I think we can all agree that the UCI is no benchmark when it comes to enforcing the rules equally among teams and riders.
For me the real question is if VvS would stop his antics and all the resulting troubles, and instead focus on training, nutrition, recovery, could he be a better rider? All of the tinkering, rule bending and legal arguing must take a toll on him.
I was actually a bit surprised listening to the recent Spin Cycle and hearing the chat directed towards van Schip. The underlying message seemed to be exactly that he should just give up and “be normal”. Even if you think he’s wrong, that’s a pretty depressing attitude to have towards someone who’s clearly just doing things a bit differently.
To me it really smacks of the “cooler than thou” cliché that has always existed in parts of cycling, and If we take that mindset too far the sport just becomes a fashion show where everyone is expected to be the same.
What surprised me even more was some of the reaction to his latest disqualification, particularly the suggestion that he somehow deserved being tackled by the police. That doesn’t even seem to be what actually happened; from the reports I read, the police helped remove him from the road after the incident, and he then appeared to have a bit of an emotional breakdown on the roadside from being disqualified yet again. That’s quite different from the version of events that some people seem to be repeating.
I’m not massively surprised though, cycling has always been oddly selective about what it chooses to be outraged by. Like the point about Campenaerts above, there are all sorts of eccentric, questionable, and sometimes downright bizarre behaviours in professional cycling that people either laugh off or accept as part of the sport as long as they like the individual rider. Yet take it an inch too far with position, equipment or interpretation of the rules and it seems to provoke a level of hostility that’s completely disproportionate. I’d wager that if it was Ronan being hounded by the commissaires at races for ‘modifying’ his clothing (read: stuffing his jacket up his jersey) the reaction on Spin Cycle would be different….
This makes it sound like his approach to aerodynamics is an either/or proposition with putting sufficient time in on training and recovery. That seems… a stretch. Possible is true, but unless we’re close to the dude, we have no basis of knowing that.
Because Campenaerts typicaly does it in a way that’s only just pushing the boundaries of ‘normal’, whereas Van Schip breaks through ‘normal’ in a way that screams ‘look at me!!’, even if getting people to look at him wasn’t the intension.
Change typically happens in small steps, not big leaps. That is in no small part because people can handle/process/stomach a little bit of change at a time, but not a large chuck.
So, if someone comes along and does something that’s a significant change (or looks to be a significant change), people rile against it. Whether that’s right or wrong doesn’t matter, it’s just how it is.
29ers were a brilliant example of that; when 29ers first came out almost everyone went ‘NO!!’, but it made 27.5 seem a more acceptable jump, which made changing wheel sizes more acceptable, and then meant the jump to 29ers a couple of years later was smaller and less jarring (visually as much as technically).
People like Jan-Villem van Schip (and Greame Obree in the past) don’t understand that, or ignore it, get annoyed at the reaction, and seemingly push against it more, which just riles people further. In many ways that should be applauded, as pushing the boundaries is how we got here, but sometimes it’s better to pull back a little, and only push the envelope a tiny bit, rather that trying to absolutely rip through it.
Yes, I know what vS is doing could be seen as precisely that, pushing the envelope, but clearly others see it as more. Sometimes it’s about reading the room and holding back a bit.
Thomas Kuhn disagrees.
Thomas Kuhn disagrees.
Not exactly.
‘When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis.’
So, one thing challenging the ‘current’ isn’t enough, it needs many.
Van Schip isn’t going to change cycling on his own, or at least not as much as he’d like.
“Shit rider”. Good grief 
Don’t hate the player, hate the game 
I don’t think you’ve quite grasped Kuhn’s point. Before his seminal contribution, the dominant theory was that each small change led to a change in thinking. His idea was that the reality is that each small change caused some discomfort, but very little change in overall worldview until enough of them accumulated to force a large shift.
This is diametrically opposed to your statement
Fair enough, but it still supports what I was getting at, which is that people don’t like sudden isolated change.
One part of Kuhn’s paradigm shift theory is that new ideas can fail to be adopted until the proponents of previous ideas (or rules in this case) literally die, and so are no longer there to impede change. Maybe JWvS needs to take out a few contracts…
I’m disappointed by many of the comments here. Like Obree, JvS opens the rule book, generally comes up with ideas thay conform to the rules as written and then gets DQ’d because the commissaires decide they don’t like the look of the thing. As an engineer, I sympathise with his sense of victimisation abd his recent emational breakdown.
If the UCI can’t write rules properly it’s not his fault. He went to the rule book to see what was allowed and thought rather than just following what everyone else did. His initiative and creativity is to be applauded.
If you don’t like the look of his solutions then fair enough, but don’t accuse him of being wrong. Just re-write the rules for the following season and get it right this time. It feels like van Schip is being punished for UCI’s inability to write rules properly?
If the UCI can’t write rules properly it’s not his fault.
Indeed, but we are where we are, and we’ve been here for a long time.
My point, and that of others in questioning JvS actions is that the UCI being rubbish at writing and enforcing rules is not news.
In some ways I love that he’s willing to do this, but he can’t stand their and complain about it after the umpteeth time he’s been thrown out of a race, and he can’t expect his team to have unlimited patience or fine paying resources.