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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
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...
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
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".
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.