Tour de France : Key Statistics

The following is an easily accessible graph showing key statistics for the Tour de France from the years 1903-2019.

I've highlighted some epochs in the data, namely the two World Wars and the 1990's doping era culminating in the Armstrong doping saga. For the wars, the plot makes it seem as if racing took place but this is just a visual effect. No racing took place during those years.

To go along with this data, you might also like my previous post on modern bicycles and cycling speeds. There, I explored whether bicycles themselves have made any appreciable impact to speeds.

Hopefully this datasheet can be used in future years as a live plot.

All data obtained from www.letour.fr and compiled with Datawrapper.

Alex Moulton Explains His Design Studies

Dr. Alex Moulton is a source of inspiration for me as a young engineer. I encourage you to watch these videos to see how a great mind thinks. The message couldn't be clearer. Good engineering is a hands-on job. If his biography weren't so expensive, I'd voraciously consume the book in one sitting overnight.

RELATED READING :

Mark Sanders Explains His Strida Concept
Design Case Study : Innovation Of The Brompton Folding Bicycle

Johan Museeuw Trained Hard

A man who knew how to train properly to overcome adversity was Johan Museeuw. He was known for his gradual approach to training, his belief in his training ideas and his ability to focus on training so he could return to racing when his cycling career seemed to be over - a couple of times.

A wicked crash on the slick cobblestones of the Arenberg Forest in the 1998 Paris-Roubaix, the queen of one-day racing classics, almost ended his career. Gangrene set in because of improper cleaning of a knee wound by medical personnel, and they almost had to amputate the leg. As it turned out, they didn't amputate the leg, and Museeuw responded by recovering, training and coming up with a win in the 2000 Paris-Roubaix. Tragedy struck again when he crashed on his motorcycle in the summer of 2000. He fought back yet again for another Paris-Roubaix win in 2002, among other victories.

Museeuw's glory started in a small way, but he kept stretching his personal limits. In his first race outside of Belgium, the Tour of Austria, Museeuw finished the first stage 30 minutes behind the winner. He was alone, numb from the cold, and reportedly crying on his bike. He did not abandon the race though. In the same manner, he would continue to break down barriers during the remainder of his career - with dogged determination.

Museeuw was infamous for training alone for periods as long as 4 months. He knew his specific training goals would not be achievable in large groups. He would ride ruthlessly into the wind for hours on end. When he adopted heart rate training later in his career, he took himself into the red repeatedly on hard days, for unbearably long periods. He would impose kilometer per hour "basements" on some training rides  - on the order of 43 kmph (27mph) - and he'd refuse his body when it told him to slow down.

Museeuw's good friend and teammate (and world class racer in his own right) Wilfried Peeters says of Museeuw, "Out of 100 pros, 95 won't be able to deal with Johan's training rhythm. A young rider who tries to constantly keep up with him will, so to speak, destroy his body. Johan has both the body and the willpower to work those heavy training schedules. He sometimes has some riders that live in his region ride with him, but very few can keep up for a few days in a row."

Peeters explains that after brutal group training rides, Museeuw would ride another half hour extra, because it was mentally very important to him.

These words were from the book Cycling Fast by Robert Panzera, a USA Cycling certified coach and NSCA-certified strength and conditioning specialist.

In order to stay a bit more objective on the subject of Johan's superhuman performances, I will also include the fact that he was imprisoned (suspended) for 10 months for allegedly using human growth hormones and other substances to boost his strength, red blood cell count and recovery time. He had stood trial for his part in a ring alleged to have funneled EPO and other doping substances from a Belgian veterinarian to pro riders.

Turns out, critical reading is essential when reading any glorified literature about any athlete these days. Its an utter shame.

*  *  *

The Quiet Goombah

"The former Soviet state of Kazakhstan is the size of Western Europe, and is not so much of its own country as its own planet, a vast sameness of boreal forests and grasslands, boiling in summer and frozen in winter, a land the Soviets found ideal for growing wheat and testing nuclear bombs - 470 tests between 1949 and 1989, most of them thoughtfully done on Sundays, so as not to disrupt the happy productivity of the proletariat. The ensuing years have only added to its charms : the rivers are so syrupy with toxins that they can't manage the trick of freezing; the rails of the trans-Siberian railroad are so elaborately twisted by frost that passenger trains cannot exceed thirteen mph. Kazakhstan, in short, is the perfect hothouse in which young cyclists may bloom."[1]

That's where the story of a stoic all-rounder began. He mumbled softly in press conferences, but spoke boldly with his legs. His enigmatic persona was only overwhelmed by his resilient desire to win. There are few who possessed his attacking style, fewer who could bring the theatrics that he gifted to any race.

A little Kazakh - Alexander Nikolaivich Vinokourov - was born on November 16, 1973 to his farming parents. At the age of 13, he applied for a position at the Spartan-like sports academy of Almaty with the burning desire of becoming a pro rider. From then on, he and his 13 colleagues were given extraordinary harsh training; up to three times a day they gave everything they had in their young bodies, in series of continuous labor. One hour at the crack of dawn, a three-hour trip right after the first meal of the day, and then another 2 times, 60 minutes going into the red right after the obligatory resting period: an education that can either break or make a person.

"Vino became known as one of the hardest of cycling’s hard breed: the Eastern Bloc goombahs; riders who had been selected as children, their growth plates and femurs carefully measured by state examiners, their biotype profiles matched against that of a “superior child,” and who were duly whisked away to the barracks of various sports schools throughout the Soviet empire. Once there, their life became an endless series of training exercises, the governing philosophy of which was summed up by a former coach: “You throw a carton of eggs against the wall, then keep the ones which do not break.” " [1]

When he was 16, the big day had come. The sports academy didn't have anything left to teach Vinokourov and his classmates. The West, where the beating heart of cycling lay, was calling. In the fall of 1996, Gilles Mas, assistant DS of the Casino pro team, received a letter from the Kazakhstani national coach. The offer: the 6 best young guns of the entire batch. The question:  Could he land a spot in the pro peloton for these guys?

