Originally Posted by curveship

Just a small geeky aside: race performance, even at the top level, tends to follow the shape of a bell curve, especially for really selective events like TTs and mountainous stages. Common wisdom is that the top guys are all within a tiny fraction, i.e., that the top end of the curve is blunt. In fact, that's usually not the case: the top end has a tail just like the bottom. So it's actually the norm for one or two guys/gals to be substantially better than their next competitors.