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High Tech Tour de France
jefu writes "As you may know, the 2006 Tour de France finished yesterday with an American, Floyd Landis, the overall winner. This years Tour had a very nice
live website, including frequent news postings and a flash interface that showed the gaps between the lead riders updated every couple of minutes. The site was taking up to 35,000 hits per minute. There is lots of technology involved in this race, including carbon fiber bikes, serious aerodynamic studies to improve the bikes, the helmets and even the riders. There are also bike transponders, GPS trackers , fancy radio systems to connect the riders to the team cars, online database access to race statistics, and probably lots more."
This was one of the first days of the Tour, I think. It ended, as the first week's stages usually do, in a mass sprint. The sprinters ride upwards of 60 km/h at the finish. His arm actually caught on an oversized, cardboard hand that one of the sponsors distributed. That was one nasty paper cut.
Hushovd did recover though; he won the final stage in Paris.
Maybe
Actually the technology use on this race is still impressive.
:)
... simple problem, but still complex solutions ! Let's hope a solution will be found .... one day ;-)
;-)
... they always win and control the race from the 1sec to the last one. No passion = less interrest for viewers).
Example of 2005 configuration :
* 300 peoples : journalist, cameramen, sound, directors, arangers, production teams, etc.
* 2 Wescam helicopters : Images from the sky (landscape, monuments and peloton from the top / cool for sprints). The wescam ball is a robotized camera controled from the helicopter used since the 90s in the Tour.
* 5 image motorbike : Inside the race, following the various groups, or team directors. They provide most of the race images.
* 10 ground cameras : For TV show and Finish zooms.
* 2 motos son : sound motorbike, 2 journalist are pushing live interviews of directors or live repports of race events (very usedfull in montains where lots of things can happen at the same time)
* 2 relay planes + 2 relay helicopters : This is the hidden part of iceberg, since the 90, all the camera (wescam equiped helicopter and image motorbikes) are sending their image streams to those relays. The relays will then ensure all the streams will be received by the technical centre on the Finish city. This was the 90s revolution.
Next year, after RollandGarros in 1080p FranceTelevision (the TV group having the license on the tour) has said they will go for HD Tour
(This will put lot of pressure on the relay IMHO)
But even with the onflight stream complex solution, sill problems about camera discontinous stream happen (for instance in tunnels or behind bridges)
My best congratulation to Floyd Landis, he was very very impresive and has the "panache" that the road spectators are looking for : bring surprise, passion and never give up !
See ya next year Floyd
(PS : spectators have never like "uber-champions" that win everything, simply because there is no surprise
Yeah, that's why I ignored this year's Tour de France. It took some effort, since I check eurosport.com every day, but I was strong:) It is a pity, that doping is so deeply involved in the sport. And the coincidences, when all the doping scandals take place just before the race, during the race, or just after the race, strongly hints (at least for me) of a set up. And that means that everybody is doping, just that some unfortunate ones are told upon. Couple that with Leblanc's relentless hunt (dislike) of Armstrong and Tour de France loses its charm.
The company that makes the bike transponders has a near-monopoly in radio control car timing systems. I wanted to write a free/open source timing software to manage our club races but the company requires developers to sign a non-disclosure agreement if they want to know the interface specs. Oh, and hello slashdot! (first post)
They are called "Recumbent bicycles" in English, btw.
from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle:
Recumbents are better aerodynamically, but worse mechanically. The torque from pedals to back wheel has to be transmitted over a longer distance and the frame has to be correspondingly heavier. The longer frame makes fighting gravity harder and adds to frame mass.
Also I can imagine (but not prove) that the horizontal riding position makes it harder to make a good pedalling stroke with even torque around the stroke. The nose down and forward position is better for situational awareness. The recumbent position is better for looking at clouds (as in a sailplane).
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I love Le Tour, but the spectators are fucking retards. I remember watching a video (cannot find it now) where Lance was coming through the home stretch and the crowd was parting as he approached, not more than a meter in front of him. (Then getting in the way of other riders, causing them to have to slow or swerve.) Imagine biking as fast as you can through a dense crowd of dense people, just hoping that nobody trips or does something else stupid. And for those not in the know, brakes on road bikes are not what you expect. Almost exactly the opposite of mountain bike brakes, they are not intended to stop you, just trim your speed. If you face an obstacle your only real option is to go around it. Also, you never just stop flat-out in a pack unless you want to become a third wheel for the guys behind you.
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There are several reasons for the technical limitations:
1. Safety reasons... it just recently became possible to build a _safe_ bike under UCI weight limits. Prior to that people were using bikes of questionable structural integrity and even drilling holes in important components to shave weight (e.g. stems, cranks, etc.) Very, very nasty wrecks ensue when your bike fails on you.
2. To level the playing field a bit. There are mega teams like Discovery, T-Mobile, etc. that can afford to throw money at a problem. There are smaller teams that can't. By imposing some limits on the technology it allows these smaller teams to compete.
3. In Europe, cycling is very much a blue collar sport of the people and UCI felt it was important to get the teams riding bikes people can actually buy. Over the past decade most of the teams have gone from custom bikes to off the shelf bikes with the really hi-tech bits reserved for time trials and mountain stages. You can go buy the Trek that most of the Discovery riders use at your local Trek dealer.
Drugs aside, I can throw on my old school Postal kit, jump on my Trek OCLV and pretend for a moment that I'm chasing down Floyd and that is part of the allure of the sport for most fans. You just don't get that with Football, NASCAR, etc. (Although I think it does translate well to baseball and soccer, which probably explains the popularity of the sports).
Finally, for the post underneath this complaining about the quality of the coverage... stadiums are built with TV coverage in mind, they have broadcast booths and hardpoints for the cameras with all the wiring already run. Cycling coverage is done over a 150+ course, at 25+ mph and they can't prep the city because they move to different citites each day. The technology behind it is pretty cool and covering stadium sports is childs play compared to what they're doing.
Every bicycle speed record currently held was taken with a recumbent.
You forgot to mention that the speed records that you mention are limited to mostly flat land, or in the words of the IHPVA, "one of the straightest, flattest, and smoothest surfaces in the world."
A recumbent wouldn't be much of an advantage in the mountain stages, but would be very interesting on the relatively flat time trials.
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