Mas decided to take two of them, on probation. The Frenchman realized that fitting in Vinokourov and Mizourov - the two chosen ones - wouldn't be so easy, so he decided to install them at EC Saint-Etienne Loire, an amateur team, for a year. 

He showed up at the French amateur EC Saint Etienne Loire in 1997 with a rucksack on his shoulder and a coach's note in his pocket that sketched out the outline of his story. The wall had come down, and Vino had come to race bikes.

Vino quickly learned French and adapted well, but Mizourov became extremely homesick and was replaced with Andreï Kivilev, one of Vino’s classmates in Almaty. Together, they found shelter with their host family.

Vino was not taken seriously. From the beginning to others, he looked like he was nine - bright blond hair, pink ears - with an affection for shiny shorts and fat gold necklaces. Coy, of brief words, he resembled a cross between a mafioso and an elf. At first people assumed it was because he didn't know French, but was that really so?

"He knew it was fine. He just didn't talk. His background was, and remained, a blank slate. His parents were reported to have been chicken farmers in Petropavlovsk, but he would not speak of it. When he did speak, which was about once a week, it was in short, pointed sentences, so simple that it was like listening to Japanese poetry :

I will ride hard today.

The hill is not steep.

I will attack them. " [1]

Mas immediately understood that he made the right choice, especially since Vinokourov was tearing apart the amateur circuit. Soon it is clear that he was way too good for the éspoirs. One year later, the Kazakhstani made his first appearance in the pro peloton. The neo-pro immediately won the 4 Days of Dunkirk and the Circuit des Mines; later in the season he would add stage wins in the Tour of Poland and the Tour de L’Oise to that.

From there on, things only got better, and that’s almost an understatement - the Amstel Gold Race, the Dauphiné Liberé, the Tour of Valencia, the Tour of Germany, Tour of Switzerland, twice Paris-Nice, twice Liege-Bastogne- Liege, summer Olympics Road Race (2nd), the Vuelta a Espana and stage wins in just about every stage race of importance! The stats are remarkable. In his pro career since 1999 up until now, Vino has had 108 podium finishes :  forty eight 1st place wins, thirty 2nd places  and thirty 3rd places. 

Talent, power, character, money: Vinokourov has plenty of it all. A house in Monaco, a huge villa in the surroundings of Nice, some real estate here and there in Kazakhstan.

"But the man who raises his daughter Irina and his twin sons Nikolas and Kiril together with his spouse Svetlana also has a very big heart. The boy that grew up in miserable circumstances never forgot  where he came from. From his first public celebration in his country, he brought gifts with him for his colleagues, who had to work with a lot less than he. He donated 5 brand new Pinarello bikes to the Kazakhstani Cycling Union, and his club in Petrapavlovsk got 20 cycling kits, including shoes." [2]

Perhaps the biggest sadness in his life came when he lost his classmate, the same friend and companion he had raced with in his young years in the 80's - Andreï Kivilev. The 29 year old Kazakh climber crashed some 20 km from the finish during the second stage of the 2003 Paris-Nice and lay motionless on the ground, his skull crushed, his ribs shattered. Next morning, he died in a coma on his hospital bed. The dangerous sport of cycling had taken yet another victim. His shocking departure was the reason the UCI even enforced the compulsory wearing of helmets in all endorsed races.

"We were always there for each other," said a heart broken Vinokourov of Kivilev. "We raced for the first time together in 1986, and took the same road through the national team to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. We turned pro at the same time, Andrei with Festina, me with Casino. To lose one of my best friends is really bad. We were such a strong gang; the Kazakhs are a strong family."

In memory for his friend, Vino founded the Andreï Kivilev Foundation, a charity fund that provides for Andreï’s wife and children, as well as for his parents, brothers and sisters that he supported during his career.  “Being a famous cyclist opens many doors. It would be a shame if I wouldn’t put that in good use," he said. "I want to make some people’s lives a bit more bearable than they are now, in my own way.”

A year after his comeback, in the same characteristic style, Vino eluded the best sprinters of the world today, won the stage and added another brilliant feather to his cap. Meanwhile, Ned Boutling, a strong Vino critic wrote thus about him :

"For 4 or 5 years, and in an era dominated by the monotony of US Postal victories set against the fading star of his T-Mobile teammate Jan Ullrich, Vinokourov had been the thrill-seeker. He could be a one-man firework one day, and embark on the most suicidal of escapades. And the very next day he could disappear altogether, only to reemerge a few days down the line in true Lazarus fashion. He was loved. You could even say he was best thing about those Tours." 

Any doubt?

[1] Dan Coyle, "Lance Armstrong's War"
[2] www.Gva.be
Many thanks to translation from Daily Peloton, stats from CQ Ranking, interviews from Cycling News, photos from Graham Watson.

ADDITIONAL READING :


The Alberto Contador You Did Not Know

 *   *   *

Credit To The Bicycle

The following article was written for the July edition of ASME Magazine by Frank Wicks, a mechanical engineering professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. He is a cyclist and an ASME Fellow. Enjoy over a cup of tea or coffee.

 Credit To The Bicycle

This descendant of the hobby horse put the world in the driver's seat.

Since it can’t go as fast as a car or carry as much freight as a truck, a bicycle often doesn’t get the credit it deserves.

After all, it is a highly efficient vehicle. A cyclist can travel 12 miles per hour with an effort comparable to walking. The body converts the energy of food into muscle power. You can ride about 1,000 miles at 15 miles per hour using the amount of energy comparable to a gallon of gasoline.

Today an estimated billion bicycles are used throughout the world for travel, recreation, and exercise.

