@Twitter announces Pro Cycling Sponsorship

While "tech" has caused ballistic increases in housing prices in San Francisco, pushing condo prices over $1000/square foot, there are advantages to the presence of these companies close to home. And that's connections. A friend sent me the following story, scheduled for publication on VelocyclingNews.com.

Fresh off its remarkable $18.36 billion IPO, @Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) has announced it will be sponsoring professional cycling in 2016, coincident with the first phase in the new UCI restructuring of the top tier of professional racing.

"Every sponsor comes into cycling wanting to win the Tour de France," announced CEO Dick Costolo (@dickc), an avid cyclist himself. "Yet for any team to win is always a long shot. That's why we are taking a new approach, a guaranteed approach."

That approach, it turns out, is to become title sponsor of each and every of the 16 class 1-A UCI professional teams. With the media exposure of professional cycling teams estimated at $88.4 million per year, it only makes sense to multiply that profit 16-fold, according to Costolo. That's a $1.4B annual return on a roughly $250M investment.

"In 2016, the pro peloton will become a sea of blue," Costolo continued. When asked how the teams will now be distinguished from each other, he noted each team would have a unique hashtag printed on their blue-and-white kits.

The Twitter monopoly on class IA teams won't give them a corresponding monopoly of the top races, as teams from the lower classes may be invited. However, it would be unprecedented for a minor team to win one of the valued grand tours. So Twitter does indeed now have a virtual lock on these 3-week stage races. One day races, like Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo, provide more opportunity for upset. But it's safe to say @Twitter jerseys will be dominating podiums year-round.

Twitter has already gotten enormous benefit from professional racing, as it's become ubiquitous that top riders tweet before and after each race. For example, Taylor Phinney was an early forerunner in this practice. Yet Twitter is looking at greater opportunities.

"We expect riders of every Team @Twitter to be tweeting not just before and after races, but during them. Indeed we've been working with a major component manufacturer for handlebar-mounted keyboards to facilitate this," he said. "It will be a pleasure having Taylor on Team @Twitter, firing off tweets to his captivated followers as he rides elbow-to-elbow over the cobblestones of Belgium and France."

Equipment sponsors remain to be determined, although it has been rumored that the teams will be all using OEM frames and wheels from Hong-Fu Bikes of Taiwan, with shifting and derailleurs from MicroShift.

Dramatic stuff. But we live in interesting times.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more