Rio Olympics 2016: Engineering speed for the Canadian track cycling team

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Waterloo research team had one week to design and deliver a complex handlebar connector that helps athletes stay in the optimal position for maintaining speed.

A tight timeline was only fitting when engineers at the University of Waterloo took on a special project for the Canadian track cycling team headed to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Lending their expertise in a world where winners and losers are typically decided by tiny fractions of a second, Professor John McPhee and research engineer Carin Yeghiazarian had just one week in June to produce a small but technically complex piece of hardware.

“It’s a very complicated 3D system,” said McPhee, a professor of systems design engineering and Canada Research Chair in system dynamics. “Obviously, we dropped everything else in the lab and just focused on this.” [Read more]