Perhaps more important, though, are the world-changing engineering achievements that the bicycle made possible. Design improvements during the first 90 years of the bicycle’s history provided much of the initial technology that was extended to modern motorized forms of transportation.

It was no accident, for instance, that Henry Ford called his first internal combustion powered vehicle a quadricycle. To keep its weight down, it ran on bicycle wheels. In a very real sense, the bicycle was the ancestor of the Model T, and we all know where that led.

The Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss used bicycle shops as bases for pursuing their pioneering work in human flight. William Harley built bicycles before teaming up with Arthur Davidson to make motorcycles. Paul MacCready and others have used bicycle-type drive systems to achieve human-powered flight.

The first steerable two-wheel vehicle was an attempt to create a mode of transportation during a period of worldwide disaster. The invention is usually attributed to German inventor Karl Drais, who introduced it in 1817.

The incentive has been traced to a massive volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. The solar reflectivity of the ash in the atmosphere caused drastic global cooling. The year 1816 has been called “The Year Without a Summer.” Crops failed. Starving horses were slaughtered for food. A new form of transportation was needed.

The Drais machine, made mostly of wood, was called a hobby horse, dandy horse, or draisine. Propulsion was by walking or running while the rider sat on the frame, not far different from the Flintstones’ family car. As people used the hobby horse, though, they discovered that it could remain upright while moving forward even with both of the rider’s feet off the ground.

This was a surprising and important discovery that demonstrated the potential of alternative propulsion with the feet not touching the ground, an innovation implemented in 1840 by Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland. He developed a back-wheel drive using connecting rods and treadle pedals.

The popular conception of the antique bicycle, propelled with pedals on a large front wheel, was introduced around 1865. Variously called a high wheel or velocipede, it was also dubbed a bone shaker. The English version was called a penny-farthing because the size ratio of the two wheels was reminiscent of the two coins. Falling forward, a common accident, was called “taking a header.”

Wheel design was one of the key enabling technologies for bicycles. Spoke wheels go back to antiquity, and for most of history, they were made of wood and operated in compression, with the bottom spokes taking the load. Eugene Meyer of France invented the adjustable tension wire spoke in 1866. The load is taken by the upper spokes while all of the spokes work to retain the circular shape of the rim.

It can be noted that wooden spokes in compression support the load like an arch bridge, while wire tension spokes support the bicycle and rider like a suspension bridge. Wire spokes significantly reduced the weight of the wheel.

In 1877 an American Civil War veteran known as Colonel Albert Pope started making high wheelers under the brand name Columbia in a sewing machine factory. The bicycles cost $125 while sewing machines sold for $13, so the change promised greater profit on each sale.

But the bicycle in the 1870s was not for everyone. Cycling continued to be an activity for the rare individuals who had skill and patience. It was a challenge to mount and dismount as well as to ride and stop.

It was not until 1885 that John Starley in England introduced the “safety bicycle,” which virtually anyone could learn to ride with relative ease and safety. It allowed the rider to start and stop with both feet on the ground. It used two wheels of the same size. The back wheel was powered by chain and sprocket. The big sprocket on the pedal crank and smaller sprocket on the back allowed the wheel to turn faster than the rider pedaled. It also allowed the cyclist to pedal at the rate at which he could produce the most power.

The safety bicycle was the result of several new enabling technologies. These included better materials and fabrication methods, low-friction ball bearings, chains with bushings that rolled easier over the sprocket teeth, pneumatic tires for better traction and comfort, and hollow tubing made of stronger steel.

The safety bicycle was disruptive technology. It created a new idea in transportation-the personal vehicle. It did not require the cost and complications of maintaining and harnessing a horse. A rider could travel from place to place without conforming to the schedule of public transportation.

It was a dramatic new form of freedom. Susan B. Anthony proclaimed that bicycling had done more to emancipate women than anything else.

The bicycle became a symbol of the closing decade of the 19th century, called the Gay ’90s. It was the first Golden Age of the Bicycle. The Wheelmen, an organization dedicated to keeping the heritage of early cycling alive, has identified more than 3,000 brands of bicycles that were made between 1890 and 1918. Even so, ownership continued to be limited to the relatively affluent.

But more important than the bicycle’s effect on the close of the 19th century was its influence on the 20th. The techniques and technology refined for the bicycle enabled the developments that reshaped the world.


More Bike Than Bird

The brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright in Dayton, Ohio, had built a printing press in 1889, and had started a newspaper, but it was losing money. In 1892 Orville paid $160 for a new Columbia safety bicycle and Wilbur bought a used one for $80. They soon opened a business to sell bicycles and parts, and to perform repairs.

In 1896 they introduced their own bicycles, hand-made for each customer. Options included the type of handlebars, metal or wooden rims, and single or double tube tires. They invented a self lubricating hub that protected the bearings on dirt roads.

This was also the year the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal died when his bird-like flying machine stalled in flight. This tragedy inspired the Wrights to pursue their own aviation experiments. They would become the first to achieve controllable and powered flight just seven years later.

An observer noted that the Wright Flyer looked more like a bicycle than like a bird. The remark was appropriate because the bicycle was a vital link to the first successful airplane in several ways.

Experimenting with flying machines required time and money. The Wrights’ bicycle business made a good profit of $3,000 in 1897. The business was also seasonal, which gave them free time in the fall and winter. They used a bicycle to compare and measure the lift and drag forces of different wing shapes, and from this information they also designed remarkably efficient propellers.

Piloting required developing a new set of skills. The Wrights studied the similarities between steering a bicycle and controlling a flying machine. Each requires the ability to bank for coordinated turns. Controlling the bank angle on a bicycle requires a steerable front wheel. After encountering stability problems with their first gliders, the brothers achieved controllable flight by introducing a vertical rudder.

