So our hopes of salvaging any sort of sporting pride this summer now rest on Wiggins and Cavendish in the TdF.  I’m really hoping that Team Sky can put in a good team performance and Wiggins can be a contender.  22 days of cycling to look forward to, starting today, and finally a break from vuvuzelas and a return back to cow bells.

For Team Sky this year’s Tour de France is all about one man, Bradley Wiggins, and how high up the standings he can finish in Paris. But there is a bigger picture as well. Doing everything feasible and legal to help Wiggins finish in the best possible position in 22 days’ time is only one stage in a five-year quest to win the Tour with a British cyclist.

Sky, British Cycling and Wiggins’s quest for Tour success is founded on the celebrated philosophy that took Team GB’s cyclists to eight gold medals in Beijing: aggregation of marginal gains. 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.

Starting from scratch, Sky have been able to look at every area of cycling and ask the question: can we do it better? They have the resources – the Murdoch millions, Dave Brailsford and his coaches’ ability to think outside the box, and the expertise that took the track cyclists to all those medals – and they are using them to the full.

At the most basic level, most professional cycling teams are unstructured. The riders are left to get on with training, told when to race and are expected to turn up fit. Sky have turned that on its head by employing a “race coach”, Rod Ellingworth, the inspiration behind British Cycling’s Under-23 academy, and Mark Cavendish’s mentor. His role is specifically to supply coaching support where needed.

“I think it’s pathetic, teams not caring for their riders, they expect the best every weekend but don’t talk to them,” Ellingworth says. He has found that, curiously, some of the riders actually need to train less. “For most riders, training is a panic thing, they need to test themselves constantly. But they don’t have to do it alone, I can help them make that call.” One rider on the Tour team, Michael Barry, said it all earlier this year: “The riders are treated like adults.” It is well known that the riders have been encouraged to draw up their own rules, such as what to do if one of them is late to the bus in the morning, and what clothing to wear outside the race.

Which brings us to those black jerseys. They are not just a platform for the sponsor’s logos, although, as you would expect for a team backed by a TV company, they were examined from every camera angle during design to ensure maximum exposure. They are intended to be easily distinguished when the helicopters show the peloton from above: that helps the team managers work out how many riders are in each group when the race splits up.

The jerseys are a motivational tool, personalised with each rider’s name down the side. Good for media and fans, but it also gives the cyclists a sense of ownership. When each one joined the team, they took part in a presentation ceremony in which they were introduced to the other riders and handed a folded jersey. “It was quite powerful,” Ellingworth says. “We took it from international rugby, when getting your first cap is such a big thing. It’s pretty unique.”

Sky are the only team to employ a dedicated “head of apparel”, aiming to improve performance in every clothing-related area. They have worked out that each cyclist’s clothes can hold up to a kilo of water, be it rain or sweat on a hot day, and will no doubt be working to eliminate that. The cyclists can choose from two kinds of racing glove, and they have two kinds of crash hats, one of which has closed off air vents giving an advantage of about 1sec per kilometre.

Performance analysis is set to become central in pro cycling as teams at the cutting-edge employ Formula One techniques. Sky are not alone here: at least one other team have hooked up with a Formula One team, while Cavendish’s HTC-Columbia are doing interesting things with Google. Already, most teams send a gofer to look at the final kilometres of the stages and report back, rather than just relying on the sketch maps from the race organisers. Sky are going further by videoing each day’s key locations before the stage starts so that the footage can be streamed into the team’s bus as the manager gives the pre-race briefing.

Performance analysis has extended to training as well. “The analysts looked at racing style on climbs, they took all the attacks, how long they lasted, the speed, the watts produced, the moves they made, left or right of the road, how far they got,” Ellingworth says. This meant that in training Wiggins could be made to replicate certain climbs on last year’s Tour. Additionally, the use of GPS meant that climbs near Wiggins’s home in Spain could be found to represent the major ascents on the Tour.

Rest is critical during the Tour de France, so Sky have found a commonsense solution to a problem as old as the Tour itself: the need to adapt to new surroundings every day when in an advanced state of fatigue. They will be taking their own beds with them to each hotel, duvets, pillows and all. “It’s just nice getting into your own bed at night. At the Giro I didn’t have a single bad night’s sleep,” the Tour rider Steve Cummings said.

Diet is the other key. Cummings underwent a three-day sweat analysis test in Manchester before the Tour started, as part of a long-term plan to produce custom-made race drinks for each of the riders depending on their physiology, something that may happen next year. The team bus has a rice cooker, which is switched on half an hour before the stage ends, so that immediately after the finish, the riders can begin refuelling.

Sky employ a chef, an idea that goes back to Lance Armstrong, but with a twist: as well as ensuring the best quality nutrients, with variety to keep the riders interested or simply to fuel them if they are tired out, their chef will ensure that their riders eat no hotel food at all. “It allows us to control the types of food, the way it is cooked, for example so it’s not kept on a hotplate for five hours,” says their nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell. That’s part of their amusingly entitled gut health plan, aiming to eliminate the stomach problems which can force a rider out of the Tour at the drop of a hat.

