Monitoring pill to help Aussie cyclists

A monitoring pill used in cyclist Michael Rogers' stomach could be one of the differences in Australia's gold pursuit on Beijing's roads at the Olympic Games starting next week.

The capsule is one of the gadgets devised by the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) to give Australian cyclists an edge in their quest for Olympic gold.

AIS senior sports physiologist Dr David Martin and his team have applied the latest in sports science to have the athletes in peak health and equip them with state of the art gear to place the team ahead of the peloton.

Martin said Rogers, a triple world champion in the men's individual time trial, was one of his guinea pigs at the Good Luck Beijing road cycling event 12 months ago.

"Mick Rogers had a little pill in his stomach when he was riding the test event, and it was collecting core temperature data to a data logger," he said from the track cycling team's base in Buttgen, Germany.

"This gave an insight to how hot he was actually getting."

Along with weighing Rogers to calculate his sweat rates, the collected data helped create "cooling strategies" for the expected hot and humid conditions in the Chinese capital, Martin said.

At the test event the bikes were equipped to measure the cyclist's output and to create a detailed profile of the road race course, he said.

Sara Carrigan's win in the women's road race at the last Games in Athens exemplified this preparation method, where her victory started Australia's cycling campaign of six gold medals.

"The last Olympics were a phenomenal effort," Martin said.

From the profiling done last August, the Australian cycling road team would practice on the same gradient climbs which replicated a "mini-Beijing course" near the team's base at Varese in northern Italy, he said.

"(Head women's) coach Warren MacDonald has gone so far as to even map out the final 800 metres of the road race and the time trial, which is a really difficult, undulating steep uphill kick to finish the whole thing off."

Each race had a "really demanding" loop of 23.5km, with a climb over 10km before a descent where there was no let-off, Martin said.

The men's road race is over 245.2km on Saturday August 9, while the women traverse 126.34km the next day.

Martin said the bikes would have special features for smoother performance.

"We have been looking at special coatings on the cogs to minimise friction," he said.

To combat possible effects of pollution and heat, the team would be on an advance course of probiotics to boost the immune system and prevent gastrointestinal infections.

"We populate the gut with a lot of good bacteria in attempts to increase the robustness of the athlete," he said.

Far from absorbing the Olympic experience in the athletes' village, the team would prepare in Italy so to avoid possible allergies and gastro before dropping in Beijing a few days before their events.

"They are not there for the Olympic experience," he said.

"They are there to win a medal."