The Wrights had also hired an excellent craftsman and machinist named Charlie Taylor to help in their bicycle shop, who was crucial for their success in powered flight. Taylor was able to follow rough drawings and build the brothers a four-cylinder gasoline-fueled engine with an aluminum crankcase.

The Wrights use of bicycle type chains and sprockets was also vital. It allowed for two propellers to be driven by a single engine with the best ratio between engine and propeller speed. This ability to match the best engine and propeller speeds enabled a 700-pound flying machine to get off the ground with only 14 hp.

Glenn Curtiss also started with bicycles before becoming a fierce rival of the Wrights in aviation. Curtiss was 15 years old and working for Eastman Kodak in 1893 when he bought a bicycle for $125. He raced through the streets of Rochester and the rolling hills of his birth village of Hammondsport 70 miles to the south. He competed on race tracks in New York and other cities.

Curtiss next expanded from bicycles to engines and motorcycles. He installed a V-8 engine on a motorcycle in 1907 and traveled at 136 mph on a one-mile course. He became known as the Fastest Man on Earth. The relatively light and powerful Curtiss motorcycle engines provided his entry to aviation. Calling on the experience he had gained from bicycles, engines, and motorcycles, he soon showed a talent for designing flying machines.

Curtiss used his cycle shops to build a skid-mounted aircraft that he flew off a frozen lake in the winter of 1908. He used bicycle wheels on his next machine, which he flew for a Fourth of July celebration in Hammonds-port. He was awarded a Scientific American prize for the first observed flight of one kilometer. It is noted that the Wrights had already flown much longer distances, but their flights were not recognized for lack of witnesses.

The next year Curtiss traveled to France and set an air speed record of 47 mph around a triangular course. He later explained how his bicycle experience translated into air racing. He retained full power through the turns by climbing to slow while entering a turn and then diving to recover speed while entering the straightaway. This is an energy conservation technique. Kinetic energy is converted to potential and then back to kinetic. It is a technique that Curtiss had mastered while racing bicycles on banked tracks.

By 1910 the excitement and new freedom of the bicycle was being replaced by the automobile. It was led by the mass-produced and affordable Model T introduced by Henry Ford. Motorcycles and airplanes provided excitement for the more venturesome. The high energy density of gasoline combined with the light and powerful spark-ignition internal combustion engine was quite literally driving a transformation of entire societies and economies.

The introduction of electric power for factories, standardization, and mass production decreased the price of a bicycle. In the United States a bicycle became mostly a child’s toy that would be abandoned once one was old enough to drive a car. Adults in Europe continued to rely upon bicycles for transportation and recreation. Bicycle use was promoted in China, which now leads the world in the number of cyclists.

With a few exceptions, such as wider tires and an optional three-speed gear in the hub, there were few changes in the appearance of bicycles for half a century. The revival of the bicycle in the United States started in the early 1970s. Cultural changes, physical fitness programs, the oil embargo, recognition that fossil fuels are limited, the advent of Earth Day, new environmental agencies, and bicycle paths and lanes all came together to revive the bicycle as a vehicle for adults.

The racing bicycle with 10 speeds achieved by multiple sprockets and a derailleur for shifting came to market around 1970. A decade later the mountain bicycle with front and back spring suspensions was introduced. Improved machining and shifting precision has allowed options for 15, 18, 21, or 24 speed ratios.


Beyond Bells and Whistles

New bicycle features are often old ideas that become realities because of better materials, new capabilities, and increasing numbers of passionate cyclists. Options in production or under development include electric solenoid-assisted shifting that is controlled by the rider, automatic shifting that is controlled by computer, and various types of continually variable transmissions. Another feature is a computer-controlled suspension that is adjusted according to the conditions of the road or terrain.

It is generally expected that the fossil fuels that have powered our vehicles for the 20th century will be mostly depleted over the 21st. The alternatives such as biomass and hydrogen will be much more expensive and limited. Electric vehicles have the potential to be powered by hydro, wind, or solar energy. However, demand will probably exceed the capability to sustain increasing fleets of large, high-speed vehicles.

Thus, the best hope of sustaining personal transportation for future generations may be with electric vehicles that are much lighter and slower. While they are still rare in the United States, there are now an estimated 120 million electric bicycles in China, and the numbers of these vehicles is rapidly increasing in India and European countries.

The most common hybrid vehicle of the future may not be the now familiar four-wheel automobile combining an internal combustion engine and electric motor, but the electric bicycle that can be powered either by a rider’s muscles or energy stored in a battery. A development like that would be almost full circle. The only difference between that future and the first safety bicycle would be that electric power was harnessed along the way.


Balancing Act
 
While modern cyclists know by experience that a moving bicycle will stay upright, the explanations remain complicated and controversial. Mechanical engineering professor David Gordon Wilson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provides some insights in his classic book Bicycling Science. According to Wilson, the rider keeps upright by continually making small steering corrections with the front wheel.

Design parameters like the fork angle and the trail, which is the distance between the point where the fork axis is pointed at the road and the point of tire contact with the road, contribute to stability.

Experimenters have been mostly unsuccessful in attempts to build a bicycle that cannot be ridden. Most riders, however, are incapable of balancing a bicycle rolling backwards.


Well-Matched for Competition
 
A rider and a bicycle are a remarkably well matched system that has inspired many forms of competition requiring endurance, speed, and athletic skill.

The most famous endurance event is probably the Tour de France. It is now a 21-day and 2,200-mile event that encircles France and includes stages in neighboring countries. It was conceived in 1903 to sell newspapers.

Cyclists are professionals who compete in teams backed by sponsors that have included banks, telephone companies, the French national lottery, and the United States Postal Service. The event has been dominated by European riders with the exception of Americans Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong.

BMX, which stands for Bicycle Motor Cross, can be traced to California youths, who invented it as an exciting pastime in the late 1960s. It too has made the big time.

