Originally Posted by
Trakhak
If spinning low gears was crucial for those 80-year-old spinning mentors when they were racing as professionals or amateurs 50 years ago, why did they all insist on using, e.g., 42/21 as their climbing gear? Or, reluctantly, for the toughest climbs, maybe 42/23 for a bailout gear? (In the early '80's, one of the guys on my team insisted on using a 44/18 as his only cluster for even the hilliest races.)
Almost all, that is:
Giovanni Battaglin attributed a Giro win to his use of a triple crank.
(Edit: forgot to mention that the lowest climbing gear used in the '50's was often 47/21 or 23!)
It's amazing how long it took for the racing community to accept that spinning lower gears wins mountainous races.
But maybe they'd all still be grunting up hills if not for the fact that the manufacturers kept adding sprockets to the cluster to persuade their customer base that they had to buy the latest and greatest. They quickly fetched up against a limit on the small sprockets, so all they could do was add larger and larger climbing sprockets.
That's one of the few obvious instances where market-driven changes actually unambiguously benefited the riders. Looking at videos of pros climbing in the Alps or Pyrenees from even as recently as 15 years ago, it's clear that current racers are spinning up climbs at markedly higher cadences.
Digression aside:
From what I've seen over the decades, the incidence of failure for lugged bottom brackets is comparable to that of welded BB's. Here's a photo of the OP's most recent failure at the bottom bracket (1989 Panasonic MounCat 3500), from post 34 in this thread.
I am a spinner, small and in my youth rather skinny. When I got my first 10 speed (a Huffy Mark 10 with a Wright leather saddle and Huret Alvit gearing, some here will note the age this suggests
) I asked the seller (later to be my boss) how to use the gears and he said "shift into one gear easier than you think is right". You can see the endless path this can be. Spinning at 90rpm smoothly... oh right, one gear easier. Now spinning at 105... and on. These days with a weakening body I am so glad I learned how to spin smoothly...
While I do agree with the increasing of cadences when riding up hill and in the saddle (and one might credit Lance A for bring this to the public) that the pros use these days I also see an increasing of the high gear ratios too. 54x11 is no longer the highest gearing easily seen. Recently the UCI wanted to ban 10t cogs... I would suggest that today's pro has far better training (both movement and strength), better diets, better team management and equipment that has far more capacity than that of only 30 years ago. Still through all that there's also a certain amount of ego and one upsmanship that goes on too, we are dealing with young gifted athletes. Just as there was way back when and will be decades from now in the future. Andy