Uli Schoberer — Inventing the first Cycling Power Meter

Uli ,  it’s good to see you. Let’s start with the founding journey of the power meter back in 1988. 

At the time a lot of young people, did a lot of sports and even I would say more competitive sports than they do now. And I started as a normal guy doing soccer, maybe swimming. I ended up doing bike races because my father also rode a lot of the bike and I was maybe around 15. Every weekend I raced and then later I went to university to start studying medical engineering. And still, at the weekends, I went to Belgium, Holland, Germany, and all around the world, to do the races.

I was not the best cyclist, so I was an average cyclist and I was thinking, how could I train better to improve my performance? And as an engineer, I was thinking okay, what describes your performance? Is it your heart rate? Is it how fast you feel? I came to the point that I said no, it’s the power you can produce. And then I was thinking okay, what is the power? The power is two things on the bicycle more or less how hard you push the pedals and how fast you push the pedals. So you have to measure two parameters one is the force of the pedal and the other is, let’s say the cadets.

Or on the bike, the force will deprecate it with the crank. Length is the torque and the cadets are more or less the angular velocity, in technical words. So I was thinking, okay, I started reading all the training books. And it’s easy, maybe in running or in swimming to measure performance, because there the outside environment is more stable. However on the bicycle, you have flats, you have headwind, you have backwind, you have climbs, you can beat the draft.

So the speed does not tell you that much how strong you are. So you need to have the power. You need to measure the power. This tells you exactly how strong you are and where you know your body weight, or maybe your aerodynamic positions. You can easily calculate how fast you can ride and how strong you are. So I said, okay, on the bike, how can I measure the power? And the first point is when your foot type shifts the pedal ,  the bike is the pedal.

Then from the pedal, the force goes to the pedal spindle, then it goes towards the cranks, then it goes to the axle, then it goes to the chain ring, to the BB with the bespoke, and finally to the rear tire.

So there’s a long chain where the force or the power goes on the road. At that time I was thinking, okay, it’s easiest to maybe put some strain towards the edges on the cranks, measure the bending of the cranks, and then see how good you are. But when you look back at the 80s, it was not easy... There wasn’t ANT Bluetooth ,  it was basically non-existent. Even not a bike computer existed. So I said, okay, the cranks you need to dismount is difficult.

I did on the cranks and did those on the pedals. And then I was thinking there needs to be a better point that the first point on the bike where all the forces come together is the piece that’s between the pedal spindle and the chain links. It’s now called ‘Spider’. So I said, okay, I need to measure the power in the Spider because the left and right leg are already added. And then I measured only what goes to the chain because all the quantitative forces do not exist there. As you can stand on the pedal, you have no force on the chain as long as you start a power, and then you get force on the chain.

So I started creating devices, putting strain gages on the so-called spider. And so okay, then I had a problem. How can I transmit the data? Because you did not yet have Bluetooth or ANT. So we developed our own protocol, more or less. This was with a coil. This was a similar system. Also what Polar used with their first hardware monitors. You essentially have a coil that transmits data to a receiver on the frame.

We did this, I think more than 20 years for our power meters. So I developed a way to transmit the data from the Spider to the frame. We also added a small bike computer that was able to show and store the data with software at that time. So racing on the weekend, going there with a big computer on the handlebar. This was the size of, let’s say at that time a GameBoy ,  the other cyclists were laughing.

What does he have there? Who needs a bicycle computer? Then once during a race, I ran in a pothole and the computer fell off the handlebar.

I stopped in the race, picked the pieces up, put them back in the jersey, and went back in the race, the others were laughing. But being on the weekend at races, I was able to see or meet a lot of very good guys. They were on a national team. And I spoke with the coach of that region in Germany and he said that this would be interesting for the cyclists to use on the track, to use on the velodrome.

Then I got in touch with at that time the best cyclists. Then it was time for me to go to the military. At that time it was mandatory in Germany. Every guy in Germany had to do a one-and-a-half year of military service. I was able to go into the sports company working with athletes, using my instrument to prove their performance. And so then right away I was able to work with the best German athletes.

They trained for the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992 or something. At the first world championship, they used this in Maebashi, Japan.

This was before the reunion of East and West Germany. Also, the East German guys, used this on the road in the 100-kilometer team time trial. But then the first world championship was in 1991. This was in Stuttgart. So I started working with the German national team. Moreover, when you go to these events, when you go into the training camps, you see the other nations. I met the guy, the US national coach.

His name was Chris Carmichael. He later was the coach of Lance Armstrong and he was very interested in the technology. The next Olympic games were being held in Atlanta, US, and he said it would be good to help the mountain bikers. So at the same time, I worked a little bit with the US mountain bikers. And they used this for mountain biking at the pre-Olympic races in Atlanta. And so I had very quick access to very good athletes.

At the same time, I was introduced to Greg LeMond, who was the world's best cyclist, and the Tour de France winner, who tried the power meter system. He also did one year with the equipment. And so it was then for the best who were smart, they used it, but also in the same now, I live close to Cologne. There was a part of the German space agency and they had a cooperation in Italy with the University of Girona.

There was a professor there who was responsible for the fitness of the Russian cosmonauts in the space station. And he said they needed an instrument that measures the decrease in performance when you’re in space with no gravity. So I went there, and we developed a device that could go on the space station. And there I met the guys from the University in Ferrara. They worked at that time for the UCI, for their research.

So I also got very quick access to all the Italian athletes like Gianni Bugno. And then they trained the Dutch guys that were training in Italy, like Rolf Sørensen and Bjarne Riis who lived in Luca. So this was the way also to get closer to Italy.

