Olympics, who's watching ?

[Count Steer]

Women's road race is coming to the boil. Tense!

[weeksy]

Brilliant attack by Faulkner in the women's road race, totally deserved that!

[Nordboy]

Brilliant attack by Faulkner in the women's road race, totally deserved that!

Gold medal on the line, you've ridden 100 miles and then with 2.5km to go, you sit back as a three and let someone go take the gold? They were all just blimbling along looking around at each other while KF rode off into the distance. Fair play to her, but it was almost like no one wanted to win it, apart from KF of course.

Really bloody odd?

[Count Steer]

Brilliant attack by Faulkner in the women's road race, totally deserved that!

I thought she was going to do another lap! Brilliant.

[weeksy]

Brilliant attack by Faulkner in the women's road race, totally deserved that!

Gold medal on the line, you've ridden 100 miles and then with 2.5km to go, you sit back as a three and let someone go take the gold? They were all just blimbling along looking around at each other while KF rode off into the distance. Fair play to her, but it was almost like no one wanted to win it, apart from KF of course.

Really bloody odd?

Not uncommon in cycling, someone goes, the other riders think "they'll cover that" and each one thinks the same, next thing you know they've got 5s to find, then 10s and then it's all over.
Seen it lots over the years and I love it when it's the underdog.

Coming into that sprint, Faulkner was 4th for sure, so was her only plan.

[Count Steer]

Yup. None of the three wanted to be the one to lead the chase and then get pipped by someone sitting on + it was the one they least feared that went + the commentators had been saying that the favourite looked a bit out of gas.

I really didn't think they were going to close that gap to the leaders. Oh yeah, it was Team GB that did a lot to spark the race up. 5th was a bit of a poor reward for that but kudos anyway.

[Yorick]

I thought Noah Lyles was being too cocky. But big PB won it for him.

[wull]

What a final round that was with the golf, Scheffler is unreal, to be 4 behind at the start of the day and win by 1 shooting a course record equalling 62. I felt a little sorry for Tommy but all in all what a 4 days it’s been with the golf, loved it.

[Count Steer]

Wowser. The GBR team sprint bicycle boys just almost nailed a perfect 4k. Not bad for a heat. That's put a marker down.

(The men's kayak cross was a fine bit of madness ).

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

I'm watching volley ball, not pervy beach volley ball, proper volley ball, I'm supporting the French because they've got a good national anthem.

[Dodgy69]

Ooh Aah Cantona..

[Yorick]

Wow. Women's sprint gold.
3 races. 3 world records.

[Nordboy]

Wow. Women's sprint gold.
3 races. 3 world records.

Speechless, such an outstanding ride by all three girls in all three rounds. To think that only a few months ago they nearly didn't qualify and weren't ranked at all.

They really deserve that, no wonder they were so emotional. Dusty in here.

[Count Steer]

I was wondering how come we're so successful at indoor cycling when we have so few facilities. To my surprise we have 6 (indoor) velodromes in GB.

That women's team is quite something.

[Mr. Dazzle]

The whole outfit is run like an F1 team, not just in terms of the technical content but the planning, psychology etc.

It's no coincidence that we often do fairly poorly in the run up to the Olympics and then smash it at the games, they've got all the equipment supply and training regimes etc synched up so it all comes to a perfect boil around the time of the games.

[weeksy]

Funniest bit is, their best track rider is out injured, Katie Archibald.
As Dazzle says, the track stuff is just hugely professional and massive levels of investment in there too.

[Count Steer]

The whole outfit is run like an F1 team, not just in terms of the technical content but the planning, psychology etc.

It's no coincidence that we often do fairly poorly in the run up to the Olympics and then smash it at the games, they've got all the equipment supply and training regimes etc synched up so it all comes to a perfect boil around the time of the games.

It's slightly unusual in the men's team that one of the riders is also a boffin/performance engineer - Dan Bigham. Clever chap....can ride a bit too.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Yeah Dan went to Uni with a former colleague of mine, that colleague is now head of R&D at a Formula E team.

Apparently Dan always did well cause he actually understands and listens to what the techy guys tell him

[MingtheMerciless]

Looking at the Women's bikes, one had a conventional type fork and the other two had a weird almost dual crown type fork, I wonder if that's rider preference or some sort of aero reason as the lead out rider was on the conventional fork (maybe lighter and aero is less of an issue as the lead out laps are slower?) and the last two were on the aero fork?

[Mr. Dazzle]

The super wide forks are to put the riders knees into their wind shadow, the super wide seat stays are probably part of the same thing.

Tony Purnell, Head of tech development at British Cycling, is also a professor at Cambridge Uni. He gets students to investigate off the wall ideas he's picked up from random papers and what not. One idea he found was that putting poles "in series" in a breeze results in lower drag than you'd expect so he got an undergrad (chap called Joe who I ended up hiring on Tony's recommendation) to dig into that idea for his Master's thesis.

This was back in 2015/16, clearly its all borne fruit now and made its way into the bike.

As to why one rider doesn't have them...could be stiffness related but far more likely they don't have enough parts! The forks are probably trimmed at the top to get the rider's preferred bar position (adjustable ones weigh more) and I'd bet they just didn't have the bits in time. Or maybe the athlete didn't want to change close to the games.