is hard to argue that access to the greatest financial resources has any less of an impact than access to banned substances. Greater levels of funding are as beneficial as doping in many respects.
If there is a will to prevent elite sport becoming purely the preserve of first-world countries then there is an argument that financial doping should be regulated. The problem is that it is too late and things have gone too far to ever hope to introduce regulations that would level the playing field. Sport is too important and has too much riding on it for that to ever happen and so those with the most money are only going to widen the gap.
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