Receive real time information during bike race
 

Hi everyone,

I am a student from the Technical University in Munich and I had an idea with a friend to develop a communication interface between event organizers and the participating athletes. Using this, the athletes could get their rank, interim time, weather conditions, road characteristics or safety indications from the organizers directly on to their earbuds. We were wondering if only us (two electrical engineers) or also normal people would like to use this feature during their race. What is your opinion? Does something like that exist already?

Thanks a lot!

Best,
HABO

The safety indications could be useful. but the rest of it is sort of moot:

rank: What? This is constantly changing during the race
interim time: riders are already monitoring this with their personal devices
weather: same
road characteristics: you know after riding the first lap

Radios were banned by the UCI in I think 2011, then allowed again a couple of years ago. So I think that it must be useful for road races, but not a new or innovative idea.

I think state of the art info display for cyclists are these https://www.solos-wearables.com

For ITTs, getting a time check against other racers during a race would make time trials more interesting. UCI world tour riders get this already via race radio.

Too much information can be a distraction and or limiter in racing or to take the other side of the argument, if we had a lot more information while racing, what would we do with it? Dude, I am already pushing as hard as I can on the pedals.

As others have already said, much of this info is either already available, dangerous, or not that useful while racing in a pack.

As far as ITTs, I wish they would ban radios. I wanna see every rider smash it the whole course. If you go out too hard and blow up, so be it.
Radios in ITTs on the WorldTour has made them relatively uneventful as GC leaders rarely have to take any risks due to 1) being last to go, and 2) knowing exact splits to everyone in real time.
The same argument can be made for road races, but I think that ship has probably sailed.

So, you intend to invent the radio?

lol