Youngsters started to use bicycles to imitate the popular MotoCross motorcycle competitions that were performed off the road and across open country. The terrain required sharp turns, jumps, and other maneuvers to avoid obstacles, and the young bicycle riders copied those moves. A specialized BMX bicycle was eventually developed for the challenges. The popularity of BMX cycling became international, and the sport was introduced as a competition in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Obtaining the maximum speed is another challenge. While a bicycle has a very low rolling resistance the irregular shape results in a relatively large aerodynamic drag force that increases with the square of the speed. The best rider can produce about 1,000 watts or 1.34 hp for a short time, which yields a speed of about 40 mph. Achieving 80 mph would require either about eight times more human power, or alternatively a significant reduction in aerodynamic drag.

The reduced drag solution was demonstrated by Canadian bicycle racer and designer Sam Whittingham. In 2009 he achieved a speed of 82 mph over 200 meters with a running start while enclosed in a bullet shaped module racer and recumbent position to further decrease frontal area.

Streamlining and drag reduction are concepts pursued by student teams in an annual ASME competition, the Human Powered Vehicle Challenge.


To Read More

The year 1903 saw the Wright brothers’ initial powered flight, and the founding of Ford Motor Co. and of Harley-Davidson Motor Co. All the developments had been made possible by the internal combustion engine.

Marking the centennial of those events in 2003, Frank Wicks contributed three articles to Mechanical Engineering. "The Remarkable Henry Ford" was published in May 2003 and "Between the Horse and Car," about Harley-Davidson, in July.

His article about the Wright Brothers and their early competitors appeared in December 2003 in a special supplement to Mechanical Engineering, "100 Years of Flight".

All the articles can be found on Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online, at memagazine.asme.org.

David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science, published by MIT Press and now in its third edition, is currently available in a paperback edition.

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F-One & Thirty-Six Seconds

Are you surprised that Armstrong wears 15,000 dollars on his head these days? Why? History has it that an entire empire is built around the guy to babysit him with products with which that he be marginally faster or psychologically faster. Its an incredible win-win situation for the producer and the user. Is there a better walking salesman that the most famous athlete? The following excerpt from the book Lance Armstrong's War, written by two time National Magazine Award finalist Daniel Coyle, sheds ample light on the cozy love affair and extent to which a company will go to satisfy the His Highness of cycling. One can perhaps derive a sense of why the Omerta is a sustainable concept in the industry. 

The riders’ bodies weren’t the only items being eyeballed in Murcia. There was also the crucial matter of the riders’ faithful steeds, their alter egos: the bikes. The following morning, as the riders prepared for the stage 2 time trial, bikes were everywhere: millions of dollars of tropical candy-colored frames stacked in casual piles next to buses, antlering team cars, whirring atop stationary trainers. The cycling press strolled among them, lofting the ritual questions: “How’s the new bike? How’s it feel? How’s it ride?"

This year’s plot was particularly thick, focusing mostly on the secret black bike that was now in some undisclosed location within the Postal compound, and whose attributes Armstrong was now discussing with journalists in front of the bus—or, rather, not discussing.
 
“You’ll see,” he told the breathless crew, which was clamoring for detail. “You’ll see.”

“Secret” was not quite the right word. A multimillion-dollar industry had been built around Armstrong’s equipment selection, an industry that feeds on the tideline between telling enough to sustain interest and not telling enough to give away competitive advantages. Over the past five years, Trek and Armstrong had become quite deft at this process, to the point where this particular bike, the construction of which had begun back in August, was the best publicized secret bike in history. The bike had been created by a task force of companies that called themselves F-One, and that consisted of whiz-bang experts from Trek, Giro, Hed Cycling, and Nike, among others. Numbers were being thrown around—it was one minute faster over fifty kilometers. Two minutes! After his first race in Portugal, two weeks before Murcia, Armstrong pronounced it “the fastest bike I’ve ever ridden.”

Exactly why it was so fast—well, that was the secret. The cycling media was abuzz with speculation—it was a new hand position, it was a new front fork—and each time somebody guessed, Armstrong would smile knowingly. “It’s something pretty radical, pretty deep,” he said. “Let’s just say that the bike’s fast and leave it at that.”

While Armstrong was being interviewed, two men were picking their way discreetly through a crowd, moving toward a stack of bikes. One had long gray hair; the other was younger, with a shaved head. They wore sunglasses and baseball caps and dark, rumpled T-shirts chosen because they lacked any betraying logos. The long-haired one toted a backpack and a dated, clunky 35-mm Olympus camera that any self-respecting bike geek would refuse to carry.

But they were more than bike geeks; they were high gods of bike geekdom, handpicked members of Armstrong’s F-One project. Their names were Steve Hed and Scott Daubert. Hed, a forty-eight-year-old Minnesotan, was founder and owner of his eponymous wheel-manufacturing company and was known as one of the foremost aerodynamics gurus in America. Daubert, a thirty-five-year-old Coloradan, was Trek’s liaison to the Postal team. They had come to Murcia for a variety of reasons, one of which was to spy on the other teams and report back to Armstrong. And like any respectable spies, they were worried.
 
Specifically, they were worried that some of the other teams might have caught on to F-One’s big secret—or worse, have come up with some new fast design of their own. This was the season’s prime information gathering time, after all. With four months to go before the Tour, teams still had plenty of time to make adjustments. Spies were everywhere. Two weeks ago, in Portugal, the F-One boys had a scare when they noticed some German guys with a camera skulking around the Postal bus, and they quickly covered up the secret bike with a black tarp. The Germans had turned out to be bored magazine photographers, but still, you never knew.

The F-One boys moved from team bus to team bus, mixing innocuously with the crowd, sauntering touristically up to the various bikes along with the rest of the curious masses. Hed carried a tiny tape measure in his fist; occasionally he would reach toward a bike, capture a measure, and let the tape snake noiselessly back into his palm. But mostly the two of them just looked, eyes blank as camera lenses as they roved over forks, seat posts, and cables. So precisely attuned were their minds that bikes registered not as shapes but as time—specifically as time savings per kilometer. “This bike looks like two seconds,” Daubert said. “That bike looks like one, maybe one and a half.”

