06/06/08
St. Louis MO
Fylers Chief Technology Officer, Gunder Sutherland, unveiled the the long awaited rainproof wheel this afternoon at Fyler HQ. For the last several months, Sutherland and his team has been developing a wheel that will allow the Fylers to play in even the most inhospitable weather.
The wheel, originally set to debut in January, encountered a set back during the animal trials and delayed the debut several months. The mishap also managed to raise the ire of local animal rights activists resulting in multi-million dollar lawsuit settled out of court in late March. When all was said and done, the project is said to have cost the team in the neighborhood of 3.3 million dollars.
"It's a sizeable investment to be sure," says spokesman Pierre Reedy "but we feel we owe it to our fans to give our boys everything they need to come to the rink and compete."
Additional controversy boiled over when it was discovered that, beside strapping some skates to a couple of retired circus monkeys, no human or real-world testing had been done.
"The physics, the math, it's all there," sputtered Sutherland taking umbrage with the attack on his team's thoroughness. "We've run countless models, analyzed reams of data. It simply has to work. It has to."
With rain forecast for Saturday, the Fylers may have to test Sutherland's claims come Sunday June 8th at 9am. Fingers crossed for a back to back weekend of hockey.