1 TDF Question

"Jamie Wilson" <[email hidden]> wrote in
news:[email hidden]:

Quoted message said:

Do riders get updates as to where each rider is ?
For example, does Lance Armstrong get a warning that Basso is catching
him fast, so that he may put it up a notch or two ?

Few different ways.

The organsiers have a car following the leaders and other cars with each
group. Each car gets timing data from the bikes (see previous posts)
and they broadcast the gaps on Tour radio (see cyclingnews et al). The
teams have several cars with team directors (lead and a couple of
assistants) in addition to mechanics. Some of the teams rely on the
Tour radio others on the direct feed.

All of the riders are linked to the team directors by radio and get
orders from them including timing. (There are some places that have time
check multimessage boards as well)

And finally some manics on motorbikes race around with chalkboards with
the separation showing (as much for the spectators as the riders these
days).

Doesn't work that well in the mountains because the radios are uhf but
it can be a hell of a laugh to watch the race (you can try this at the
tour downunder) from the side of the road with a scanner. You do need
to have a few people though to cover French, Italian, Spanish, German
and English. Most of the chatter is in English but all of the swearing
is in whoever's native language. You can usually get some of the media's
comms as well although a lot of this uses sideband and satellite relay
tech.

Listening to broken English (and Italian) being spoken by an agitated
director who isn't sure anyone can hear him (or if they can then they
are ignoring him) is hilarious.

Gotta wonder about all that EMR/EMF out there though.

Cheers

BrettM