The place Hed and Daubert gazed at most, however, was a small area called the bottom bracket, where the pedal cranks insert into the frame. The bottom-bracket width was an indicator of what was called the Q Factor—the distance between the pedals—and this distance held the key to Armstrong’s and the F-One project’s big secret.
 
Here was the secret: Armstrong’s new bike was narrower. Its bottom bracket was eighteen millimeters narrower than a standard bike’s. It wasn’t much—about the width of a pinky finger—but the change pulled the pedals closer together, creating a slimmer profile to cut through the wind. It was dead simple, and that was part of what made it such a pleasure for Armstrong to see the finest minds of the cycling world puzzling over it, focusing wrongly on the bars and the fork and all the extras when the truth hovered right in front of their noses—it was narrower! The narrow bike combined with the smaller changes (new helmet, new bars) had been measured as thirty-six seconds faster over fifty kilometers than Armstrong’s previous setup.

The competitive advantage of this advance was complicated slightly by the fact that the F-One boys most assuredly weren’t the only ones with the idea. Bikes with narrow Q Factors had been ridden on and off in track and road cycling for years. In fact, as the F-One boys would tell me a few weeks after Murcia, a handful of riders in last year’s Tour rode them, including Ullrich himself.
 
The reason that the F-One boys played those facts down undoubtedly had something to do with corporate spin, and the fact that it wouldn’t do to be seen as cribbing from a competitor’s approach. But there was something else in play here as well. The F-One project, as with so many of Armstrong’s endeavors, had confidence in its own supremacy. CS&E’s Bart Knaggs, who played a key role in putting the F-One project together, called this Armstrong’s “we can conquer the world” feeling.

“He sees all the facts, figures them in, but he doesn’t get hung up on them like you or I would, because he’s got faith in his decision-making process. That’s the engine that drives this thing. He knows—we all know—it’s going to be better because it’s going to be better.”

The F-One project had been born in a conference room in Armstrong’s agent’s office in Austin, Texas, on August 26, 2003. It was not an auspicious birth; in fact it was rather tense. In attendance were the brass from Trek: Ed Burke, Dick Moran, Doug Cusack, and Scott Daubert, along with Armstrong’s agents, his mechanic, Mike Anderson, and Johan Bruyneel.

“On the ride from the airport, we knew we were in for it,” Daubert said.
 
Bruyneel kicked off the meeting by pointing a long finger at Burke and telling him that the time-trial bike was too slow—it was old technology. It hadn’t been redesigned since when, 2000? Then there were the other problems: Armstrong hadn’t liked the last road bike, the Madone. And then the mixup with the fork, which had been caused, it turned out, by a human assembly error at the factory. Bruyneel laid it all out while Armstrong sat simmering.

Burke apologized. It was their fault, they would fix it, all of it. First and foremost, however, they would build Armstrong the fastest time-trial bike on the planet. Various ideas were thrown around, all of them limited by the fact that the size and shape of time-trial bikes are tyrannically constrained by the Union Cycliste Internationale. The narrow Q factor was settled on as a likely path, particularly given Ullrich’s success. The next step was obtaining a copy of Ullrich’s bike. Unfortunately, that bike was made by Andy Walser, the famed Swiss designer who produced a handful of frames each year for pros and recreational athletes. Figuring Walser would naturally balk at selling a frame to Trek, the company dispatched one of their European salespeople to Walser’s shop, posing as a wealthy triathlete—a perfectly legal subterfuge. The ruse worked. By the time Walser discovered the triathlete’s true identity, the bike was en route to Trek’s headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin, being prepared for dissection and testing.
 
Meanwhile, the industrial design process revved up, each detail flowing through the window of Armstrong’s BlackBerry. Mannequins were built, Nike’s skinsuit people were summoned, body doubles were hired, a new wind tunnel was found. The vivid spectacle of intercorporate effort helped persuade Armstrong to participate in “The Lance Chronicles,” an eight-episode OLN series whose first few episodes were devoted to the narrow bike’s development, and which was, in Knaggs’s words, “a win-win-win-win proposition.
 
A thousand images of Trek and Nike and Giro at work making Lance go faster—what’s not to love?” Viewers got a taste of the hours spent analyzing such seemingly tiny issues as that of the race number, which had an unkindly tendency to balloon out like a parachute and add thirty-six grams of drag, or about 1 percent of the total. Could they make a sleeve for it? Could they integrate it into the jersey? Tape down the leading edge? “We had long conversations over who would be the number pinner-onner,” Giro’s Toshi Corbett recalls. “It was like being at NASA or something.”
 
The beautiful part was, the exact same process was happening everywhere else in Armstrong’s world, a flurry of Cape Canaveral–like activity designed to fix what were regarded as the series of problems that had caused 2003’s near miss. Since Armstrong had been dehydrated, the Postal team started adding salt to its water bottles. Since heat had caused the dehydration, Carmichael started researching methods of staying cool, including heat-dissipating vests and tiny refrigerator-like devices that worked by cooling the hand. Corbett briefly looked into a helmet with a battery-powered refrigeration system built in, strong enough to give the wearer an ice-cream headache.
 
There was more. For the uphill Alpe d’Huez time trial, chief mechanic Julien DeVriese suggested using silk tires, which weighed a fraction of what conventional tires weighed. Hed and Daubert came up with the idea of profiling the Besançon time-trial course, mapping it with GPS, a digital level, and a wind indicator; examining historical weather patterns; and locating hedges and walls that might provide shelter. Anderson found an aluminum frame that allowed mechanics to replicate Armstrong’s preferred position on any bike with 3-D precision.
 
