Banning the glucose monitor in races was the wrong call

Cycling outlawed in-competition continuous monitoring on fairness grounds, and in doing so made a safety tool harder to justify.

The governing body's reasoning was that real-time metabolic data in a race would create an unfair advantage for teams that could afford it, and might push riders toward extreme fuelling strategies. Both concerns are real. Neither, I think, survives contact with what the rule actually does.

Start with the advantage argument. Cycling permits power meters, which give a continuous readout of the single most decisive variable in the sport, and nobody proposes banning those. It permits radio contact with a director watching live data. The line drawn at glucose is not a line between information and no information; it is a line between one type of sensor and another, and the distinction is arbitrary enough that it invites the obvious question of what it is really protecting.

Then the safety argument, which cuts the other way. Riders bonk. It is a metabolic event with real consequences at fifty kilometres an hour in a group, and the traditional detection method is a rider noticing that the world has gone strange. A sensor that flags a downward trend twenty minutes earlier is a warning system. Banning it in competition means the tool is available in training, where the risk is lower, and unavailable in racing, where it is higher.

The rule also produces the pattern that always follows a ban on a device rather than a behaviour. Teams still gather the data. They gather it the day before, model it, and issue a fuelling plan based on a prediction rather than an observation, which is the same advantage delivered less precisely and available only to the teams with the modelling staff. The cost falls on the smaller outfits, exactly as it does whenever regulation moves an advantage from equipment into expertise.

If fairness is the concern, the answer is supply, not prohibition. Standardise the sensor, mandate that data be shared with race medical staff, and let anyone who wants one have one at a capped price. Cycling has done this before with other equipment.

Prohibiting a measurement does not remove the knowledge. It just makes sure the knowledge stays with whoever can afford to infer it.