Pro cycling has become a numbers game, with riders paying close attention to and obsessed with their power numbers and heart rates--so says Luca Scinto, manager of Vini Zabu-KTM.

"A lot of riders were obsessed with it," Scinto told La Gazzetta.

"I hear riders say, 'I'm running at 400 watts and they drop me,' or 'I can't get above 300 watts, I'm not feeling well,' or 'I can't get my heart rate up, I must be tired.'

The Vini Zabu-KTM team (formerly Neri-Sottori-Selle Italia) has earned a wildcard invitation to the 2020 Giro d'Italia.

"The riders are obsessed with watts. Athletes are obsessed with watts. It's good to use a power meter in training, but not in a race. I want riders to be free to think again," Sindt said. [We want to teach riders to listen to their bodies and be in control of themselves, not robots. There will be some frustration in the beginning, and there already was. But the leader, [Giovanni] Visconti, immediately agreed with me. We are heading down this path with conviction."

The evolution of power meters has changed the peloton in the last 30 years: until the mid-1980s, riders could only measure power on stationary bikes, but Ulrich Schobeler developed and patented the SRM training system. Greg LeMond helped prototype the technology, which first became publicly available in 1989.

As lighter devices were developed, the advantages of having live data began to outweigh the weight penalty, and organizations such as Team Sky began to focus on using it in the Grand Tours. Chris Froome, a four-time Tour de France winner, has been criticized for focusing too much on his power meter.

Knowing their own abilities allows riders to use power to know when to respond to an attack or set up on their own, and teams can use data to determine how much effort is needed to reel in a breakaway group.

Tour de France director Christophe Prudhomme called for a ban on power meters at the 2018 Tour, saying they would "extinguish the glorious uncertainty of the sport."

Former Tour winner Alberto Contador agreed, saying that a ban on power meters could "level the playing field," and Giro d'Italia winner Nairo Quintana said power meters "take away a lot of spectacle and make the race more cautious."

Sinto appears to be the first team manager to take the initiative and remove power meters from his riders' bikes, despite the perceived benefits of using them.