Here was the interesting thing: most of these ideas failed utterly. The salt solution tasted awful. The UCI was not likely to allow the ice cream–headache helmet. The silk tires were deemed too prone to puncturing. The course mapping turned out to be too complex to be useful, and the Belgian mechanics summarily refused to use the Dutch-built bike frame on point of national pride. (“They won’t budge,” Daubert said. “Not even Lance could convince them, I think.”)

Here was the other interesting thing: none of the failures mattered. The point was the process itself, in the way Armstrong transmitted his gaze through other people who hawkeyed the world to find the new Shit That Will Kill Them. The failures were banished, the rare successes embraced.

“We cannot have a feeling like we are standing still,” Bruyneel said. “For every ten ideas, perhaps one or two will be used. What it’s about is knowing that we have all the options on our side.”
 
“At some level, the science of it disappears,” Daubert said. “The important thing is that we get Lance something new and cool that he loves, and that’s what makes him faster.” 

To be sure, he was getting faster. The new wheels were light. The new skinsuit was fast. Best of all, the narrow bike itself was looking quite promising, which was underlined in January, when Armstrong road-tested it for the first time.
 
“What we want is for him to go ‘wow,’” Daubert said. “We try to catch him at a good time, or we’ll give it to an impressionable person, so they can say ‘wow’ and talk about it with him, warm him up.
 
“It’s a game,” he continued. “We have to be careful not to show him everything, or he’d be like a kid at Christmastime, and we’d be left with nothing. So we unveil things slowly, and we always keep an ace in the hole, something really cool we’ll give him right before the Tour. It’s kind of strange, but it seems to work.”
 
Armstrong didn’t like the narrow bike—he loved it. He tested it in Austin in December and again at the team’s California training camp in January, most memorably on a training ride where he started out on his regular road bike and switched partway through, letting the team go ahead. Armstrong powered up to them on the narrow bike and blazed past, a big smile on his face.
 
“How much did this cost?” he yelled as he rode. Hed and Daubert quickly ran the numbers: $250,000 so far, which made him even happier. Thirty-six seconds! It was beautiful!

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Creativity With A Bicycle

It may be no understatement to tell someone that all that can be possibly tried out with bicycles have been already tried. I wonder how much is left to do? Maybe 2%? Okay. 3%. I suppose that the probability that your new bicycle idea is unique compared to what's come and gone is very small. I hold the theory that given something that is really popular among the masses, and a lot of time span in years, that probability gets even smaller.

Here are a few of those ideas from history. The creativity is compelling. More here for your weekend pleasure.

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Cold Forging Technology At Shimano

If you read descriptions of Shimano's products, you'll often come across the words "cold forged aluminum", mentioned with great pride.

Forging is a metal shaping process in which a malleable metal part, known as a blank, billet or workpiece, is worked to a predetermined shape by one or more processes such as hammering, upsetting, pressing, rolling and so forth. Cold forming is a precision category of forging which does the same thing without heating of the material (room temperature), or removal of material.

Most of Shimano's products in the bike and fishing business utilize cold forming technology, which was established by the company more than four decades ago. It was in 1963 that Shimano introduced a cold forging plant to press precision parts for bicycles using dies and high pressure in order to form metal at room temperature. Plants such as these use presses, punches and dies that see very high working pressures, upto 1500 N/mm^2.

But why such specialized equipment?

The plasticity of aluminum at room temperature is low. The flow stress of aluminum decreases with increasing temperature. For alloys that are very easy to forge, such as 6061, there is nearly 50% decrease in flow stress between 700 deg F and 900 deg F.

Forgeability and forging temperatures of various aluminum alloys. Note that 810-900 deg F is the recommended forging temperature for 6061 alloy. Credits : Aluminum and Aluminum Alloys (ASM International)

Therefore, at room temperatures , because the flow stresses are higher, large machines capable of ramming and hammering the hell out of these alloys to get accurate shapes are needed. Of course, its more a delicate operation as opposed to the violence I have described above as great care has to be taken to prevent microscopic defects from developing in the cold forged piece, while it works at the upper limit of its strength.

On the other hand, because cold forging allows one to make parts without introducing the need for heat treatment and additional machining processes, it is an economical manufacturing method to produce precision, net-shape parts.

This is exactly what was needed by Shimano back in the day when it started designing integrated shift levers and gears that demanded high precision but which invariably suffered from the disadvantage of having a specialized and small market without much economy of scale. It has been mentioned that Shimano is one of the few companies in the world that can produce cold forged aluminum parts with close tolerances as those needed in the STI mechanism.

So how exactly did Shimano get around to having this precision, cost cutting technology? It turns out that the company has to thank a brilliant electrical engineer who basically re-created the entire company in the 1950's by helping it adopt the cold forging process, way before any other company in Japan at the time, even Toyota!!

Shuzo Matsumoto joined Shimano in 1954 with a dream. A graduate of the electrical engineering department of Osaka Prefecture University, he saw his mission as introducing cold forging technology to the replace hot forging then used. To achieve this goal, he was dispatched to the United States for 2.5 months by the company President, Shozaburo Shimano (died in 1958). In those days, only a limited amount of foreign currency could be taken out of Japan by any individual. Therefore, before departure, he was handed a lot of dollars obtained from the black market by Shozaburo and was simply instructed to "enjoy the trip".

The following snippet from page 76 of the book "Japan : Moving Towards A More Advanced Knowledge Economy, Vol. 2 Advanced Knowledge Creating Companies " describes briefly how Matsumoto went about accomplishing his mission of introducing cold forging technology to Shimano. Zoom in to enjoy the read. If you've anything else to share about Shimano and their production processes, give me a buzz.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES :

Cold Forging In Bolt Production : A Video From Discovery Channel's How Its Made
Shuzo Matsumoto Patent : Rear Hub With Built-In Three Speed Change Mechanism For A Bicycle

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That Strange Bicyclist, Alan Turing

One of the reasons we have computers and can make it do wonderful things for us is largely because of one man. Alan Turing.

