"often times these riders ..."
 

"often times these riders have their tires as high as 100psi" this was the announcer talking about the time trial bikes and their tires. I laughed, thought I would share.

I heard that. I'm thinking, 'oh my, I run my tires higher than that and they are clinchers!'. I'm assuming there was a mixup for some reason. I don't think they would run them even that low in the rain would they? Maybe they do and they were saying 'in the rain, they run it as high as 100 psi.'

Actually I think it was Bobke who said that one possible cause of a lot of the accidents was riders running their tyres at 100PSI when they should have been running at 75PSI at most. I was really baffled by that statement too. I ride all the time in the wet weather (hard to avoid in Seattle) and I run clinchers at 120 to 130 PSI. I was always under the impression that those guys in the TdF ran tubulars at like 200PSI.

Running super high pressures actually slows you down. If you're on a velodrome, thats different, but the whole point of tires is to conform to the surface of the road and offer a contact patch to drive your power to the ground. If you run super high pressures, all you're really doing is giving yourself a rough ride, bouncing from pothole to pothole, and limiting your grip because the tires cannot conform to irregularities in the road.

Controversial, huh.

I must confess your right eg: during the summer season ridding on my continetal gator skins with tyre pessures at 130-140psi the ride was uncomfortable, and unpredictable to ride into most corners .Now that winter conditions are here slippery and wet roads the tyre pressures are at 120psi, the bike handles much safer into corners, without losing speed wet or dry conditions.

perhaps they run lower psi to avoid the harsh and questionable handling effect of the cobbles for these stages.