8 ms·

I agree that sport should be sportsmanlike, but there is also an entertainment factor. These pro cyclists are public figures, paid by teams funded by corporate

I agree that sport should be sportsmanlike, but there is also an entertainment factor. These pro cyclists are public figures, paid by teams funded by corporate sponsors, cyclists have public rivalries and journalists pour fuel on the fire. Events from one race carry over to the next. There is lots of drama, there are rules which change over time (and usually lag a few years behind technology advances), race officials have to make decisions in the heat of the moment, usually very controversial decisions after rule changes. (look at the recent disqualifications due to the new anti-littering and dangerous-bike-position rules this year, and the bike-lane rules a few years ago) On one side it's unfortunate that technological details and possibly human error make it hard or controversial to decide the winner for this race, on the other side this event has kept the cycling community talking for 3 weeks (even HN is talking about it right now). And most likely in the next few months or years we'll see some rule/regulation changes to handle these cases better. Just like in politics, something needs to happen first before action is taken. All the recent rule changes were triggered by dangerous crashes or other events. And imho all of this combined makes pro-cycling one of the most exciting forms of entertainment to watch or follow. A little side note: Many amateur races don't have photo finish equipment. In my race days sometimes not even a camera, and 3 race officials would stand on a little platform above the finish line with voice recorders just calling out jersey numbers and then get together in a room for 20 minutes to compare recordings and compile the final result. Draws were much more common back then. edit: all of the previous races and media coverage and drama and the first 250k in this race have led to this super exciting final 1k that is ultimately decided by millimeters. To me that is beautiful.

