Originally Posted by
63rickert
Team issue for pros in 2019 is 49x10 for top gear. Doesn't matter the amateurs and the punters are not strong enough to push that gear, the pros use it and it will soon be normal for all of us. Just as 53x12 became normal and 50x11 became normal.
Eddy Merckx used a top of 53x13. We are all stronger than Eddy now. My point, which I assumed most would miss, even if anyone read it, was that brifters encourage riders to keep shifting and shifting and shifting some more, until everyone ends up in the big gear. Doing a weightlifting stomp.
As far as I am concerned the top three and often the top four gears on mass market bikes are useless. At which point it makes sense to ask why do we need 10 or 11 or 12 different cogs in back? But I am not selling new bikes. And I don't believe ad copy.
This has very little to do with brifters, and more to do with having more gears. There's very little con to adding an overdrive. There is no SRAM team issue. Riders get to pick from the options what they want for whatever they do. If they don't need the full range of gears most of the time on a flatish stage, they're going to gravitate towards bigger rings as they are marginally more efficient for any given ratio. You act like pro gear ratios on road bikes for sale to the public is somehow a new thing. It isn't.
I have never once seen anyone substantiate that Eddy's biggest gear was 53x13. It was the big gear readily available on road bikes of the era, yes, but there were bigger when paired with bigger rings and when you have limited gear choices, there are always compromises that have to be made. It's not about being stronger than Eddy, it's about trade-offs. Eddy didn't just go what's the biggest gear he could use then settle on 53x13. Adding a higher gear comes at the cost of losing another gear. More gears means fewer trade-offs. With 11 speeds you can have your straight block, a climbing cog and your silly TT downhill tailwind high gear at the same time. No, brifters do not encourage you into shifting into your highest gear. You just previously said yourself brifters enable you to keep your cadence within 5rpm.
If high gears bother you that much, buy junior cassettes or run a CX/subcompact crank, or just blame everything on newfangled evil brifters I guess.