It was only a matter of time until the materials got good enough for this to happen.
I'm always surprised that these teams never seemed to try and recruit pro athletes for this kind of thing. I've got a friend who's a professional cyclist and his 30 second power rating is something like 1100 watts and I'm sure at a minute it's only degraded by 50-100 watts.
Bit of cycling geekery: if he can do 1100 watts for 30 seconds, he's probably around about 750-800 watts for 60 seconds. Power declines approximately with the inverse of time until it flattens out at your long-term sustainable power. A pro is probably somewhere in the 350 watts range of sustainable power, so doubling the duration would mean his power above the sustainable rate would be halved, putting his estimated 60 second power at 725 watts. In this particular range of power, the approximation tends to be a little low, so fudging upwards a bit puts him around 750-800 watts.
Those pro numbers are a little low. Although La Gazzetta's watt calculations have been somewhat questionable in the past, Tony Martin's wattage was given as 480 for the Mont Saint Michel TT on Tuesday.
Shane Perkins, and Aussie track rider who is probably the strongest cyclist in the world in terms of pure brute strength, has a maximum output of 2500 watts (my guess is that is a ten second effort, they don't give it, but his 60 second effort is certainly higher than 1100 watts).
An average pro (domestic and international) vs. the pro who just won a worldclass TT. An average weight pro vs. a big boy like Tony Martin or even more so Shane Perkins. I've seen quite a few pro wattage files, and 350 is fairly common for an average pro.
The more reliable measure is w/kg. Pros tend to range anywhere from high 4s (low-level sprinters or rouleurs) to mid 6s (world class TT'ers or climbers), with most being somewhere in the 5s. If la gazzetta's numbers are right, and if we believe Tony Martin's posted weight of 75kg, his 480 watts puts him at 6.4 w/kg.
I wasn't exactly thinking of Optum or Kenda, I was thinking of a Pro/WorldTour level rider. The numbers you mention are frightening close to these I found for Brian Vandborg: http://home.trainingpeaks.com/races/saxo-bank-sungard/2011-u... - not exactly known as a powerhouse (there he is finish 47 seconds down over a 8km TT, and here he is barely beating Chris Anker Sorenson in a 40km time trial a few months before those figures: http://cqranking.com/men/asp/gen/race.asp?raceid=20722). Sure, Domencio Pozzovizzio isn't putting out 400 watts sustained (he probably isn't putting out 300), but my feeling is that Siutsou, Chavanel, Tuft, Vanmarcke, Vaitkus, Malori and other riders of their ilk are creeping up towards the 375-400 range sustained.
Don't get me wrong, I'm nitpicking here, I was just noting those numbers feel slightly low.
On individual rides (e.g. http://app.strava.com/activities/66583736 ) there's a chart below the map which you can switch to show "Performance", check the "Power" checkbox and you'll see his watt output. Looks like today he cracked 1kw momentarily about ten times, and for an hour starting around ~1h30 in he never went below 200w.
From what I remember, pro cyclists are simply too expensive.
It's better to have an amateur who is 80-90% as good as a real pro, but is genuinely interested in the project and would be more dedicated than a hired pro.
It seems it would be possible to get a pro to work on the project pro bono provided you picked the right guy. I was assuming the projects would go that route. Any reasonably intelligent pro cyclist would love to be the guy who set a world record like that, it's a similar achievement to the Gossamer Albatross.
But that's a very good point you've made. I obviously didn't even factor in price.
Apart from price, would a pro be prepared to risk injuring himself in a malfunction? I'd guess a typical pro would put career above engineering glory. If the pro did it for free you'd probably still have to buy an insurance policy to cover him.
Pro cycalists already take risks; if their bike has an issue, or their path has an issue such that they fall they are potentially looking at serious injury. Not to mention the fact that prior to the test proper, the mechanism would be well tested to make sure it won't fall apart, and there would likely be many practice runs with additional safety percuasions until everyone was comftorable.
Also, how is powering the first human powers flying machine not good for a professional athlete's career?
Playing with semantics, if a pro agreed to power such a helicopter, he'd most likely be doing it as an amateur, since amateurs do things for the love of it!
Pros take risks, but I'd theorise that a part of the career would be managing those risks, to maximise the career. It would be very cool to power the first human powered helicopter, but I suspect we are not typical, in that the typical punter cares more about sport than a helicopter. From a professional point of view, the fame and returns from piloting a helicopter are negligible compared to the rewards of improving in the Tour or the Giro.
I'm descending into hot air production here, since I have no real evidence on which to base it!
It looks like Cervelo was sponsoring the team, based on the bike being used appearing to be an R5 and the kit he was wearing. Nowadays Garmin (for whom Cervelo is a major co-sponsor) only has one Canadian on the team, Ryder Hesdejal, but they do have a number of Americans, including Dave Zabriskie, a reasonably slim time-trial powerhouse (read: perfect for this), who is currently sitting on his couch in Colorado unable to ride due to his six-month suspension he received as part of admitting to doping and testifying against Lance regarding his time on the US Postal team. They could have made it happen...
"This attempt was made in accordance with the regulations of the FAI Sporting Code including the provisions of 5.2.2.3 on Unsporting Behavior."
and googling for that reveals:
'5.2.2.3 reads:
"Unsporting Behaviour. Cheating or unsporting behaviour, including deliberate attempts to deceive or mislead officials, wilful interference with other competitors, falsification of documents, use of forbidden equipment or prohibited drugs, violations of airspace, or repeated serious infringements of rules should, as a guide, result in disqualification from the sporting event."'
So I'd guess for official World Record attempts (and probably for the prize rules) doping is out. (Sounds like the pilot has enough other sporting pastimes that he'd be unlikely to dope just for this project too…)
Most top tier pro cyclists clock 25000-35000 miles a year on their bikes, and race 80-140 days a year. Other than that, the job is mainly sitting around recovering. Although cycling is an incredibly complex sport, on the level of gridiron football or basketball in terms of the number of calculations that have to be made as part of tactical decisions, the longer-term playout of actions (at least in long road races) means that riders and their sporting directors (think coaches) have time to think about their decisions, and that combined with how much of racing is done on feel means there isn't the same need for things like film study and in-depth tactical coaching on a daily basis.
Athletes have a lot of what might be called downtime in their schedule, but very little actual free time. downtime is a part of training, a good nap schedule and staying well rested between training sessions and races is very important. You can't just go off and pedal a helicopter because you've got a couple hours free.
this is surprising that they don't try to get world class cyclists.
I'd like to point out the distinction from professionally paid road racers and olympic-level track (velodrome) riders. Road riders are always travelling, generally pretty busy and would probably be hard to get for a project like this, but more to the point, don't train for this kind of maximal wattage output.
But in fact, the world record for the 1km time trial is right below 1 minute right now (58.875).... I read somewhere on the internet that world class kilo riders are doing <900 avg. watts to do a kilo. Not to mention the fact that these guys aren't really bothered by much outside an olympic year.
otoh, canada doesn't have any of these caliber of riders, afaik.
We have had, including Curt Harnett, Jocelyn Lovell and (on the female side of things) Clara Hughes. The "thunderthighs" crowd does tend towards speed skating, though, which tends to be more accessible in a large country with few velodromes.
I'm always surprised that these teams never seemed to try and recruit pro athletes for this kind of thing. I've got a friend who's a professional cyclist and his 30 second power rating is something like 1100 watts and I'm sure at a minute it's only degraded by 50-100 watts.