Turing is the founder of the ideas behind the modern computer and artificial intelligence. The idea of controlling the computer's operations by means of a program of coded instructions stored in memory is central to any modern computer and this brilliant idea first occurred in Turing's mind.

At a fundamental level, he was one of the greatest mathematicians that ever set foot on the planet and arguably the greatest computer scientist Britain ever produced. And one of his most celebrated specialties was in the much sought-after skill of code breaking.

True genius as he was, during WWII, he single handedly solved the unbreakable German Enigma code (the Wehrmacht model shown right) at Bletchley Park, through a code breaking machine he designed known as the Bombe. Much astonishing an act it is to build something that can crack a machine which produces on the order of 15000000000000000000 (15 billion billion) combinations of secret code.

In one of the pages of the book The Essential Turing by Prof. Jack Copeland (a truly breathtaking work), there is a profound statement that just struck me. It is estimated that the breaking of Enigma, and in particular the breaking of Home Waters Naval Enigma, in which Turing played the crucial role, may have shortened the Allied war in Europe by some two years.

Take a look at the WWII Casualties page here and turn two years into human deaths to get a rough perspective of its significance (you could assume that the German High Command is not destroyed in those two years while doing that).

But as history has it, geniuses such as Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing etc had a problem. Their stories show us that you be so ahead of your times with your ideas and can use so much of mind, body and energy to focus on answering important questions that it can take away something from you that others would call normal human behavior. Simply put, there is a possibility that having the mind of a genius can turn you into persons with strange personalities and impractical attitudes. Beyond a point, these aspects may cause events that can fight with your own sanity and drive you insane, ultimately to your own death.

Turing's life came to a sad end partly in this manner. And in his life, he had a fair share of eccentric behaviors that made him open to persecution. Take a look below.

Turing was athletic (he almost made it to the British Olympic Team in the marathon) and had something for the bicycle from an early age. It is said that he acquired a hero status at the tender age of 13 when he pedaled 60 miles alone from Southampton to Sherborne Private Boarding School after discovering there were no trains running that day. It wasn't the act of riding such long miles that needs mention but instead, the special sort of determination to do so that you hardly would expect from a kid at 13.

While working at Bletchley Park, Alan would use the bicycle to commute to work as well as to get around Cambridge. The bike, however, was an old and defective machine. It also had an interesting problem. As you pedaled it, every so often, the chain would pop off and disengage from the chain ring. Every time this happened, he had to hop off the bike and put the chain back on. When he finally made it to his office, he had to wipe his hands with a rag dipped in Turpentine from a bottle he had placed there.

He loved his dying bike and would not give it up for something better. In fact, he enjoyed riding such a poorly functioning machine that no one else could. So how did he ride it? Well, legend (from reading an article by Ian Stewart in Nature) has it that he chose the most tortuous path to devising a solution for the problem.

The logician in him theorized that if he could find a pedaling interval "n" after which the chain would fall, he could then time it in his mind and execute a special maneuver with his legs to prevent the chain from disengaging. That took a lot of energy so he devised a counter and fixed it to his bicycle wheel and analyzed the mathematical relationship between the number of spokes in the wheel, the number of links in the chain and the number of cogs in the crankset.

What he found was that the mishap occurred for a unique configuration of wheel, chain and pedal. On looking at the machine more closely, he discovered that this problem only happened when a particular damaged link on the chain came into contact with a particular bent spoke. So he simply straightened the bent spoke.

By golly, a bike mechanic or anyone with a reasonable amount of experience with a bicycle could devise an efficient solution in less than 10 minutes. It took him months. This lengthy approach to solving problems proves to us that he was a true mathematician and not a mechanic.

That's not all. Turing had a bad case of hayfever allergy from an early age. He rationalized that to filter pollen away from irritating and exacerbating the allergy, he would strap a gas mask on his face while riding his bicycle in town, even in the rain. He was indifferent to what others thought about this practice. He did it.

Other odd behaviors were made obvious. His colleagues noted that instead of acts like chaining his bike, he had a strange habit of chaining his coffee mug to a radiator in his office as theft protection. Turing, it seemed, had different priorities.

Was this Turing's bicycle and gas mask? This still was obtained from a Channel 4 News segment.

Despite these and many other odd behaviors, he was very a very honest, open and friendly man. Perhaps only too friendly and vulnerable, as he ended up revealing to the security services about his practice of homosexuality. In the cold war, homosexuality was seen as a defense risk, not just something illegal and immoral. Shocked with the revelation, they arrested him and had him sexually neutralized through organotherapy. This involved chemical castration by injection of female estrogen that later induced many physical changes and mood issues in him.

Unable to cope with the tensions that played out in his head during his years in medical treatment, Alan Turing retired to his room one evening at the age of 41 and killed himself, taking a bite out of an apple he had laced with potassium cyanide.

The incredible irony of his story is that of a man who wrote brilliant theories about the human mind and machine intelligence, being treated no more than a machine, to be controlled and put into discipline by humans, humans who in fact acted like machines who saw the world only in binary, in black or white paradigm.

More than 50 years since his death, thousands upon thousands of people have signed petitions asking Britain to offer a formal, posthumous apology for the ill-treatment of Turing. A man who should have died a war hero in fact died in utter shame, they say.

Whether he should be pardoned or not has been one of the ongoing debates of our times.

ADDITIONAL READING :

The Turing Archive : History Of Computing

Bletchley Park : Its No Secret, Just An Enigma (Telegraph)
Alan Turing : Code Breaker And AI Pioneer (1 Hour Video From MIT)
Alan Turing : Life And Legacy Of A Great Thinker
International Turing Apology Petition

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