Here's your Tour de France 2023 Stage 1 Bike Tech, looking at bike GPS computers, power meters, action cams, and plenty more! Dive into the details from the start of Stage 1 in Bilbao, Spain in the Basque country.
Full listing: www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/07/t...
The Tour de France kicked off again today, this time in Bilbao, Spain with 176 riders and 22 teams. And thus begins the annual tradition to ferret out not just the sports tech gear these teams are sponsored to use, but the gear they’re actually using. And there’s some interesting tidbits this year!
First up, best I can tell this is the first year that SRM is not sponsoring a TdF team. Obviously, as always, sponsorship doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but in the case of SRM specifically, I think this marks the end of an era. While one unsponsored power meter team did have a handful of SRM units on-hand, they also had a collection of single and dual-sided Stages units.
Meanwhile, on the bike computer front, we see more of the same from last year. There aren’t any major shifts, with the camp split roughly evenly between Garmin & Wahoo sponsorship fronts, along with Hammerhead and Bryton each sponsoring a team. Giant/Stages has left that scene from the one sponsorship last year. Still, it was notable to see how many teams had the just released Garmin Edge 840 units on-bike. Typically teams don’t tend to put brand new tech on bikes this quickly, but they were today. In fact, I even saw Team Jayco carrying around a Garmin Edge 840 box to the starting area, with less than 30 minutes to the start of the stage. Unclear what the final destination of that was, but, I found it notable.
Next up, we’ve got the bike computer front, where things are a bit messier. Actually, they’re both cleaner and messier. As a rule, all Wahoo teams can use either the BOLT V2 or ROAM V2, per rider preference. Thus, for all the teams I saw, it was a mishmash of the Wahoo units within the team - perhaps just barely favoring the BOLT V2.
Meanwhile, on the Garmin side it’s basically the same story. The Garmin sponsored teams have access to whatever units they want, and in most cases that means riders choose what they want. It tended to be a blend of Garmin Edge 1040, Edge 840, and Edge 830. In non-sponsored teams (like Team Bahrain), you saw some flyers, such as the Garmin Edge 130. Undoubtedly, because bike computers are usually held by the rider till the last minute (inside the team busses), it’s hard to capture all 176 riders within the very short handful of minutes they ride by. Thus, it’s plausible some Garmin-sponsored rider is also doing something quirky too.
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30 июн 2023
