"Stewart Fleming" wrote in message
news:1067461343.496514@ns...


Rik O'Shea wrote:

Most people who race or follow cycling know that it is effectively a
sport in which one's performance is governed to a large extent by ones
power output. A good sprinter is defined by someone with a high
top-end power output, a good climber by a high power to weight ratio
and a time trialist by their power output at aerobic threshold. Of
course there are other factors that come into play but power tends to
be the key overriding factor.

Don't forget that HR data is often useful :-)

That is a good point. If we had the HR values for each of the ITTs, we would
probably see that Lance was not working nearly as hard in the earlier ITTs
when he was not a contender for the stage or GC.

Still, you have to be realistic Stew. Those numbers are hard to come by and
even then would not tell the whole story. I agree it would possibly have
proven the point that Lance went harder in the ITTs in the Tours that he
won, but you would not know unless you have them. I guess that is why it is
foolish for the coach to not track HR and keep in in the athlete's data.


Seriously, your estimates for Indurain's aerobic power are on the high
side. 515-550W would be typical for his Tour-winning days. I don't
recall exactly, but I think the 550W figure was at/before his successful
hour record attempt.

The highest estimate I ever saw for any of his ITT wins was 550 and that was
not knowing his drag values.

John Cobb had an article last year (sorry, but I didn't record the link)
where he detailed the work that had been done over some period of time
on improving Armstrong's power output and reducing frontal area and
other drag characteristics in order to improve time-trial performance.

AFAIK, they have made changes each year. The most work was done prior to the
1999 Tour. More win tunnel work is done each year and there are not only pos
ition refinements but each hardware vendor has brought new and faster
equipment as well. I can't think of a single component that was not changed
in his TT setup.