It seems it would be possible to get a pro to work on the project pro bono provided you picked the right guy. I was assuming the projects would go that route. Any reasonably intelligent pro cyclist would love to be the guy who set a world record like that, it's a similar achievement to the Gossamer Albatross.

But that's a very good point you've made. I obviously didn't even factor in price.

Apart from price, would a pro be prepared to risk injuring himself in a malfunction? I'd guess a typical pro would put career above engineering glory. If the pro did it for free you'd probably still have to buy an insurance policy to cover him.

Pro cycalists already take risks; if their bike has an issue, or their path has an issue such that they fall they are potentially looking at serious injury. Not to mention the fact that prior to the test proper, the mechanism would be well tested to make sure it won't fall apart, and there would likely be many practice runs with additional safety percuasions until everyone was comftorable.

Also, how is powering the first human powers flying machine not good for a professional athlete's career?

Playing with semantics, if a pro agreed to power such a helicopter, he'd most likely be doing it as an amateur, since amateurs do things for the love of it!

Pros take risks, but I'd theorise that a part of the career would be managing those risks, to maximise the career. It would be very cool to power the first human powered helicopter, but I suspect we are not typical, in that the typical punter cares more about sport than a helicopter. From a professional point of view, the fame and returns from piloting a helicopter are negligible compared to the rewards of improving in the Tour or the Giro.

I'm descending into hot air production here, since I have no real evidence on which to base it!

It looks like Cervelo was sponsoring the team, based on the bike being used appearing to be an R5 and the kit he was wearing. Nowadays Garmin (for whom Cervelo is a major co-sponsor) only has one Canadian on the team, Ryder Hesdejal, but they do have a number of Americans, including Dave Zabriskie, a reasonably slim time-trial powerhouse (read: perfect for this), who is currently sitting on his couch in Colorado unable to ride due to his six-month suspension he received as part of admitting to doping and testifying against Lance regarding his time on the US Postal team. They could have made it happen...

Do they have any rules for this that disallow doped riders? I would almost guess that would be like turbo-charging or water injection.

From the pdf linked upthread by iandanforth:

"This attempt was made in accordance with the regulations of the FAI Sporting Code including the provisions of 5.2.2.3 on Unsporting Behavior."

and googling for that reveals:

'5.2.2.3 reads: "Unsporting Behaviour. Cheating or unsporting behaviour, including deliberate attempts to deceive or mislead officials, wilful interference with other competitors, falsification of documents, use of forbidden equipment or prohibited drugs, violations of airspace, or repeated serious infringements of rules should, as a guide, result in disqualification from the sporting event."'

So I'd guess for official World Record attempts (and probably for the prize rules) doping is out. (Sounds like the pilot has enough other sporting pastimes that he'd be unlikely to dope just for this project too…)

Ha! Alternatively this could become a clumsy, comedic and highly detectable performance enhancing device on the next Tour de France

Genuine question: what are pro-cyclists generally spending their time doing? Are they in races or ramping up / recovering from races all year?

If they have downtime I don't see why you couldn't find a pro that is genuinely interested in what you're doing.

Most top tier pro cyclists clock 25000-35000 miles a year on their bikes, and race 80-140 days a year. Other than that, the job is mainly sitting around recovering. Although cycling is an incredibly complex sport, on the level of gridiron football or basketball in terms of the number of calculations that have to be made as part of tactical decisions, the longer-term playout of actions (at least in long road races) means that riders and their sporting directors (think coaches) have time to think about their decisions, and that combined with how much of racing is done on feel means there isn't the same need for things like film study and in-depth tactical coaching on a daily basis.

Athletes have a lot of what might be called downtime in their schedule, but very little actual free time. downtime is a part of training, a good nap schedule and staying well rested between training sessions and races is very important. You can't just go off and pedal a helicopter because you've got a couple hours free.

A pro cyclist might also not have the optimum watt/kg output for the time period defined for the contest.