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."

Comments

What the fuck is this?

[walnutmon]

I got this from their online log...

17:28 - Hushovd Crashes! Hushovd has crashed in the finale. He is bleeding profusely from the right elbow and appears to be in a terrible state...
17:32 - No Crash For Hushovd Hushovd did not crash as reported earlier but he did sustain an injury in the final straight when his right elbow was caught on something held over the barriers by a spectator.

Umm... Oops?

The technology didn't stop with the bikes.

[Don_dumb]

There were some excellent advances in biochemistry and pharmaceutics if I remember correctly . . . http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/cycli ng/5138306.stm.

It's good to be the coach

[oostevo]

I'm sure the coaches are loving all of this stuff.

In the beginning, you just had the riders out on their own wits to guide them, then they got radios and the coaches got to keep them updated, then the coaches got live TV feeds in their cars to keep themselves updated, and now apparently "it is now possible to track the position and speed of each rider in the Tour de France in real-time thanks to the EGNOS European satellite positioning system."

Being a coach sure got easier if they've got realtime tracking of all the other riders.

Also mechanical tech

[Max Romantschuk]

One of the more intreresting aids I've seen some riders use are PowerCranks: http://www.powercranks.com/

From the site: (http://www.powercranks.com/about/concept.htm)

PowerCranks(TM) integrates a one-way clutch in each crank-arm of your bicycle or stationary bike. This patented modification changes the cranks from being fixed to each other at 180 (as are regular cranks), to being independent from one another. Each leg can drive the bicycle but one leg cannot assist the other. Effectively, with PowerCranks(TM) the rider is doing one-legged pedaling with both legs simultaneously.

So basically, they force riders to use all leg muscles and keep them from lifting one leg with the other, wasting energy. Simple, but very effective. It's a nice concept, and I'd love to get a pair even for my commute, but being a niche product they are rather expensive...

Re:Also mechanical tech

[Anonymous Codger]

"The nose down and forward position is better for situational awareness"

Huh? Have you ever ridden a recumbent? Situational awareness is far better - you're not staring at your front wheel all the time. I can't count the number of times I've almost been mowed down by some roadie in an aero crouch who can't see more than five feet ahead of his wheel.

As to your other points - true about the recumbent being worse mechanically. Long frames and long chainlines decrease efficiency slightly. However, there are a few FWD recumbents that solve the chainline problem nicely, and improved materials are getting high-end recumbent weights down as low as 17 pounds.

As to a good pedalling stroke, I find it easier to spin properly on my recumbent than on my upright.

Please do not take any of this as being critical of upright bikes - I enjoy both types and think both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Re:Can you do without?

[kfg]

It's a professional sporting event. Privately owned. Don't wanna play by the rules? You don't gotta play the game.

I'm not talking purely hypothetically either, it's the choice I made, although perhaps a bit easier choice for an American in the 70s. We didn't exactly have a lot of "cred" back then and things over there were not to most American's taste. For my part I'm not talking about the European culture. I loved Europe. I'm talking strictly about the bike racing culture. Those were still pretty much Prisoners of the Road days. Cycle racing was a blue collar sport, a way out of the factory job, but you were pretty much a serf to the team. Simply an employee of the sponsor.

That upstart kid Greg something or other went over there though. He managed to at least partially rewrite the rules. Go figure; and good for him. They needed a bit of rewriting. He made his team an independent business entity from the sponsor, in the American model. That changed things.

But then he didn't want to wear the jacket his mom made for him either. He wanted to wear the yellow jersey.

KFG

Google Earth

[thelamecamel]

They also had maps of all the stages, with all the checkpoints, sprints, etc, available through Google Earth. You'd download the file, and suddenly a bunch of blue lines would appear on the pictures of France. As usual, you could then tilt the view, and the contours of the mountains would appear, i.e. mountains would rise either side of the blue line that people would be cycling down. You can then almost pretend you're flying down the valley along the course! Very nifty.

Wikipedia and fixing mistakes.

[Jerk City Troll]

Why is it that people think correcting mistakes is somehow a bad thing?

Tour-de-France is actually pretty anti-technology

[Digital_Quartz]

I'm sorry, but Tour-de-France is the anti-technology race. Wired had a photo gallery listing many technologies that are banned from the tour:

http://blog.wired.com/tourtechnology/

Any bicycle which is too light, or which has excessively good aerodynamics is outright banned. There is very little exciting aerodynamics research going on for Tour-de-France. Recumbents were banned by the Union Cycliste International way back in the 30s because they were way too fast. Every bicycle speed record currently held was taken with a recumbent.

UCI basically felt that racing should be a test of the rider rather that of the technology, and so made the diamond frame the "standard". Since everyone else saw people winning races on diamond frame bikes, these bicycles were much more popular than many other technologically superior bikes, which is pretty much why recumbents are hard to find and overly expensive today.

Even this nearly traditional looking Softride pivotless suspension bike (http://www.bronesbikeshop.com/Softride.jpg) was banned because it "could have an aerodynamic advantage".