High Tech Tour de France 221
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."
Re:What the fuck is this? (Score:5, Informative)
Hushovd did recover though; he won the final stage in Paris.
Impressive. But still one point to solve ... (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:The technology didn't stop with the bikes. (Score:2, Informative)
AMB not free software friendly (Score:2, Informative)
Re:no "ligfietsen"? (Score:1, Informative)
They are called "Recumbent bicycles" in English, btw.
from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle [wikipedia.org]:
Re:Also mechanical tech (Score:4, Informative)
Recumbents are better aerodynamically, but worse mechanically. The torque from pedals to back wheel has to be transmitted over a longer distance and the frame has to be correspondingly heavier. The longer frame makes fighting gravity harder and adds to frame mass.
Also I can imagine (but not prove) that the horizontal riding position makes it harder to make a good pedalling stroke with even torque around the stroke. The nose down and forward position is better for situational awareness. The recumbent position is better for looking at clouds (as in a sailplane).
That is one thing that bugs me about Le Tour. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Tour-de-France is actually pretty anti-technolo (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Tour-de-France is actually pretty anti-technolo (Score:2, Informative)
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."
Re:Americans in France! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Tour-de-France is actually pretty anti-technolo (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That is one thing that bugs me about Le Tour. (Score:3, Informative)
It is true that the spectators have caused their share of crashes. The crowds on the slopes of the mountain stages are just ridiculous. In towns, they are usually kept behind barriers. Hushvod got cut jockeying for position in a mass sprint in a town.
But you are wrong about the brakes. At anything like reasonable speeds, say below 40mph I can lock up the tires just fine in my 2004 Raleigh Grand Prix road bike with a good, hard squeeze. I'd skid out of control and take about half the life out of my $30 tires if I did so though. But stopping in an emergency is not a problem. The problem is that at 25+ mph/40+ kph and in very close (elbow-to-elbow) proximity to other riders and spectators there isn't really time to react. One second you're riding along, then bang! ass over tits onto the pavement. Been there, done that.
Re:That is one thing that bugs me about Le Tour. (Score:3, Informative)
I'd guess that he's probably right.
If I'm right, your bike has rims branded as "Equation" that are made from alloy.
A good number of the competitors in the Tour are using carbon rimmed wheels, which are totally different than the alloy you'd normally ride on. Carbon, in case you've not experienced wheels made from it, is an enormously bad braking surface - there's horrid heat transfer problems, it seems like there's hardly any friction at all, and there tend to be rigidity problems. In fact, a company called Lightweight famously made a carbon wheel a few years ago that could only be used on entirely uphill stages because of the problems with heat transfer and rigidity.
At the point of the cutting edge wheel tech these guys are using in the Tour, I'd say it's a safe bet to say that braking wouldn't always be as effective as the Raleigh.