Originally Posted by DrIsotope

I was talking about Strava with one of the guys at my LBS, he a very KOM-centric sort of roadie guy. One of the only things we share in common is regularly losing leaderboard positions to 17-year-old kids that ride for the California Juniors teams. Whaddaya gonna do, right? Anyhow, his summation of Strava goes something like this: "Strava hasn't even been around 10 years, and you'll see most of the local KOMs are all weather based. Some guy gets the lucky tailwind, or better, has a paceline to pull him into that tailwind. If you expanded it out over time-- say 100 years into the future-- every Strava KOM will be unattainable. Because it will be held by a guy that had a leadout man and a 30mph tailwind."

Doesn't help that we have an annual bike race here, so any segment in the road course, or on any of the road between the event stages and the houses the teams stay at, the top 200-300 positions on the leaderboards are just clogged with pro times. So I lean into it. I routinely play leadout man for my wife-- I take her into segments and break the air for her. She's got something like 70 QOMs.