What is your first memory of making an upgrade to your equipment as an athlete?​ 

To be honest as a young racer I was not interested in improving my equipment so much as improving the quality of my training. And very early in my experience as an amateur racer I had the idea that to improve training quality you had to be able to measure performance. The easiest way to measure performance is to measure power. So, my goal was to create a tool to measure power.

Can you remember the first time you were able to use your homemade power meter?

Sure. I put it on my bike at a local race and everybody of course laughed at me and said ‘what is that Gameboy on your bike’. But then during the race I would be on a climb and I would get dropped and I could see how many watts we were doing in that moment. So now I knew the limits of my power but I also knew how many watts my competitors were doing. Knowing this made training easier as I knew what the target was. These days everybody trains this way but I was the first!

Who was the athlete (or coach) who most influenced your approach to further developing the SRM product? Who pushed you hardest to improve?

To be honest most athletes do not have the specific knowledge or experience to really make technical demands from the power meter. But there were some athletes who were particularly interested and demanding about equipment and the SRM. Greg Lemond for example was the first athlete who contacted me who wanted to use the SRM during a race. He used it during his return to racing at the Giro d’Italia in 1994 at team GAN. The other big innovator was Bjarne Riis. He was the first guy to win a race with a power meter on his bike during the race. That was the Amstel Gold Race in 1997. He sent me the data, I was able to see the watts he was producing in the last hour when he was riding alone and understood the level needed. I started working with Bjarne in 1996 when he moved to Team Telekom and he told them he wanted to win the Tour de France. They said Bjarne you are living in the clouds. But he was not put off. He made an appointment with Fausto Pinarello, went to visit them to see what bikes Indurain had been using to win the tour the last five years, went to Mallorca with me, did aerodynamic tests… And then he won the TDF 1996. Athletes like Lemond and Riis didn’t necessarily change the way I designed my product but they made it public and made more well known the use of technology to improve training.

Has there been any other invention or innovation you were involved in that comes from a direct request of an athlete, coach or federation?

The German federation asked me to create an ergometer that allowed the rider during testing to keep a constant cadence. They wanted this to understand the cadence that allows you to put out optimal power. The results were interesting: for track sprinters cadence for optimal power was 160rpm, for triathletes 95. Another request was to measure oval chainrings versus round chainrings and different crank lengths. But on these criteria we could not see significant differences.