Originally Posted by
gtrob
And then the US women went out and had over a second on them by the 125m mark, talk about a fast start. They almost held it too. When you have a 5s lead on 3rd place maybe they pulled back on purpose? Coach could easily slow them down 1/10th a lap and save them the effort.
I think its clear based on times it will be UKvsUS and AUSvsCAN, but its so close it could go either way in each race.
They definitely slowed down, but that might have been due to Catlin pulling off, too. This is my rough charting of their splits:
Add 15 to the x-axis to get the lap splits - I subtracted it to condense the x-axis and make the differences a bit clearer. They had a ~20.15 starting lap and then were in the low- to mid-15s for a while, until a few that were 16+. Although take these numbers with a healthy grain of salt - I didn't have a great view of the line on each lap when I took splits. It was dependent on whatever camera angles their producers were giving, and when.
What is clear is a slowdown in the last km. Whether they slowed down due to their 4th rider's removal, or due to their coach dialing them back a bit - not sure. It would be nice to go back to the video and look at who was pulling when and for how long.