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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."
Yeah, brilliant.. Tell us now!.. you know, when it's over.
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?
the 2006 Tour de France finished yesterday with an American , Floyd Landis, the overall winner
... blah blah
I wonder how Americans always keep winning in France.. these last few years. To hell with all this fancy schmancy technology carbon fiber bikes, serious aerodynamic studies to improve the bikes, the helmets
As Alistair McLean figured out with Vyland and Royale... Fear is the Key. Americans are plain scared in France, methinks!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Wow, way to put out libelous and unsubstantiated claims. The second Americans win something, it's because of doping?
I'm Italian, and I don't recall Americans saying that the Italy soccer team was doped through the roof when they won the World Cup.
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
I just want to know why people care so much about performance enhancing drugs. I would rather see a bunch of juiced up frenchmen flying at 200 MPH on a bike, crashing at the end and exploding, taking out 1500 spectators. Seriously, I watch sports for entertainment, period.
You take it, I don't want it...
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
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.
I'm sorry Max, but we're going to take your arm off to reduce turbulence...
Do you know anyone who has never had a medical condition treated with drugs?
Have you ever seen anyone undergoing chemotherapy? It isn't exactly performance enhancing. Neither is arthritis so bad you're going to need a new joint, no matter what sort of drugs they give you.
KFG
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
All things considered, it is good to have a tour-winner again who is not specializing in this event and does other courses too, unlike the specialist Lance Armstrong. The fact that he only competed in the Tour took the shine off his victories. It seems fairer this way.
Armstrong was a truly great cyclist. But I'll agree that him being a one trick pony when it came to races places him under people like Miguel Indurain. I've talked with people who have admired his multi-win streak and when I've said "Yeah, he's good but I think Indurain was better" and have them go "Indu-who?"
For those that don't know. Indurain won 5 consecutive Tour de France races 91-95 and Giro d'Italia 92-93 (not that many double winners in the history). He also set a World Hour Record in 94.
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 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.
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.
Join Tor today!
Why is it that people think correcting mistakes is somehow a bad thing?
Join Tor today!
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".
So, if a car is travelling along beside you on the left (assuming you are on the right side of the road), then how good is the driver's situational awareness about you? How much can you actually see what's going on. I ride my regular bike to work, and I feel like having the extra height even above most cars really helps to let me see what all the crazy drivers are doing. I can't imagine seeing much, or having the drivers notice me if I was on a recumbent bicycle.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
"Lance was coming through the home stretch and the crowd was parting as he approached, not more than a meter in front of him."
The crowds on the mountains have always done that, since long before Lance knew how to ride a bicycle. As with most things in cycling, enthusiastic spectators are not a Lance creation. If you think that is crazy, you should see crowds do the exact same thing at rally races - that's with cars, not bicycles.
When the tv video is shot from behind a rider from a motorcycle, the foreshortening effect of the video camera lens can make the spectators in front of the cyclist appear much closer than they really are. The same effect is very pronounced on sprint finishes, when head-on images can make the race seem like a matter of centimeters, when really the riders are meters apart.
While drunken fans can be an annoyance, the biggest danger from fans is people using cameras - the camera lens can screw up their depth perception, they don't concentrate on what's happening around them, and straps and cords dangle causing hazards that handlebars can snag; all of these have led to high-profile crashes in bike races.
RTFM; please, I beg you.