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?

Re:What the fuck is this?

[McWilde]

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.

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.