Originally Posted by
Six jours
An earlier poster kind of beat me to it, but it's worth pointing out that in the 80s, the TdF winners averaged 23.1 MPH, while in the 2000s, they averaged 25 MPH. Even ignoring better roads, shorter stages, and EPO, the bike just isn't worth 5 MPH.
I agree. Their "programs" now encompass everything from aero to diet to sleep to tactics, all fed into computers and optimum decisions made. These guys know the watts it takes to pee. They get together in the off-season camps to develop strategies on riding, terrain, tactics, along with conditioning, bike setups, diet, body-mass indexes, recovery strategies, coordination of support and equipment, even just getting to and from the venues. The contending pro cyclists, these days, are managed machines, and often what separates them is their suffering psyche, and how their genetics react to their training regimen.
All other noise aside, riders like Armstrong and the top of the pack were competitive, driven beasts long before we knew who they were. They simply had the egines. Very early testing identified Contador's engine. Armstrong was killng 'em in 5K's and 10K's as a teenager. These engines were simply plugged into systems, and set upon bikes. The bike was the platform that displayed their considerable abilities to suffer, push themselves, and tactically dominate others on pretty much similar platforms.
What the guys in the 80's did, and into the 90's, was generate information that is now being used to make the entire peloton just under 8% faster. The bike is not the major factor in that 8%.
Most team managers just don't want the bike to be the factor in not winning. Amateur cyclists tend to amplify that anxiety and make it bigger than it is.
I know where the blame for my lack of success in the TdF lies. It's definitely not my bike.