Originally Posted by
RChung
... I'd say it was much later: probably around seven or eight years ago. When I bought my last road bike six years ago, I got the aero bike that, at the time, had the largest fork clearance possible so I could run 25mm tires at lower pressure when most other aero bikes were limited to 23's.
I would say the breakthrough came when Tom Anhalt showed his field test results against roller data (on Slowtwitch.com as I remember). Before that, the common wisdom was that rolling resistance monotonically decreased with increasing pressure. Tom showed that out on a road, there was a break point where the steady decrease abruptly changed to an increase with pressure. That really opened the floodgates as others began doing similar tests and it wasn't long after that the mechanism was identified. I can't remember what year that was but he used virtual elevation so it must have been after 2007 (but probably not much after).