Becoming an Olympic champion takes years of hard work, not just from the athlete but from the coach as well. As a coach, Roger needs to know about bicycle racing, which he does--earlier in his career Roger was, himself, an Olympic bicyclist. And like all great coaches and teachers, he needs to know how to communicate with and motivate his students. But there is more to it than that. Statistical analysis and mathematics play a large role in the training and development of professional athletes.

Roger utilizes data analysis and mathematics to help him coach. Heart rate monitors are strapped to the chests of the cyclists. As they go through their workouts the device measures how many times in one minute the heart is beating. Too many beats per minute and Roger knows the biker is working too hard and he or she should back off a bit before getting hurt. Not enough heartbeats per minute and its time for a little pep talk.

Over the long run it's possible to graph exactly what progress the athlete is making. Roger can look at an athlete's data at the start of the training and see that at the proper heartbeat rate the person averaged, say, 18 miles an hour. He can then compare that to a current chart and see that now the cyclist is averaging 22 miles per hour. This indicates the cyclist is going faster but with the exact same effort, and this means the training is working the way it should. And when the training works, champions are created.