And more or less also the reason now why I live in Italy two times of a year, so that’s more or less the way the start of the system was. And then when you go back to the quantity of the product was not that much, but it was only built for national teams and elite professionals. Maybe he bought two systems and he put it from one bike to the next bike to the next bike to the next bike, and the bike was done. But as I’m detached now, it’s different. Now a professional, not me, but from other companies, they get money to use their product ,  at that time it was not the case.

Basically, you came up with the idea and you used first principles to build the device itself. From the beginning, how did you approach it from a business perspective?

So at the start, I did everything alone. Later I got other people who helped me to design a computer. I’m not the best guy when it comes to making a computer. I’m good at mechanics, like developing strain gages and developing the mechanic devices, and then also guys who developed the software to evaluate the data. But the price of the system, I think the first system I already put up for maybe 5,000 German marks, which is right now around 3,000 euros.

So I know it cannot be cheap because I know the amount of work and what this all costs. And I know, okay, I need to have a certain price to survive. And I made in the first years maybe 200 systems a year. And they all were built by me. And I delivered to the athletes and the quality was good. Based on the system I built, they were able to use it for four or five years. So it was not finished after one year or two years.

And the people wanted it and they paid. There was not a discussion about this as for them it was an important tool. Like you are, let’s say, a good cook, you buy the best knives or something, or you are a designer, you want a good computer and you buy your computer to do good work.

This was the method that didn’t work for all professionals, but with the professionals I worked with. They gave me the money and they bought it. I worked mainly with the national teams. They bought them because they wanted to win medals at the Olympics and they needed good tools. So this was not a problem. It later became a problem, because also I was able to get a patent for this. I think it expired around 2008 because from that point the patent expired because it was based on power meters for crank drive.

A lot of others started copying and then the market got flooded with more or less copies. But then also with power meters, they should not use the name power meter. And now I think if you do some market research, maybe you find 20 different power meters on the market. And I do not know if they all make really good business and can survive, because some have already disappeared.

Let’s go to the Lance Armstrong story because I spoke to him a few days ago. We recently met in Vegas and Lance is an investor in Terra as well. Can you tell us the story of how you started working with Lance?

I think I came to a race in Belgium when I met with Chris Carmichael with the team US Postal. I went there and then I spent time with the team and explained the technology to him and he was happy to use it. He always called me directly if he wanted something. He would often pick up the phone and call with questions. 

Do you know how he used it over time?

He was not really interested in downloading the data to analyze. He was looking at the bike computer and then knowing what he was doing. When he was doing intervals in the mountains, he was looking at the computer, okay, I pushed the watts I wanted. And then for him, when the training was over, it was history. Not any more interesting, not like later sitting on a computer and analyzing the data. Now he wants the information instantaneous as actual feedback in the training.

Then say, okay, this was good. He knows this is faster, not like others, then recording, and then later sitting for hours and analyzing the data. He was by far not that guy.

Yeah, he was telling me this story that basically he was looking at two things ,  one, the power, and secondly his heart rate. And his goal was to keep his heart rate at 200 bpm ,  unbelievable. For 1 hour straight and then 2 hours straight. And then he was trying to up the power based on his heart rate being so high. All the time I was like, how can you even do it? How can you even go to 200 bpm for 1 hour straight? This is unbelievable. 

Yeah, but you must have the genetic disposition to do this. Others cannot do this and are finished at 150. It was at a high cadence at that time and now it's getting more popular. But this was very smart of him, because, you know, a race engine gets the high power by a high rpm of the engine because power is cadence multiplied with force or with torque. So if you double the cadence, you can double the power and keep the force the same, because the force is limited to your muscles.

But when you increase the cadence, you can easily get a higher power. But to have this high cadence, we need maximum oxygen and you need to train this. But he was one of the first who was able to do this ,  attack and then keep a high cadence up with the high power till the top and the others were pushing the bigger gears. If you are trained, I think it’s less stressful for the muscles, but now things have changed.

What do you think is the future of the cycling space in the next five or ten years?

I think soon it will come to the point with the Tour de France and at other events that they will use electric bikes. And I think it will come maybe in a way that you are allowed to carry an X amount of battery and then at the start line, maybe all the batteries are empty or fully charged. Everyone should have the same and then you are allowed to have a motor. I do not know if we’ll be limited with a certain torque, because this depends then on the weight of the cyclist or if they say we don’t care about the strength of the motor.

And that I also do not know if they say this depends also on your weight, how heavy you are or not, or they give everything open and only it’s the rule at the start everything needs to be empty. We don’t worry how much you have, but no energy should be stored in the bike. So then the challenge would be in the race to charge the battery of your bike with your own energy because there is no energy at the start.

So then the team should maybe aim to have the team leader as economical as possible at the point where it counts. Then he can use the additional energy, his own energy that is stored in the bike for whatever he wants. You already have similar things in Formula 1, where you have a boost mode and others. Because I think the electric industry with bikes will want to push this forward ,  this is what I think.

But to make the regulation is perhaps difficult and I think maybe at my point the easiest is if you say at the start line everyone should be empty and then it’s up to each rider to put in the power, but then the bike gets heavier and you need longer to charge ,  so it will be up to each rider. Eventually, this would give a lot of freedom for the engineering teams and then the helpers need to get the guy in the draft so that he always puts a little energy in his battery in order to have energy at the final climb so that the batteries are full.

Then you would see them up in speed to around 50 km/hour. Yeah, and the sparks will come out of the rockets of the bikes. I think this would be really interesting for the spectators too.