Originally Posted by
Johno59
The French were so confident the upstart Lemond didn't have a clue about TT that they let him have his ridiculous clip on horns.
In the foto the bars are 6 inches too high , hence the bent arms and hunched back.
Originally Posted by
T-Mar
In the subject photo, lowering the bars farther would be detrimental. You don't want to straighten the arms. You want the forearms parallel to the ground, to minimize frontal area. Lowering the bars probably wouldn't fix the hunched back. In the early days of funny bikes, the vast majority of cyclists didn't have have the lower back flexibility to achieve a flat back. Only after this style of bicycles had been around for a while did cyclists start working on their back flexibility to further improve body position and aerodynamics.
As I understand it the advantage Lemond's aero bars, and all those since, is your arm and back muscles. rest on a vertical humerus bone. A good analogy is stand straight legged for an hour and then stand squatting . Very soon you will feel the burn. I doubt you will last 15 minutes and you will ache like hell.
Staight arms on bullhorns recognise the gain of straight bones as opposed to our featured rider's exertions.
BITD bullhorn rider's had flat backs but they couldn't compete with the amount of latic acid not produced by Scotts revolutionary clip ons.
In the the famous 1989 TT in Paris, Fignon was more than 50 secs up in the last competitive stage. Lemond was given no chance . He stormed home in record time and won by 8 seconds - the French still haven't gotten over it.😵😵😵😵😵