John Clendon wrote:
Hold on, hold on. Lets re-race 50% of the Tour de France races because someone fell in the last 10km.
Racing is racing. The stakes are high and you accept the risk of it.
That's actually an interesting example, for at least two reasons. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the TdF, if a fall happens in the last KM (or somewhere thereabouts), they don't re-race, but they actually just give everyone the same time. I don't believe that's ever happened on the Champs-Élysées, but if it did, and you had multiple competitors deadlocked on net time, it seems pretty clear they wouldn't just give the victory to whomever managed to avoid the crash that day.
Maybe more importantly, the more analogous case happens all the time in the TdF (and other stage and one-day classics races), typically on a mountain stage where the heads of state have separated themselves from everyone else. One then has a crash, or an equipment malfunction. I've always thought what happens next is a fascinating character study: Armstrong backs off for Ulrich in 2001, and lets him get back into the race, Hamilton and Ulrich back off for Armstrong in 2003, Contador backs off for Sammy Sanchez in 2010, etc, etc. But then Contador fails to wait up for Schleck in 2010, and Sastre fails to wait for Sanchez, etc, etc.
As I understand it, the vast majority of elite cyclists are in favor of approach 1: you should make every effort not to profit from your competitor's misfortune (Contador and Sastre were pretty roundly criticized in 2010, and I don't believe Contador has made the same mistake again). Of course, you pretty quickly get into a line-drawing game--when are you supposed to back off, and when not? But I don't know that we need to decide all the hypotheticals beforehand, because the community seems pretty good at self-policing.
Not immediately clear to me why the same couldn't or shouldn't happen in running, at least in cases where we're trying to crown a champion of something.