The world's biggest bicycle race is a tech junkie's wonderland, with blingy high-spec bikes and digital gizmos galore. But old standbys like tape and paper are still put to good use too. When we visited the Tour de France this year, we were as impressed with the state of the art as we were with simple tricks of the trade.
Here are some of the things that caught our eye:
Super-fast carbon-fiber aero road bikes and deep-section wheels.
For nearly a century, the world's best cyclists all rode steel frames. Later came along aluminum and titanium. But these days every rider in the Tour de France rides bikes made of carbon fiber, a technology borrowed from the aerospace industry. It's light, stiff, fast, and a lot more comfortable than it used to be. Eventually, aero road bikes — which take their tube designs from time-trial bikes — came onto the scene. These bikes give a definite wind-tunnel-proven advantage and are now a mainstay of the peloton. The fastest sprinters ride aero road bikes, including Mark Cavendish, who raced a Cervélo S5 and Enve aero wheels to four stage wins.
Meanwhile, the search for motors continues.
The International Cycling Union conducted 3,773 tests for technological fraud — aka motor doping— at this year's Tour using magnetic-resistance technology via a tablet app. There were zero positives. It all goes back to February, when a Dutch rider was caught at the cyclocross world championships with a bike that had a motor hidden in the frame.
Indeed, officials were taking the threat of "motor doping" seriously.
A thermal camera was used for the first time without warning at the Tour this year, in a bid to detect hidden motors in riders' bikes, AFP reported. The camera was developed by the French Atomic Energy Commission and used alongside magnetic-resonance testing. "No one saw it, no one knew," Thierry Braillard, the French secretary of state for sports, told AFP.
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