eterevsky 5y ago
I don't see how declaring this race a draw would deter from the excitement or from the entertainment value. If anything, it would add to it, since this is such a rare occurrence.
- vbsteven 5y ago
  Agreed, my response was not meant as a judgement on whether a draw would be a better or worse conclusion. I was trying to highlight the broader context around the events and their outcome. In this case it wasn't immediately clear who won and the officials had to make a call under pressure with millions of people waiting. They called Van Aert as the winner based on the imperfect data they had. Was it the right call? Maybe, maybe not. In an alternate timeline they might have called Pidcock, or a draw, or a redo of the last 1km. The takeaway is that this rare occurrence happened and sparked lots of discussion, which hopefully leads to technological and/or regulation changes to could handle these occurrences better in the future. I would call that progress.
- foobar1962 5y ago
  The gambling/betting agencies won’t want 2 winners in the race.
eru 5y ago
> A little side note: Many amateur races don't have photo finish equipment. In my race days sometimes not even a camera, and 3 race officials would stand on a little platform above the finish line with voice recorders just calling out jersey numbers and then get together in a room for 20 minutes to compare recordings and compile the final result. Draws were much more common back then. Interestingly, technology makes this trivial these days: Pop a cheap Android phone on a tripod, and with the right software (or even just taking a video), you have a decent approximation of photo finish equipment. (I say 'trivial', because a smartphones with the required capabilities are basically free, if you take an old, used one.)
- vbsteven 5y ago
  Yes indeed. And I have to admit that my race days are more than 10 years ago before smartphones were commonplace. The fancy organizers had camcorders for this purpose, others audio recorders and some others just pen and paper.
  - eru 5y ago
    About 15 years ago as a teenager I was at a nerdcamp where amongst other things we did lots of physics experiments. Eg measure how fast bubbles rise in honey at various temperatures to calculate its viscosity. Or: drop various big blobs of water from a height and analyze what happens. Or, figure out at what windspeed candles blow out. Relatively simple things, but not usually covered in high school physics classes. Anyway, it was amazing how many experiments became so much more feasible than even a few years prior, because cheap digital cameras were available. Oh, this also reminds of how ufo and Loch Ness and Yeti sightings have become so much rarer these days, because people demand proof.
inopinatus 5y ago
Transponders are very common in club level racing now, and the accuracy available is good enough for the grassroots level of competition in pretty much every discipline (except, possibly, track sprint). Still, I think there will always be a place for a stone-faced commissaire with a clipboard, freezing their ass off in the finish-line rain, watching the bunch draw near.
- sverhagen 5y ago
  I worked in this field, posted elsewhere on this page about working photo finish at Amstel Gold in the past. Around that time we also experimented with transponders, maybe even at an Amstel Gold Race, else at the Netherlands Tour (or Eneco Tour). The accuracy, at high speed, of transponders, didn't quite solve for the close finishes. A bigger problem were the practical issues: transponders gone missing in crashes, bike switches, transponders being mounted in the wrong place (enough to matter). It's not a substitute for photo finish. It is, though, a great substitute for reading bib numbers off of a poorly lighted photo finish. They're complementary.
  - vbsteven 5y ago
    Would you be so kind to provide a short high level summary on how the transponder tech works? I always assumed the transponders were mostly used for GC timekeeping in multi-day stage races and maybe help automate the initial results shown on TV post-finish. The live telemetry (wattage, speed, heartrate) we've seen in some races the last few years are also very interesting. But that's probably a different tech stack from transponders used for timekeeping.
    - inopinatus 5y ago
      Most transponders in competitive sports, and certainly most pro cycling events, will be an active type, i.e. they include their own power source. The timing mats are relatively simple EM trigger loops that induce the transponder to wake up, yelp its identity (typically on UHF frequencies) to the trackside receivers that will actually record the passing time, then go back to sleep. Such systems generally remain reliable even in large passing groups. Commercial prices vary, but the trackside equipment (mat, decoder, laptop, software) typically costs a few thousand dollars, and the transponders ~$100 each with a lifespan of 5 years. Some manufacturers claim millisecond accuracy, which is plenty for (say) counting laps in cyclo-cross, or for timing many BMX events; but they're not enough to distinguish the places in a >70km/h field sprint for the finish line. Some mass participation events like public marathons may use low-cost/disposable passive transponders e.g. ones embedded in the bib number; these are more like a typical RFID chip, having a longer (and rather jittery) wake-up time, in part because they draw power from the mat itself, and a much lower transmission energy. They're more easily disrupted by environmental conditions, or when passing in large groups, or even by sweat & skin contact. Telemetry from onboard bike computers and sensors is indeed a completely separate stack, and can be anything from a bluetooth relay by phone app over cellular, to a dedicated vendor-specific box with its own SIM card and a short-range radio to signal the team car. The onboard sensors are generally using ANT or BTLE to talk to the head unit aka "bike computer" that aggregates, records, displays, and relays the data. Speed may be calculated by GPS/GLONASS/etc, or sensed by wheel rotations e.g. using a spoke magnet or even hub-based rate ticker, in which case the necessary measure of precise wheel diameter may still be calibrated by the head unit using GPS. Power is not measured directly but inferred e.g. by integrating a dynamometer within the crankarm to compute power from strain & cadence. Some units also capture barometric pressure to estimate altitude, and this may be considered more accurate than GPS right up until you ride through a pressure front and it goes bananas. Some bicycles e.g. those with electronic/wireless shifting may also report their current chainring & sprocket selection, and finally you can overlay all this excruciating near-real-time detail onto the Gopro video feed from your handlebars/seatpost cameras and livestream it over cellular networks and thence to the world-wide peanut gallery. To sum up, there's an awful lot of 2.4GHz activity going on in the pro peloton, and I hereby deny ever having paired a second bike computer with the HR strap and power meter of my nemesis in order to know when the bastard was too tired to follow my attack, no sir

eterevsky 5y ago

I don't see how declaring this race a draw would deter from the excitement or from the entertainment value. If anything, it would add to it, since this is such a rare occurrence.

vbsteven 5y ago
Agreed, my response was not meant as a judgement on whether a draw would be a better or worse conclusion. I was trying to highlight the broader context around the events and their outcome. In this case it wasn't immediately clear who won and the officials had to make a call under pressure with millions of people waiting. They called Van Aert as the winner based on the imperfect data they had. Was it the right call? Maybe, maybe not. In an alternate timeline they might have called Pidcock, or a draw, or a redo of the last 1km. The takeaway is that this rare occurrence happened and sparked lots of discussion, which hopefully leads to technological and/or regulation changes to could handle these occurrences better in the future. I would call that progress.
foobar1962 5y ago
The gambling/betting agencies won’t want 2 winners in the race.

eru 5y ago

> A little side note: Many amateur races don't have photo finish equipment. In my race days sometimes not even a camera, and 3 race officials would stand on a little platform above the finish line with voice recorders just calling out jersey numbers and then get together in a room for 20 minutes to compare recordings and compile the final result. Draws were much more common back then. Interestingly, technology makes this trivial these days: Pop a cheap Android phone on a tripod, and with the right software (or even just taking a video), you have a decent approximation of photo finish equipment. (I say 'trivial', because a smartphones with the required capabilities are basically free, if you take an old, used one.)

