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Sports Technology?
An anonymous reader writes "With the 90th Tour de France starting today, it is fun to marvel at the improvement of road bike technology over the years. Like others, I have traded up from heavy steel to aluminum, and now carbon fiber, ending up with a bike far better than its rider. How have advances in sports technology enhanced your own performance and enjoyment of sport?"
Well, given that I've been racing bicycles for 15 years now, I think that the biggest advances have to be lightweight suspensions and disc brakes on mountain bikes, integrated shift/brake levers on road bikes, and scandium as a frame material.
:-)
Scandium's a pretty new development -- gives you the weight of aluminum with the durability and "liveliness" of steel...
Carbon fiber -- I've never liked, not even Trek's OCLV -- too much of a "dead" feel to the ride...
For my road bike, I too, am on aluminum, but I'm going back to steel this fall -- because, in the end, steel is real. I can get a bike similarly equipped to my aluminum one, at a similar weight (steel's got some great new alloys), with the feel and responsiveness I've always loved...
I could write forever on this subject, so I'll just shut up now.
blog |
Parabolic (shaped) skiis are a great example of technology in sports. It's not uber-high-tech, but it's made a world of difference. Ski lengths have plummetted, along with turning radii, and it's far easier for beginners to progress from snowplow to parallel and carved turns.
My other sig is funny!
There are a lot of ethical questions involved here. Improving materials in sports have lead to big improvements in some sports. Take polevaulting. If you plot the polevault world record versus year for the 20th century, you will see significant jumps as the athletes switched from hardwood to bamboo to fiberglass to carbon fiber. Concequently, you can't compare records from different eras.
Golf in another sport where this has become a problem. The advances in golf clubs have made it difficult for the courses to keep up. The USGA has finally had to set limits on the properties of golf clubs for official play because the alternative (making the courses longer) is very difficult and expensive.
College baseball is another one. They have had to slap limits on the properties of aluminum baseball bats because they were starting to affect the game too much. There are now rules governing how much rebound is allowed from a bat. Note that major league baseball doesn't have this problem because they still use wooden bats.
I am a materials scientist, and I'm always amazed how every new material immediately gets made into golf clubs. Titanium, Beryllium-Copper, Cermets, Amorphous metals. Each has been made into golf clubs.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Everyone here seems to be talking about the able bodied sports.
I am involved with prosthetics and orthotics, and technology plays a huge part in the paralympics.
Look at carbon fibre legs. The fastest paralympian is Marlon Shirley who can do the 100m in 11.09 seconds.
But this tech is also used in able bodied athletes. Take for example that carbon fibre plates are used inside runners shoes to act as energy storage devices and allow the runner to be more efficient than his body would be without the shoes.
I'm too young to have seen the development of the most revolutionary advances in climbing: the shoes, ropes, harnesses, belay devices, protection, etc. etc. But I sure do appreciate their benefits -- both in my ability to climb more difficult routes and (more importantly) the safety with which I can climb.
As an example of the benefits of new technology, consider the American climbing ratings system (the Yosemite Decimal System). Originally there were ten difficulty levels, from 5.1 to 5.10, 5.10 being "physically impossible". Today, it goes to 5.15 -- and thanks to the technical advances in gear, an amateur like myself can climb 5.10 or 5.11 (once considered "advanced" climbs).
-Thomas
My wife and I are serious bicyclists. This year, we are attempting longer and harder rides than ever before, with more elevation gain. So we got new bikes.
My wife's bike is built on a frame by Wylder, called the Queen of the Road. Wylder is going out of business; when they were in business, they charged $1800 for that frame, but they are selling the frames they have left for $750. (Their web site says they have 42 cm, 45 cm, 52 cm, and 55 cm frames left. If you know a woman who wants a ti bike and can fit one of those sizes, send her this link!)
My bike -- I'm still amazed, I feel so lucky -- is a Colnago Ovalmaster. It's 6/4 titanium, the extra-stiff kind, and it has oddly shaped tubes; the shaped tubes help make the bike very stiff in the ways I want it to be stiff (when I hammer on the pedals, the frame doesn't flex) but still light and springy when I go over bumps. I love it.
I was able to afford my frame because I got it used on ebay. You can get some great deals on bike stuff on ebay.
Anyway, our new bikes have really helped us improve our speed. I didn't realize how much my wife's old bike was holding her back, until she got the new one. Her old bike is comfortable and stable, but it's six full pounds heavier than her new one, which matters when you are spending many hours climbing tall hills. And a lot of the weight savings is in moving parts: pedals, cranks, wheels. (The rule of thumb is that rotating weight counts double, so you should sooner get a lighter wheel than a lighter saddle.)
For me, the biggest improvement with the new bike is not the climbing, but the descending! My old bike was not stiff enough for me, and I got very nervous going down a steep hill. My new bike feels rock-stable under me when I am descending. I am still not a speed demon on downhills, but I'm a lot happier and a bit faster.
The metric I like to apply to bikes is dollars per mile. We ride enough miles that even just this year, both bikes will drop to well under a dollar per mile. If you only ride 10 miles at a time, don't spend serious money on a bike; get an inexpensive starter bike. (But don't buy a $200 bike from Wal-Mart. If you are considering buying a new bike, please read my thoughts on my personal web page about bikes.)
When you think about it, there is a lot of technology going with us on bike rides. We have heart rate monitors that also record speed, distance, and altitude changes (Polar S720+). We have technical fabric clothing, such as CoolMax jerseys or microfiber polyester rainwear. We have helmets that can save us in a bad accident, yet are light and don't make our heads overheat. We carry cell phones while riding, in case a bike totally breaks down and we need a taxi, or in case someone needs medical help.
No matter how much technology I buy, the pro riders could still ride me into the ground on a low-end bike. But our titanium bikes, and our other gear, let us ride up to our ability and have fun doing it.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Dude, it is a recumbent. I'm guessing you ride one, so you'll have 1001 reasons for riding it, but they all boil down to the fact you wasted your money on one.
There are some of us that actually enjoy riding a bike, which means not just riding on the flat (which is about all a recumbent can do), but going up hills, down them (a very scary proposition on a 'bent) and across rough terrain (either off-road, or just city streets!). 'Bents have some nice properties, but regular style bicycles just work better across more situations.
Get over it.