It’s AI week here on Tan Tenovo’s House of Irritability, and once again we’ll be taking a look at the profound ethical, legal, financial, and cultural implications of this controversial technology and its evolving impact on the cycling landscape.
Nah.
But we are going to look at more zany AI stuff though:
Of course we all know that Cavendish has had a long relationship with glasses:
But few appreciate just how long it has been:
“I remember my first set of Oakleys. It was at the National Track Championships and I was about 14. It was at the Manchester Velodrome — there was a store there and there was a pair of BMX chrome-end frames. I said to my dad, ‘If I win, can I get them?’”
I was confused about the “chrome-end frames” until I realized he was probably just talking about M Frames and the transcription software screwed up.
AI off to a great start right out of the gate.
In any case, he’s been wearing them ever since:
He did win that day and his dad came good for his birthday. “I still have them. And from that moment, I never wore anything else.”
And no, I will not ask the AI to generate an image of Mark Cavendish wearing nothing but a pair of M Frames.
Thanks to Cavendish’s dedication to Oakley he now seems to have a deep relationship with Luxottica, for whom he speaks at conferences and stuff:
Hosted in Monaco by the Italian eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, which owns not only Oakley but also Ray-Ban and Persol, and makes many glasses for luxury brands too, Prada, Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren among them — this conference, called Switch, is attended by more than a thousand professionals in optometry, or eyecare, from opticians to doctors and scientists.
And me, an amateur cyclist and full-time optical glasses wearer.
If you don’t know about Luxottica, they’re basically to glasses what Pon Holdings is to bikes, except they own all the glasses companies and not just some of them, and they make Pon look like three guys in a garage.
Of course the next frontier in sports eyewear is AI, and so now Cavendish is pushing their Futuristic Space Glasses:
He explains how effectively these glasses bring real-time data to the user: speed, heart rate, recording stabilised video from your point of view, integration with fitness apps like Strava and Garmin, as well as connectivity to phone and messages — all this can be accessed through audio, hands free.
This technology promises to make your GPS and all that other stuff obsolete:
Getting your information through the glasses’ microphones instead has safety implications, of course, but also more nuanced advantages. The sportsman who might otherwise be locked into their phone or computer is now free to be present in the environment they are actually inhabiting. Connect your glasses by Bluetooth to a smartphone or a Garmin smartwatch and then ask “Hey Meta” for information like speed, distance travelled, heartrate or navigation guidance, and you’ll hear a voice telling you the information through the speakers in the arms of the glasses.
And Cavendish finds this scary, though he’s got enough of a handle on his fear to keep promoting the glasses:
Being able to concentrate 100 per cent on performance is one benefit of the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses, which have taken the shield lens design so familiar from its non-AI Oakley predecessors. But being able to instantly access data about your performance, and log that data over time, is another. “It’s actually quite scary,” Cavendish says. “AI will learn your body better than any coach, because it has the data there and then.”
He even sees the day when a competing cyclist will be able to ditch their radio set-up — earpieces connected to radio units they are carrying in their jerseys, which they use to keep in touch with their team cars and teammates to discuss strategy and exchange information. In future you will be able to communicate direct through your Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses. Incidentally, these have the speakers and microphone enhanced to compensate for the noise from activity, like wind. “Going forward, there might not be a need for a directeur sportif — the bosses in the cars — because AI is actually going to know what’s happening.”
And it’s not just for pros, either:
But at present, says Diogo Guimaraes the VP global brand activation at Oakley, the official cycling bodies are not allowing Oakley Meta to be worn for competitions. “It feels like an unfair advantage,” he explains — even though they do not give you any physical edge. Nonetheless Guimaraes thinks that cycling will have to embrace them at some point: “The adoption is super strong, especially among the high level of athletes,” he says. However, the technology is not just for the elite, he explains. “The beauty of it is that exactly the same data is available for me and you as for a guy like Mark Cavendish.” For the everyday athlete, there is also the convenience of hands-free connectivity and the ability to take pictures and film and post to social media without slowing down.
I will certainly admit that as a former semi-professional bike blogger turned leisure blogger I do like the pictures and film part, even if I do think fishing your phone out of your jersey pocket and trying not to drop it or crash or both is an integral part of the blogging experience. But I do strongly disagree with Oakley’s brand guy in the sense that the data that is available to Cavendish is absolutely not available to me. Cavendish is an elite athlete, whereas the only data available to me is this:
That was the AI’s second crack at the prompt, in case you’re wondering. The first one was this:
A few more passes and it would have been perfect, but I’m too lazy even for AI, so some problems remain. For example, why are all the cars from the 1970s? Still, I’m torn between being afraid of AI and being in awe of it because it gives me god-like photo editing power. Image curation has always been the weakest of my many weak points, which is why the images on this blog used to look like this:
And yes, I realize the lo-fi aspect is part of the charm, but like many of your favorite rock artists I probably never would have bothered with it had I access to more resources and better technology at the time.
Anyway, Cavendish has brought us much enjoyment over the years, so I’m glad he’s gainfully employed and enjoying his retirement from the sport:
Now that Cavendish has retired from pro competition, what he enjoys the most about Oakley Meta is the “little stuff”, he says. “You can ask it, ‘If I’m going at this speed and at this power, how long will it take to get home?’”
Though now that he’s no longer racing why doesn’t he ditch the metrics and JBARA? And if he still needs a pair of smart glasses he can wear Rivendell’s version, which is a paper cue sheet binder-clipped to a pair of wire-rim spectacles you found at an estate sale.
As for the current pros, most of them seem to be represented by this guy:
I found this part particularly noteworthy:
And when he speaks, people take note.
Recently, he caused minor uproar for suggesting that a Visma-Lease a Bike team car crashed into Pogačar on stage 18 of last year’s Tour de France, despite Pogačar stating he suffered a knee injury before the apparent incident. Carera also slammed efforts to monitor riders’ power files in an attempt to detect cheating, stating that “we do not have a doping problem”.
“Sometimes people like my opinion, sometimes they don’t,” he says. “Sometimes people don’t have the balls to say it. For this reason, journalists call and ask me. I only have one face.”
Notice he didn’t say there’s no doping in cycling, he just said it wasn’t a problem.
Now that’s what you call a pragmatist.