vbsteven 5y ago
Yes indeed. And I have to admit that my race days are more than 10 years ago before smartphones were commonplace. The fancy organizers had camcorders for this purpose, others audio recorders and some others just pen and paper.
- eru 5y ago
  About 15 years ago as a teenager I was at a nerdcamp where amongst other things we did lots of physics experiments. Eg measure how fast bubbles rise in honey at various temperatures to calculate its viscosity. Or: drop various big blobs of water from a height and analyze what happens. Or, figure out at what windspeed candles blow out. Relatively simple things, but not usually covered in high school physics classes. Anyway, it was amazing how many experiments became so much more feasible than even a few years prior, because cheap digital cameras were available. Oh, this also reminds of how ufo and Loch Ness and Yeti sightings have become so much rarer these days, because people demand proof.

inopinatus 5y ago

Transponders are very common in club level racing now, and the accuracy available is good enough for the grassroots level of competition in pretty much every discipline (except, possibly, track sprint). Still, I think there will always be a place for a stone-faced commissaire with a clipboard, freezing their ass off in the finish-line rain, watching the bunch draw near.

sverhagen 5y ago
I worked in this field, posted elsewhere on this page about working photo finish at Amstel Gold in the past. Around that time we also experimented with transponders, maybe even at an Amstel Gold Race, else at the Netherlands Tour (or Eneco Tour). The accuracy, at high speed, of transponders, didn't quite solve for the close finishes. A bigger problem were the practical issues: transponders gone missing in crashes, bike switches, transponders being mounted in the wrong place (enough to matter). It's not a substitute for photo finish. It is, though, a great substitute for reading bib numbers off of a poorly lighted photo finish. They're complementary.
- vbsteven 5y ago
  Would you be so kind to provide a short high level summary on how the transponder tech works? I always assumed the transponders were mostly used for GC timekeeping in multi-day stage races and maybe help automate the initial results shown on TV post-finish. The live telemetry (wattage, speed, heartrate) we've seen in some races the last few years are also very interesting. But that's probably a different tech stack from transponders used for timekeeping.
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    Most transponders in competitive sports, and certainly most pro cycling events, will be an active type, i.e. they include their own power source. The timing mats are relatively simple EM trigger loops that induce the transponder to wake up, yelp its identity (typically on UHF frequencies) to the trackside receivers that will actually record the passing time, then go back to sleep. Such systems generally remain reliable even in large passing groups. Commercial prices vary, but the trackside equipment (mat, decoder, laptop, software) typically costs a few thousand dollars, and the transponders ~$100 each with a lifespan of 5 years. Some manufacturers claim millisecond accuracy, which is plenty for (say) counting laps in cyclo-cross, or for timing many BMX events; but they're not enough to distinguish the places in a >70km/h field sprint for the finish line. Some mass participation events like public marathons may use low-cost/disposable passive transponders e.g. ones embedded in the bib number; these are more like a typical RFID chip, having a longer (and rather jittery) wake-up time, in part because they draw power from the mat itself, and a much lower transmission energy. They're more easily disrupted by environmental conditions, or when passing in large groups, or even by sweat & skin contact. Telemetry from onboard bike computers and sensors is indeed a completely separate stack, and can be anything from a bluetooth relay by phone app over cellular, to a dedicated vendor-specific box with its own SIM card and a short-range radio to signal the team car. The onboard sensors are generally using ANT or BTLE to talk to the head unit aka "bike computer" that aggregates, records, displays, and relays the data. Speed may be calculated by GPS/GLONASS/etc, or sensed by wheel rotations e.g. using a spoke magnet or even hub-based rate ticker, in which case the necessary measure of precise wheel diameter may still be calibrated by the head unit using GPS. Power is not measured directly but inferred e.g. by integrating a dynamometer within the crankarm to compute power from strain & cadence. Some units also capture barometric pressure to estimate altitude, and this may be considered more accurate than GPS right up until you ride through a pressure front and it goes bananas. Some bicycles e.g. those with electronic/wireless shifting may also report their current chainring & sprocket selection, and finally you can overlay all this excruciating near-real-time detail onto the Gopro video feed from your handlebars/seatpost cameras and livestream it over cellular networks and thence to the world-wide peanut gallery. To sum up, there's an awful lot of 2.4GHz activity going on in the pro peloton, and I hereby deny ever having paired a second bike computer with the HR strap and power meter of my nemesis in order to know when the bastard was too tired to follow my attack, no sir