Tour de France 2019 plans show organisers still hope to curb Team Sky | William Fotheringham

The route is designed to be more open, with more climbs amenable to attacks, and power meters could be banned. But there is little to cause Team Sky sleepless nights

In yet another attempt to make the Tour de France a more open race, which will be seen as a further move to break Team Sky’s domination, the organisers are to push for the abolition of the use of power meters. The ubiquitous device which helps a rider to gauge his effort by recording power output as he rides also “annihilates the glorious uncertainty of sport”, according to the Tour organiser, Christian Prudhomme.

It remains unclear whether this will be put in place for the 2019 edition, which looks particularly mountainous and which continues the trend towards fewer and shorter time trials. However, it is actually unlikely that the move will drastically affect Team Sky; speaking to Le Monde on Thursday, the defending Tour champion, Geraint Thomas, pointed out that he and his team train so frequently with the devices that they end up riding as much according to physical “feel” as to the readout on their screens.

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