Should Grand Tours Be Shorter? The UCI's Future of Cycling Report / Can We Believe Tigst Assefa / Are Athletes Asked to Play Too Much?

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Show notes

This week, the UCI's Future of Cycling report, why people believed Tigst Assefa when they doubted Ruth Chepngetich, and whether athletes are asked to take on too much load and risk of harm:

• (00:02:11) The UCI proposes 16-day Grand Tours from 2029, teams of seven or six riders, shared media money, budget caps, and GPS tracking of riders and cars. Ross backs most of it, but asks how any sporting governing body knows what its sport really needs when the loudest voices may not be in the majority
• (00:17:20) Remco Evenepoel beats Giulio Ciccone to the European title by under three-thousandths of a second, and we explore how a photo finish works
• (00:25:23) Can Jacob Kiplimo break the marathon world record in Chicago this weekend?
• (00:28:19) Had Assefa broken Chepngetich's record in Berlin, would we have believed her? We compare their career trajectories, the confounding effect of prototype super shoes, and tease a new paper that Ross is involved in, suggesting women benefit more from the shoes than men
• (00:41:19) Emma Navarro ends her season after almost three years of under-fuelling and RED-S. How did her team miss it, and what should "normal" feel like?
• (00:48:44) Player unions take FIFA to court over fixture congestion. Ross plays devil's advocate, since clubs carry most of the load, nobody has defined how many matches is too many, and nobody really considers the other side of the impact of players being classified as workers
• (01:02:01) Jannik Sinner's season is over, and no semi-final or final was completed at the China Open. Is tennis limping to its year end, and what evidence is needed to fix it?
• (01:03:31) And finally, Stuart Phillips dismantles a hyped creatine study, and we pick the 2036 Olympic host on tourism grounds alone (Kirsty Coventry, please consider South Africa!)

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