There is an episode of The Simpsons (episode 238, The Mansion Family) where Mr Burns, the oldest resident of Springfield, goes to a doctor for a check-up. The upshot is that he has every disease known to man. The only reason hes not dead is Three Stooges Syndrome all the diseases are trying to get through the door to kill him simultaneously, so they get wedged against each other. The slightest disturbance in this equilibrium would be fatal.Id argue that the sport of professional cycling is in a similar position. There are a simply awesome number of things wrong with it, yet it still works. This has been the case for as long as Ive been interested or involved. For a business worth millions, employing thousands of people, and run by people who at the very least arent obviously morons, its wildly unstable.Teams vanish every season, and they always have done. Sometimes they do it in an orderly manner that lets everyone try to find another job, like the Arkea-B&B Hotels teams last year. And sometimes they just point their propellers at the sky and thunder to the seabed mid-race, like ANC-Halfords, which imploded in the middle of the 1987 Tour de France.Races come and go too. Even things that looked fairly permanent like the Criterium International, the Tour of Yorkshire, or the Ride London events. One press release and they can blink out of existence.The sport is ludicrously dangerous. If you invented pro cycling today, your idea wouldnt survive the risk assessment for the first race. Risk: catastrophically unstable vehicles being raced at high speeds in close proximity to each other, surrounded by hard objects. Mitigation: polystyrene hats.Its run by an often-opaque organisation based in the Swiss mountains like a Bond villain. Large parts of cycling are kept afloat by questionable money from iffy government regimes and industries.It should all fall apart at any moment, but it does not. In fact, the shambles is a lot of how it works. Weve just finished with the spring classics. The thrill of the classics can easily blind you to their weirdness.Imagine, again, that youre inventing this from the start: We start in Milan, we ride down 300 km of flat road, we have a couple of really short, easy climbs, and we finish in San Remo. Its going to be amazing. Or Were going to get everyone to ride their road-race bikes over the worst roads in Northern France. Half of them will fall off, and the other half will get punctures. Youll love it.Theyre like that because they werent primarily intended to be bike races. They were publicity operations having a race to Roubaix was mainly about publicising the not totally prepossessing settlement of Roubaix. The Tour de France and the Giro dItalia were just selling papers by means of a terrible trial of endurance 50% of their DNA is in common with the worst excesses of reality TV.A lot of cyclings glory is that its not a modern sport. Its evolved, and barely, from a nineteenth-century freak-show.This is why Im always concerned about the calls to modernise it. Theyre almost always well-meaning and sincere most people in pro cycling want to make the sport more financially stable, and above all they want to make it safer.But I also know that, for example, a properly safe sport would be on shorter laps of a carefully designed circuit. And that a really financially-sustainable sport would almost certainly mean fans paying to watch it from the roadside. And while I dont want to see riders injured, and I dont want to see riders getting raked over by dodgy sponsors, I also worry about the beautiful equilibrium of impending disasters that got us here.