Cranking it up for Paris, new bike set to keep British on a roll

(Fixes typo in bike name in paragraph 21)

By Martyn Herman

LONDON :The old saying that a worker is only as good as their tools could be applied to the world of elite track cycling where Olympic medals are often decided by fractions of seconds.

So delivering a bike that can maintain Britain's more than decade-long domination of the velodrome at the Paris Olympics is a process that occupies many of Oliver Caddy's waking hours.

Caddy is the Lead Project Engineer for British Cycling and it has been his job assembling the jigsaw of components that make up the recently-unveiled Hope GBT Paris - a machine that has pushed the boundaries of bicycle design.

"It's in my DNA," Caddy, a former competitive racer who joined British Cycling's so-called Secret Squirrels Club nine years ago, told Reuters. "I've either been riding bikes or taking them to bits and putting them through my mum's dishwasher for as long as I can remember. A combination of Lego and cycling has led me to where I am."

The Paris bike is once again a collaboration between British Cycling's in-house developers and the best of British engineering including Lotus Engineering, Renishaw and Hope Technology.

While, to the untrained eye, the space-age black bike looks like the one used in Tokyo where Britain again topped the track cycling medals table - there are modifications including the Renishaw 3D-printed titanium pedal cranks, a split seat post and serrated front forks developed by Lotus and British Cycling.

The carbon fibre frame, manufactured by Hope in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, has several other tweaks.

The mission, according to Caddy, is achieving aerodynamic harmony between bike and rider.

"We stopped thinking of just the bike or just the rider alone quite a while ago,"