Interesting article studying race radio

On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 1:36:36 PM UTC-7, Fred Flintstein wrote:
On 3/23/2011 12:12 PM, Mike Jacoubowsky wrote:
http://inrng.com/?p=2149#more-2149

Not what you would expect to see... somebody actually did study the
difference between races with & without race radio. And with a different
outcome than many would think.

I'm not certain 1991-1996 vs 2001-2005 TdF stages are otherwise-equal;
you're comparing pre-Lance to Lance days, and regardless of what you
think of Lance himself, Bruyneel brought a different style of racing to
the Peloton, that of everyone dying for the King. At least it's my
perception, possibly wrong, that pre-Lance it was more likely your GC
guy didn't have the entire team at his disposal, but rather you'd have
your separate sprinters & breakaway guys... something not possible with
a classic Lance/Bruyneel team.

The two periods are very comparable. LANCE/Bruyneel was a refinement
of Indurain/Echavarri. Their approaches were analogous, a dominant
rider with support from riders that were excellent grand tour riders
on their own.

Both teams put a lot of effort into suppressing attacks by riding an
aggressive tempo so it shouldn't be a surprise that the end results
were also very similar.

Was the other consideration that in the pre-radio era, racing was more aggresively negative, due to the need to be more conservative (less info=less margin) in releasing and recovering breakaways?

On Mar 24, 2:31*pm, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 1:36:36 PM UTC-7, Fred Flintstein wrote:
On 3/23/2011 12:12 PM, Mike Jacoubowsky wrote:
http://inrng.com/?p=2149#more-2149

Not what you would expect to see... somebody actually did study the
difference between races with & without race radio. And with a different
outcome than many would think.

I'm not certain 1991-1996 vs 2001-2005 TdF stages are otherwise-equal;
you're comparing pre-Lance to Lance days, and regardless of what you
think of Lance himself, Bruyneel brought a different style of racing to
the Peloton, that of everyone dying for the King. At least it's my
perception, possibly wrong, that pre-Lance it was more likely your GC
guy didn't have the entire team at his disposal, but rather you'd have
your separate sprinters & breakaway guys... something not possible with
a classic Lance/Bruyneel team.
The two periods are very comparable. LANCE/Bruyneel was a refinement
of Indurain/Echavarri. Their approaches were analogous, a dominant
rider with support from riders that were excellent grand tour riders
on their own.

Both teams put a lot of effort into suppressing attacks by riding an
aggressive tempo so it shouldn't be a surprise that the end results
were also very similar.

Was the other consideration that in the pre-radio era, racing was more aggresively negative, due to the need to be more conservative (less info=less margin) in releasing and recovering breakaways?

The article makes a big deal out of the fact that in the
radio era, the gap between breakaway and peloton is
larger, implying I guess that the peloton gives up more
efficiently in the radio era.

It's not clear that one should combine stages on which the
peloton just fails to catch the escape (gap less than a couple
minutes) and stages where the peloton gives up and mails it
in ( 8-10 minute gaps). It's also not clear what they did to
calculate this number - for example calculating the median
gap is much less sensitive to outliers than the mean gap,
which will get pulled up by the occasional stage with a
30 minute gap. This is also something where behavior is
different on mountain and flat stages.

In any case, I don't see how much that gap has to do with
radios. The chalkboard man existed before, so it's not like
the riders were unaware of the time gap.

Fredmaster Ben

On 3/24/2011 9:58 PM, Fredmaster of Brainerd wrote:
On Mar 24, 2:31 pm, Ryan wrote:
On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 1:36:36 PM UTC-7, Fred Flintstein wrote:
On 3/23/2011 12:12 PM, Mike Jacoubowsky wrote:
http://inrng.com/?p=2149#more-2149

Not what you would expect to see... somebody actually did study the
difference between races with& without race radio. And with a different
outcome than many would think.

I'm not certain 1991-1996 vs 2001-2005 TdF stages are otherwise-equal;
you're comparing pre-Lance to Lance days, and regardless of what you
think of Lance himself, Bruyneel brought a different style of racing to
the Peloton, that of everyone dying for the King. At least it's my
perception, possibly wrong, that pre-Lance it was more likely your GC
guy didn't have the entire team at his disposal, but rather you'd have
your separate sprinters& breakaway guys... something not possible with
a classic Lance/Bruyneel team.
The two periods are very comparable. LANCE/Bruyneel was a refinement
of Indurain/Echavarri. Their approaches were analogous, a dominant
rider with support from riders that were excellent grand tour riders
on their own.

Both teams put a lot of effort into suppressing attacks by riding an
aggressive tempo so it shouldn't be a surprise that the end results
were also very similar.

Was the other consideration that in the pre-radio era, racing was more aggresively negative, due to the need to be more conservative (less info=less margin) in releasing and recovering breakaways?

The article makes a big deal out of the fact that in the
radio era, the gap between breakaway and peloton is
larger, implying I guess that the peloton gives up more
efficiently in the radio era.

It's not clear that one should combine stages on which the
peloton just fails to catch the escape (gap less than a couple
minutes) and stages where the peloton gives up and mails it
in ( 8-10 minute gaps). It's also not clear what they did to
calculate this number - for example calculating the median
gap is much less sensitive to outliers than the mean gap,
which will get pulled up by the occasional stage with a
30 minute gap. This is also something where behavior is
different on mountain and flat stages.

In any case, I don't see how much that gap has to do with
radios. The chalkboard man existed before, so it's not like
the riders were unaware of the time gap.

Fredmaster Ben

Yes. I've never accepted that radios = more information.
Radios = faster transmission, which is not the same thing.

And I was wrong about Bruyneel refining Echavarri's strategy.
If you watch the Leth documentary 'Stars and Watercarriers',
you see many instances where the Molteni team sets a difficult
tempo as part of Merckx' strategy.

The 'Road of Pain segment' from the movie is worth watching
over and over.

Fred Flintstein

On Mar 25, 12:13*am, Fred Flintstein
wrote:
Yes. I've never accepted that radios = more information.
Radios = faster transmission, which is not the same thing.

True, but with some time-sensitive information, having it arrive too
slowly or too late may change it from "information" to simply data or
even noise.

On Mar 25, 12:13*am, Fred Flintstein

And I was wrong about Bruyneel refining Echavarri's strategy.
If you watch the Leth documentary 'Stars and Watercarriers',
you see many instances where the Molteni team sets a difficult
tempo as part of Merckx' strategy.


dumbass,

are you disputing that armstrong and bruyneel invented GC team
tactics ?

armstrong also invented scouting the climbs before the race and
"spinning" a high cadence.

On Mar 28, 1:26*pm, Amit Ghosh wrote:
On Mar 25, 12:13*am, Fred Flintstein

And I was wrong about Bruyneel refining Echavarri's strategy.
If you watch the Leth documentary 'Stars and Watercarriers',
you see many instances where the Molteni team sets a difficult
tempo as part of Merckx' strategy.

dumbass,

are you disputing that armstrong and bruyneel invented GC team
tactics ?

armstrong also invented scouting the climbs before the race and
"spinning" a high cadence.

Don't forget the interweb, he invented that, too

Fred