Name: Cycling's speed secrets | The Economist
Uploaded: 2021-05-18T11:27:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

[Cycling Commentator] It's a furious threat.

on the track that delivers the winning formula,

the difference between success and failure

the most successful teams in global sport.

Great Britain's track cyclists have topped

the medals tables at the past three Olympic games.

And it's a team that keeps churning out winners.

are decided by as little as 1/1000th of a second,

Emily and her teammates are obsessed with one thing:

[Cycling Commentator] Turning the pressure on.

to find those tiny margins is on the bike.

The team's key man for this is an aerodynamics expert

and ex-Formula One motor racing engineer.

My job is simply to use technology and engineering

in any way I can to make the team go faster.

Cambridge University Professor of Engineering,

Tony Purnell, designed the world-renowned

The way those layers of carbon fiber are constructed

all makes for a lighter and a stiffer bike,

When you cycle, a little bit of the power you produce

If you can reduce that loss, it translates

into the athlete being that little bit more powerful.

Using that chain would have made the difference

in the games between the silver and the gold medal.

where aerodynamic perfection is relentlessly pursued,

[Cycling Commentator] Always ahead of schedule,

he was 45 seconds up after 40 kilometers.

Chris Boardman broke the one hour world record.

settles into the superman position, arms stretched

in front of his head, for smoother aerodynamics.

By pioneering his legendary superman position.

Today, this legacy lives on at the state-of-the-art

Boardman Performance Center, in Evesham, England.

but we see that the most significant portion

Sit down, tell me a little bit more about

the direction we want to take, what do we want to look at.

his optimum body posture for an upcoming team pursuit race.

In the wind tunnel, Dan is battling winds

of over 60km/h to simulate the drag conditions

could depend on a series of almost imperceptible

and adjusting the gap between them by just millimeters,

Dan speeds up by nearly half a second per kilometer.

We're operating at a world record place here.

particularly from the hand open position,

could add up to a big advantage for Dan's team.

Me personally, I'm about 4/10ths quicker just for my turn,

and if that gain was for everybody in the team,

then we're one and a half to two seconds quicker overall.

But its pursuit of legitimate marginal gains

still sets the pace for many other disciplines.

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Cycling's speed secrets | The Economist

intense

absolutely

subtle

compromise