Sky have worked on the radio systems that link riders and personnel in a race, and have looked at other sides of communication. Eyebrows were raised when the riders were given team issue iPhones at their first get together. But the thinking is simple: they have no excuse for being late for anything. The team has an internal newsletter to keep everyone up to speed, particularly with technical developments.

Disconcertingly, for all the breadth and intensity of Sky’s quest for marginal gains, this Tour is only an intermediate stage in the search for perfection, following the research that took place as the team was put together last year. This is only Sky’s second Grand Tour, and while enabling Wiggins to “be the best he can be”, it is also a testbed for them. Worryingly for the opposition, there could be much more to come.

William Fotheringham is the author of Roule Britannia, a history of Britons in the Tour de France, published by Yellow Jersey

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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and with a little luck, the XML Google Maps plugin will pick up on the gallery and the geotags in the photos

…job done.

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My first post Christmas ride on the Ph.D. ended up being a bit of a disaster as the rear Mavic Aksium wheel ended up being totalled within a few yards of setting off when the hub suffered a failure that lost one of the flat spokes.  All rather annoying – and the wheel’s now in for repair at Tredz in Cardiff, pending a view from Mavic on what went wrong (and hopefully supporting a warranty repair).

So having been back in work for a couple of weeks without the freedom of being able to cycle to and from, I’ve been slowly losing what little sanity I have on the Stagecoach South Wales bus service from the village.  It didn’t take long for my better half to take pity on me and say I was allowed to get myself a new thrash about bike for winter riding – leaving the skinny rims of the Ph.D. for better weather.

Through a process of impressive upward management, persuasion and, alright, eventually begging, I managed to get my budget up from the original Kona Cinder Cone level that I was looking at.  After a quick scout on Google, I managed to find a 2008 Orange EVO8 reduced in the January sale at Sunset MTB around the corner from my office.  How could I resist?  I really miss riding the EVO2 – 10 years is a long time to be in the same saddle after all – and so I dropped in to take a look.

Anyway – here’s the lowdown:

Size 19″
Frame 6061-T6 Custom Butted Aluminium
Colour Champagne
Fork Rock Shox Recon Race Air w/Motion Control 100mm
Rear Derailleur Shimano XT Shadow
Front Derailleur Shimano LX
Shifters Shimano LX R Fire +
Crankset Race Face XC Evolve Triple X Type
Cassette SRAM PG950
Brakeset Avid Juicy 3 160/160
Hubs Shimano Deore 475 Disc
Rims Mavic XM117
Spokes WTB S/S Black
Tyres Kenda Nevegal/Blue Groove 2.1
Headset Tange TG8
Stem Orange Stalk +
Seatpost Stick Up
Saddle SDG Bel Air
Handlebars Supercross +
Pedals Shimano SPuDs

The guys at Sunset are typical of a good dealer: Not snotty; not pushy; warmly welcoming, and; good at what they do.  They didn’t have a 2008 bike up and running, but put one together for me during the day and swapped out some of the components that weren’t really my bag.  All in all, a very good purchasing experience and probably the best I’ve had from an Orange dealer since the good old days when I still had access to Stif’s.

So you can expect some more posts as I get back in the Groove with the daily commute again.  Suffice it to say that I’m chuffed to nuts so far <grin>.

Lucky I didn’t see any carbon road bikes…

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The weather was glorious today – warm, with a bit of a breeze (as ever, it seemed to be anabatic and therefore detrimental to my inbound speed). The heat was also a bit warm for a climb, so I took a detour out to Rocky Mountain Cycles in Llantrisant to grab a new Camelback. If you’re in the area and need a friendly bike shop, then there’s nowhere better – they even filled up the Camelback for me and topped it off with some powder to keep me going. Pretty good job really, as I was out of bananas and hadn’t eaten much before setting out.

Aside from avoiding decorating and other rather dull chores that need to be done around the home, the idea today was to test out the geotagging of the new Blackberry Bold (9000). I wasn’t convinced that it was doing anything when I was out in the States, but it seems I was wrong. It was almost certainly due to the overshadowing of all the tall buildings downtown that was preventing a good lock. Here in sunny Wales, where we’re lucky to see the sky, it’s no problem. I’ll re-edit this later with some of the images tagged for the trip.

Max speed today was down a little on what I might have expected for the route. I’d have thought that I’d have been able to hit 45mph without too much trouble, but it seems that wind resistance was going to spoil that for me on the way back down from peak ride height. The other problem area was 30 miles out on the return leg – I’d forgotten there were a couple of short but annoying climbs on the way back in – and paid the price for it. Oh well, that’s part of the fun.

Track for 26th July 2008

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The service provides a means of being able to pre-record a route that can be exported to a gpx route in the same way I’ve shown previously. Rather than use Google’s directions service to be able to describe a route, you can simply ‘draw’ it on the Gmap Pedometer service and then export that out for use on your Garmin as before.  Now that’s more like it – as provided the high-res imagery is available in satellite view, you should be able to record off-road routes without too much trouble.

A word of caution though.  The registration/positional accuracy of the Google data coupled with the accuracy of your GPS unit at any given time may well lead to some pretty large error in positioning.  Pretty large meaning, don’t plot any knife-edge routes and expect to be able to follow them blindfolded wihtout mishap.  You have been warned!

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