Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
TAMING DUST
The Absa Cape Epic is eight unforgiving days in the saddle – and is the original stage race to stream live footage from out in the field, thanks to Dimension Data. Lindsey Schutters visited the Oak Valley race village to find out more.
FROM AN AIRCRAFT, everything looks peaceful. Meanwhile, the airspace below the Bell 206L is turbulent with data. Dimension Data specialises in dealing with information coming from a cycle race. The company’s management of Tour de France 2016 saw 127,8 million data records processed in the cloud. Tracking 198 riders in 22 teams that generate 42 000 geospacial points and 75 million GPS readings is no easy task.
That data then had to be interpreted to the 17,8 million viewers on the website at a rate of 2 000 page requests per second. Live tracking one of the most watched sporting events on the planet is one thing, but relaying the raw data in an entertaining way is a completely different thing. And that’s what Dimension Data is trying to do: tell stories with data.
We’re not in Europe, though. Here at Oak Valley Estate in the Western Cape Overberg, you can barely get a 3G signal. It’s the finish line for stages 4 and 5 of the 2017 Absa Cape Epic and the area around the race village is an oak and pine forest. The Elgin Valley is a great place for growing fruit, but terrible for broadcasting live from a mountain-bike stage race.
The man expected to achieve the impossible task of getting the information from the race out into the world is Wolf Stinnes and he has an interesting track record. He heads up Didata’s so-called Black Ops team in Cape Town and it is safe to say he has a thing for sport. That interest led the company’s involvement in building five of the seven stadiums for the 2010 football World Cup. Well before the Internet of Things was coined as a buzzword, he helped fit smart building solutions to sports stadiums.
“We only got here this morning and it’s a move day so there’s always chaos,” says Stinnes from a well-constructed stage. “This is our third year with the Absa Cape Epic and those race fans who can remember back in 2014 will know that there was no news coming out of the race, just delayed footage on a Supersport packaged show.” The story about how Didata came in to revolutionise race coverage is that the founder of the Cape Epic and the regional head of Didata met on a mountain-bike trail. One of them had a mechanical.
“If we were an enterprise setting up operations to connect everything that we have here, it would be a 10-day normal working hour exercise. We had about 48 hours. At Elandskloof we had about 36 hours because someone was still getting married. On a build site we have about 20 people all told and they rig up all the infra-
structure that you see here,” he explains. That infrastracture is built on an enterprise-class fibre ring around the camp, coming from the media centre that is the heart of the operation. Reconnaissance happens about a year prior, with decisions on how to bring in the infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist coming soon after. But this is Cape Town and conditions can change at any time.
Data is transferred via a 200 Mbps uncontended international link up and down (provided by Didata subsidiary Internet Solutions) to service the media and to keep critical services running. “In addition to that link to service the higher volume times like all the TV broadcasts that go over our network, we establish a 70-megabyte satellite. Having done this for a several years we’ve established a number of things. Firstly, Cisco switches can withstand 85 degrees in the Sun. But generally we get tripped up by one of two things: power failures and power spikes.”
About 36 hours before the media visit, estate management called to say that the organisation had broken one of the tractors. What happened was that the lawnmower went over one of the fibre streams, which then wrapped around the machine. In 2015, the event organisers insisted on 200 wired points, but most of the village is now connected wirelessly. Around 1 pm there had already been 322 visitors on the network. Stinnes explains that weekends and public holidays bring many people who do software updates on the event Wi-fi.
In 2015, the event live broadcast was from a static Gopro mounted on the finish line. Then 2016 allowed video teams to move through the race village and 2017 sees high-quality livestream over the Internet from around eight in the morning until lunchtime.
The 2016 prologue was also the world’s first mountain-bike live footage streamed to TV. That footage was shot from an e-bike following the action. Now there are two helicopters alongside the four e-bikes doing the entire race.
The biggest breakthrough in the IOT space, however, is the GSMbased units that the riders are issued with. Those units allow for live tracking of riders and facilitate quicker response times from emergency personnel. It also has a by-product of raw data that can be analysed and added to race information to tell a better story. All of that is now accessible through the app and allows loved ones to track specific athletes.
The air is truly thick with data at the Absa Cape Epic and constant innovation means that it can be converted into better stories of courage and endurance of the human spirit, bringing spectators that much closer to breathing the dust. PM
For a long as he can remember, Patrick Burnett had this feeling that he wanted to do something with his hands, but didn’t know what or how or when. “At school we were taught that creativity with your hands was drawing a picture or being an artist, but I can’t even draw a stick figure.”
Burnett studied journalism at Rhodes and, by his mid-thirties, was the co-owner of a successful news agency focused on environmental issues. He had a growing, happy family and he loved some parts of his job. But something was missing. He started thinking a lot about how he could connect the passionate surfer he really was with what he did Monday to Friday. “I didn’t want to be one of those okes who crams his entire life into weekends.”
At the same time, he had a gnawing feeling that surfboards could be made in a more environmentally friendly way. Without thinking, ordered a book on building wooden surfboards and got cracking. He’d never even seen a wooden surfboard, he had no woodworking experience and he owned no power tools apart from the obligatory Ryobi drill. But as soon as he started working on that first board he was hooked. Which isn’t to say it was easy.
