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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."
Umm... Oops?
You take it, I don't want it...
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.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
From the site: (http://www.powercranks.com/about/concept.htm)
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...
.: Max Romantschuk
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
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".