Cycle logical changes......
Monday, 05 July 2010 09:14.
I always cringe when someone starts off a conversation with "I read something really interesting in the paper at the weekend", particularly if it's first thing in the morning and it forces me to turn off my commuter auto-pilot. So forgive me but....I read something really interesting in the paper at the weekend. I was perusing the veritable feast that is the Saturday Guardian sports section, which at the moment rivals all other supplements in girth and stature, with the sports world trying to squeeze a year's worth of action into one summer.
There was a piece on Team Sky's entry into the Tour De France this year and their preparations before the event. Team Sky is a relative newcomer to the Tour and so therefore is afforded the luxury of looking at the whole race preparation from an outsider's consultative perspective and asks the million dollar question, is there anything that can be done better? The point with most activities is that although, particularly in cycling, there is no need to re-invent the wheel it does pay to see if there are gains to be made. As Team Sky point out "Put simply, you aim to be as good as you can in as many areas as you can: put together, a 1-2% improvement in all those areas amounts to a considerable gain in performance." It is this philosophy that was carried over from the awesome Olympic GB cycling team performance a few years ago that made King Midas' skills look like a Christmas cracker magic trick.
Some of the performance gains identified in this case are from reducing the amount of water that a cycling jersey can hold to reduce the rider weight, moving each team rider's bedroom furniture from stage to stage to ensure a comfortable and reassuringly familiar night's sleep, to designing a team jersey that can easily be recognised by in-air cameras for in-race and post-race analysis.
Sublime, and often ridiculously obvious, mini changes can often transform something that works into something that works, makes money, takes less time, and causes fewer problems. Optimisation is not necessarily about the big engineering changes and expensive remedial work. It is more often than not that a readjustment of existing communications infrastructure, and an awareness of how IT is being done which provides the biggest and certainly most satisfying gains.
Now that the Optimisation plug is out of the way I'd like to say good luck to all the GB riders in the Tour, of which there are many. It looks like the nation's sporting success baton is now firmly in your hands.
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