Originally Posted by
79pmooney
There is a photo from Saturday's huge Tour de France crash that could be used to illustrate the OP's point. In it you can see perhaps a dozen broken frames; many at top and down tubes. So, what, an easy $60 grand of ruined bikes? By contrast, there is the famous footage from "Water Carriers and Kings" (title from memory and wrong, but close) of a rider bending his 1970 steel fork straight enough to ride and finish by hand after a multi-rider crash. Most of the rest had already mounted their bikes and gone.
You know they can just press a little button on their radio and be off and riding on an identical spare bike in a matter of seconds, right? Pro bike racing seems like one of the few situations where shaving grams at the expense of durability makes sense. They don't need bikes that survive crashing. They have a whole car full of spare bikes, parts and mechanics that follow them around.