Our Women’s Team Pursuit program, we’re among the top 3 in the world right now,
we want to continue being in the top 3 and hopefully in the top of the box basically at the Olympics.
To do that, we just need to continue working on the design.
We know that all the other competitors are doing the same thing and
we just have to stay one step above them.
The design is basically leading to performance and it’s always that.
The Team Pursuit is a highly technical event. I mean, we’re racing at speeds over 60 kilometers an hour.
When you’re racing at such high speed, even small differences in your head position or your hand position,
they really make a difference in how much power you have to push to be able to ride at a certain speed.
90% of the energy that they’re putting into the pedals is going to fight air resistance.
So anything that we can do to minimize that air resistance is going to make the athletes go faster.
We’re focusing on every part of the equipment
the bike, the bars, the helmets, the skinsuit, the shoes – everything.
Today we’ve isolated the handlebars.
We’ve got all of our riders actually going through the testing as they’re trying
to get the optimal position for each and every athlete.
We identified that we needed a lower starting positon for their hands when they start the event.
We needed an arm cup that really cup their arm quite well and gave them a lot of stability
and the ability to install these round tubes where we were allowed to put a lot of different shapes into their hand.
We’re working with a partner- Alphamantis.
With their different algorithms they’re able to determine whether or not this position if faster than another positon.
It’s just getting that extra one hundredth of a second, that extra half a second.
We want to be able to cross that finish line and say we have done everything possible
to actually get that performance and that’s what it’s all about.
Every little detail matters and aerodynamics is certainly a huge part of that.
It’s going to be fantastic to see what Canadian track cycling is going to be capable of down the road.
