Originally Posted by
big john
This past TDF winning rider posted the fastest average speed ever. But comparing the event speed from year to year can be misleading because the route changes and there may be a lot more climbing some years, more TTing, weather, etc. Plus, it's not a 2000 mile time trial. The riders are not racing the whole time and there may be significant amount of "tempo" riding.
That said, Jonas Vingegaard said they were going pretty hard last year.
Using TDF average speeds as a measure of bicycle speed capabilities is flawed.
And obviously any increase in speed with new tech is going to come in very small increments, if at all.
And you have to eliminate all of the dopers... which would be all of them, but I'm talking the Lance era dopers.
If you take Merckx - his typical TT was 46.5kph+/-. Pogs and some of the current guys are sitting at 50kph+/-. These guys, while probably not really clean, are on either end of the "doper" era. Advances in training, aero, bike tech = +/-4.5kph for the road. 4.5kph difference from a road bike to a full on TT bike. The road bike to road bike difference would be much smaller.
A bit more of a difference on the track - but that's not even apples to apples. Merckx was essentially on what would be a Walmart level road bike, and the track guys are on machines.
And you could easily say that the biggest tech advances come in the form of a TT bike for the road, and track bikes for the velo.