Easily win the Tour de France every year thanks to this bicycle secret: there’s no law that says you CAN’T enter the race with multiple people on a bike! [*]

[*] But you would be disqualified from the race.

Background:

Bicycle races have stagnated due to their archaic one-rider-per-bike format.

Proposal:

To usher in a new era of bicycle-based excitement add variety to bicycle races, an “entrant” to the race could be re-defined as a single bicycle, rather than a single person.

Then, participants would be able to use any style of bike (and number of riders) that they felt was suitable for a specific stage of the race. Figure 1 shows a couple of relatively conservative options.

Although this may sound like a radical change, it is based on sound historical precedent:

  1. Olympic rowing has a category for eight people in a boat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_(rowing)), so there is no reason that something similar couldn’t work for bicycling as well.
  2. There are existing tandem bicycles for six (or more) people: https://www.google.com/search?q=6+person+tandem+bike . You could order one today!
2-regular-vs-tandem.png
Fig. 1: The tandem bike on the right has a similar rolling resistance and wind profile as the single-occupant bicycle, but double the power output from the riders.

It might turn out a “single-bike peloton” made up of a dozen or more riders would be the best race strategy.

Or perhaps the ideal bike would be able to pivot in the middle (like an accordion bus), with more than one steer-able wheel, as shown in Figure 2.

3-4x-and-8x-bikes.png
Fig. 2: Top: a four-seater tandem bike. Bottom: An eight-person articulated bike that can bend around corners, which would help on especially winding roads.

Conclusion:

This is clearly the future of bicycle-related sports. You should lobby some extremely-corrupt sports regulatory organization and get this change implemented! (You will probably need a lot of money and/or incriminating evidence in order to succeed.)

PROS: Re-invigorates a hundred-plus-year-old sport.

CONS: Greatly increases the options for catastrophic bike collisions. May make passing nearly impossible.