Boulder team Garmin-Chipotle H3O's still has its Tour de France podium dreams open, thanks to Christian Vande Velde's performance in the Alps, and possibly the performance of a Boulder company, which supplied the team with state-of-the-art motion detection analysis of their cycle fittings.

Vande Velde remained in sixth place on July 23, with his eye on the critical individual time trial this Saturday. In the final stage of the Alps, he remained with the race leaders over the Galibier, the Col de la Croix de Fer and up Alpe d'Huez, despite constant pressure from the other teams to eliminate him from contention before the time trial.

At Boulder's Retül, all eyes are always on the Tour, but this year cycling's biggest event is also a test of their own motion-capture technology. Such analysis has come a long way since first employed in film and software animation and is now employed in a variety of industrial uses, including injury prevention in assembly lines, noted Retül's Co-Founder Franko Vatterott.

For cyclists, it allows for dynamic 3-D analysis of a fitting -- which can affect everything from saddle and handlebar positions, the amount of travel in their strokes, the position of their feet on the pedals and especially their wind resistance - while ramping up the RPMs on a stationary trainer.

" It's really an incredible evolution, of sorts, in terms of technology," said said Allen Lim, PhD, the sports physiologist for the Garmin-Chipotle team, about the Retül technology and software. "This is like a stock broker going from a ticker tape to the Internet."

In November, the entire Garmin-Chipotle team actually had the advantage of using a dynamic bike-fitting with Lim and Retül fitter Todd Carver, which included fitting bikes for specific races, such as time trials or mountain stages. Retül's new portable technology -- the 45-inch by 16-inch case could go into an airline's checked bagged -- allowed all fittings to be tested while teams members rode their bikes on stationary trainers in a wind tunnel.

The Garmin-Chipotle team also took a unit to Europe for the season to fine tune the bikes and also make adjustments in case of injury.

" For the riders, this is often their first opportunity to put a set of numbers against their feel," Lim said. The Retül technology automatically and instantaneously reports data accurate to fractions of a millimeter about a rider's position as they actually work their bike on a stationary trainer.

Carver had previously worked with some of the world's top riders, using motion-detection analysis to hone their bike fittings at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. However, it wasn't until he hooked up with Retül engineer Cliff Simms and marketing director Franko Vatterott that the bike-specific technology and software was developed allowing the dynamic 3-D analysis to be easily applied to entire team's rides and to become affordable for recreational riders.

" We believe the system provides a common dynamic fit language that will ultimately be used to further the science of fitting a bicycle to the human body and therefore help manufacturers make better bikes. Not to mention everyone likes to be able to ride faster with less effort, feel more comfortable and have less pain on the bike, so our cyclist customers like it too."

The system is similar to that used for motion detection for motion pictures or video games, but employs a harness of eight LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) instead of reflectors. The LEDs are placed in key body movement locations for bike riders and tracked by three infra-red cameras resulting in three-dimensional measurements accurate to fractions of a millimeter.

For more information, contact: Franko Vatterott at 720-406-1171, pr@retul.com