’ N BOER MAAK ’ N PLAN
“When I was gluing down the rails I immediately realised that the three clamps I’d picked up at my local Mica weren’t going to be enough,” he chuckles. “I rushed inside and pulled the laces from my wife’s running shoes.” She might not have been too charmed, but he managed to stick those rails down.
That was by no means the only challenge. When it was finally time to “glass” the board, Burnett couldn’t find the right type of epoxy in South Africa and had to make do with the stuff used to glue carpets down. He’d read how important it is to epoxy in a warm environment, so he pitched the family tent in the garage and filled it with heaters.
That first board was no oil painting, but he promised himself he would try to surf it at least once. “I found myself caught in the rip and this wave came and it was a good wave so I just paddled for it. I caught it and I got to my feet and I made the drop and I cruised all the way down the line. I can’t describe the satisfaction.” He went home from that surf and started planning his next board.
“Very early on I remember saying to my wife, ‘Imagine if I could do this for a living.’ And she encouraged me to go for it. Looking back, it was crazy… I was clearly a very, very long way from achieving that dream, but she backed me.”
IN THE BEGINNING
Wooden surfboards date back nearly 1 500 years to sixth-century Polynesia – but those olo were five metres long, ten centimetres thick and weighed 50
kilograms. American pioneer Tom Blake started working on the first hollow wooden board in 1926 and five years later he filed a patent for a “water sled”. Almost eighty years ago to the day he wrote an article detailing how to make and ride one of his boards for none other than Popular Mechanics.
Blake’s lake s lightning-fast boards revolu- tionised surfing until, in the 1950s, lighter synthetic materials put an end to the glory days of wooden surfboards. Or so we thought. In recent years, craftsmen in places as diverse as Maine, Ireland, Australia and Morocco have resuscitated a dying art. “There are loads of reasons to make surfboards out of wood,” explains Burnett, “It’s exceptionally beautiful, it’s a sustainable resource and it’s also very buoyant and flexible. The boards I’m making now don’t just look amazing, they’re also a pleasure to surf.”
ONE STEP AT A TIME
A hell of a lot of work goes into transforming a pile of planks into a wooden surfboard. Burnett handpicks the raw timber, based on the weight of the wood and the beauty of the grain, before milling it into wafer-thin planks. These planks are usually only about 30 centimetres wide, so both the top and the bottom of the board are made up of several pieces glued together.
The board gets its strength from a plywood frame that looks a lot like the skeleton of a fish. In the early days Burnett used to hand-cut every piece of the frame, but nowadays he gets them CNC cut using one of the 20-odd templates (for different board shapes) he has saved on his computer.
This frame is sandwiched between the top and bottom of the board, but the sides of the board – the rails – have to be built up from anywhere between five and ten individual strips of wood. The board is
then shaped, using simple tools and a lot of painstaking attention to detail. The final step in the process is glassing the board: coating it with three of four layers of environmentally friendly, plant-based epoxy.
GETTING PHILOSOPHICAL
“In the beginning, I doubted whether I’d ever be able to make boards that were as good as the ones I had in my mind, but I got there in the end,” Burnett says. “When you’re making something with your hands you have to be entirely present, making decisions for yourself. And if you get it wrong it’s hard and you have to learn.” Apart from teaching humility, mistakes force you to slow down and work in the moment – something which “brings a kind of peace” that we’re seldom able to access in our humdrum lives. “It’s similar to catching a wave,” he says with a faraway look in his eyes. “That rare moment when time stands still.”
Working with your hands teaches you that everything is part of a greater whole, says Burnett. “If you look at that finished surfboard you see the grain and you see the polish and it looks beautiful, but what’s also involved there is several hours of scraping off dried glue and another few hours of sanding… What most people would consider really menial tasks. And it’s like that for any craft – changing your engine oil, or turning a wooden bowl – even baking your own bread. If you’re not patient and you constantly want to get to the next step then you’re gonna blow.”
At the time he didn’t realise it, but Burnett was actually part of a global return to craftsmanship that has been described eloquently by Matthew Crawford, an American motorbike mechanic who also happens to have a PHD in political philosophy. Or is it the other way round? “Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honour. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience,” writes Crawford, before explaining how a good mechanic can be just as intellectual as a university professor. “And yet my decision to go into this line of work seems to perplex many people,” he observes.
The important thing, he continues, “is whether a job entails using your own judgment or not. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts,” but when you’re done fixing a motorbike it either goes or it doesn’t. Crawford argues that most modern jobs – no matter how high-powered – protect employees from “unambiguous failure”, and he doesn’t think this a good thing.
Matt Kramer, one of the very first students to complete Burnett’s boardbuilding course, couldn’t agree more: “Riding my handmade wooden board makes me feel like I’ve earned my place in the sea. I feel initiated. I know what’s inside this thing, just how much effort, love and attention to detail is engrained in its makeup, and I’m going to take a great deal of care to ensure that it stays with me as long as possible.”