Though, I also think this isn't ALWAYS a bad thing.
It's easy to choose examples where it is, but I'll make a counterpoint (though one that will take some explanation, since at first blush it seems a perfect example of the evils of money, lol).
I'm a pretty serious cyclist. I'm no pro, but for an amatuer I'm extremely fast, I train very hard, and keep a pretty good eye on the pro cycling world. And, fifteen years ago, pro cycling WAS a perfect example of the evils of money chasing performance, since at that time the answer was "doping," and the peloton was juiced as shit. The problem was then an American started winning the Tour de France, the French got pissed, and the worst kept secret in the peloton went public... and the backlash was so severe that fans started to lose interest, and the money spigot risked going away.
So, the peloton got clean. It's hard to say with
perfect confidence, but there's a rigid anti-doping framework in place, there are a bunch of riders who have made being clean a huge part of their identity (see: Phil Gaimon, who's a riot at baseline), and there are enough
other non-doping scandals and half scandals that suggests teams are still chasing performance at the margins but now in ways that don't involve drugs - the recent blowback and banning of using carbon monixide as a training stimulus, ans guys like Matteo Jorgensen - with justification, I think - complaining that the smaller team just don't have the budget to do things like the extended reverser altitude training camps the big teams do, where their riders sleep at high altitude (to maximize adaptation), but then train at low altitude (to maxinize power output and availability of oxygen for high aerobic work, and drive their muscles as hard as they can) for a couple weeks in a block, and how his breakthrough season came when he basically took most of his salary and self-funded his own camp, and then managed to make the jump to one of the top teams after a banner season that followed. Basically - with how hard the teams are looking for
natural adaptations, and how heavily chemical ones are policed, it's fairly unlikely that there's any real broad-based doping efforts going on in the peloton.
But, something funny happened - the current generation of riders is out-riding the ones that doped to the gills. Some of it is equipment - there's been a huge rethink of bike design (aerodynamics now trump weight, we now know most of what we thought we knew about rolling resistance is wrong an riders are going from narrow rock hard tires to wider and softer tires, etc). And some of it is only indirectly performance related; there's been a lot more scientifically rigorous work done on flueling and riders are now getting higher and higher doses of carbonydrates into them mid ride (one of the powders I use for sitations where it's unlikely I'll be able to eat for one reaosn or another is cabable of getting me something like nearly 800 calories in a single water bottle, at max soluability, which is
nuts), and after generations of riders getting lighter and lighter for climbing performance, Jonas Abrahamsen's stint in the lead of the climbing classification in last year's Tour, with a physique that would still be considered slim by a layperson but for a cyclist is the sort of broad shouldered, muscular build you usually associate with a top sprinter, has people rethinking that the secret to climbing performance may not be minimizing weight after all, and that in the future we may see riders allowing their weight to rise as a tradeoff for mazimixing power. And, we've had a huge rethink in training approaches, from the days of Eddy Merckx and "just go out and ride your bike," to far more structured plans and, in part driven by Tadej Pogacar's success here, a focus on doing an absolute fuckton of "zone 2" low intensity aerobic, so you can rack up huge amounts of aerobic volume while building relatively light fatigue... so then, on your hard days, you can go REALLY hard. And we're seeing things like now Pogacar's zone 2 is slightly above my in-peak threshold power, and Jonas Vingegaard's 2023 Tour win was sealed in a time trial where he likely averaged a stupendous 7.1-7.2 watts per kilogram, when "about 6.5" had been considered roughly a cap a decade ago. And Pogacar has been able to elongate his racing calendar - rather than tyrying to time a peak for the Tour or the Giro or something, he's worked with coaches to manage that fitness/fatigue line more tactically and now has emerged as a legit spring Classics contender as well, and should STILL be able to get back into form for the Tour, because, hey, if you're doing a ton of training at Zone 2, not only does that give you a huge aerobic base and huge endurance, but you can still do quite a lot of that while recovering.
This is all a lot of incremental detail that's very interesting to me, and probably no one else on the board. But, the point I'm going on is this. A hundred years ago, the Tour was a race for amateurs who were nuts enough to think it sounded fun. 50 years ago, it had become somewhat more professional, but it was pursued with a hobbyist, brute force attitude. 25 years ago, riders discovered drugs. That blew up... and now, all that money is generating breakthroughs in understanding on how the body responds to training, how we can better fuel for all day rides, how we can optimize our gear to actually do what we want it to do the best... And Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingeggard or Wout va Aert, or at least a dozen other guys in the peloton, all could eat 1990s Lance Armstrong for lunch today, and then go out and do intervals afterwards.
Slow day at work, can you tell?
