How to make KoM into a genuine climber's competition.

Something I find frustrating and annoying in stage races is that the King of the Mountain points are - in the first couple of weeks - usually hoovered up by people in breaks. It is the first person to cross the summit who gets the points, not the person who was fastest up the hill.

Likewise the Sprint points - how many times have we seen a break of riders in shitsmall teams sail unconcernedly across the Sprint point, not even bothering about who gets the points.

Sprinting is a bit of a problem, but I have a perfectly workable suggestion as to how to make the KoM competition more realistic.

As you probably know,  each bike has a transponder (microchip) on it, so that at the finish line, the organisers can take an accurate timing of when the bike crosses the line.

It's that little square thing, usually hanging down from the back section of the frame: 

This is why, incidentally,  there is sometimes a delay in announcing the winners - if riders have had to change bikes mid-course, or have swapped with another rider, it can cause some confusion as the transponder is either missing (if it's a spare bike) or comes up with the wrong rider's name.

So here's my first suggestion: add more decoder loops at the bottom and the top of a KoM hill, then it can easily be seen who got up it fastest.

Simple, huh?

OK, it takes out the tantalising "shall we attack? Or shall we look at each other?" tactics, and reduces it to merely who can steam up the fastest - but isn't that what climbing is about? Who can do it fastest?

Mid-race Sprints are a bit trickier: my first thought was that instead of there being just one air bridge across the road, there should be two, set a certain distance apart, so that we can see who got from the front to the end of that section the fastest. The final sprint would still be a mad scramble, by the way, I'm not proposing to change that one.

I can see a few objections to the Sprint suggestion: it removes all the tactics, and that fine judgement as to when to go and when to hold back. It would require anyone not intending to compete to move to, say, the left, to avoid blocking anyone steaming up from behind. It possibly would turn the mid-race sprints from being a display of strength and skill, to merely being strength.

And it would look a bit odd, possibly, to see someone way, way off the back of the peloton suddenly surging forward, having saved their strength for the past hour or more.  And, worst of all, there would not be an obvious immediate winner, it would have to be announced once all the riders had passed that point.

I suppose those objections would also apply to my KoM plan. But I think there's validity in the suggestion.

And if anyone is thinking how easy it might be for riders to swap bikes in order to cheat - well, there are cameras everywhere these days, and I suppose it would be as easy to have the transponder in, say, the heartrate monitor,  so we are tracking the rider rather than the bike.

Simple, don't you think?