says
ok, I will go back and make sure you have access.
Be...
Well-Known Member
I took up road cycling to get stronger and fitter for TT, liked it a lot, and then the pandemic hit, which for me has meant no TT for close to a year now. And during the last five years as I got more into cycling, and it is interesting to compare the two sports. They are very very different things, and it has changed my perspective quite a lot.
The thing that strikes me most is how much more is actually KNOWN about cycling than TT because it is fundamentally simpler and so many things can be readily measured -- these days even for amateur cyclists at an accessible price. It is ideally suited to high level geekery. By contrast, TT is almost impossible to accurately measure many parameters in real time, and even in some cases where sports scientists can really engage with it, it only occurs in a few countries and is only available to, say, national teams like the CNT.
In cycling, for $300 in the US or equivalent in Europe, Australia or UK, you can have video capture and power output-based fitting, where the positions of bars, seats, and shoe cleats can be set in optimal positions (in millimeters) to maximize comfort and cycling efficiency. People who race at a level comparable to what some posters here do in TT can do this while monitoring respiratory and blood gasses, can get their positions optimized in a wind tunnel, etc. So a lot of choices that people make can be optimized in a rational way. It wasn't always like that, of course. But it has been that way for several years now.
Another thing is that in cycling, an amateur rider is not going to be making themselves WORSE by riding a bike that is too fast for them. Now, they may well be wasting a LOT of money for the most marginal of gains but they are not going to be slower by riding a faster bike. If a decent amateur rider takes a $12,000 bike or a $4,000 one on the same course of, say, 50 miles, under identical conditions, chances are that extra $8,000 gains them maybe 10 seconds, which matters a lot in the Tour de France, but not to me. And that is in a race against the clock. If there are other riders are present -- a full peleton and tactics become a big issue -- then things like when to attack, and how to locate oneself within a large group at various times completely dominate and the choice of the $4,000 vs $12,000 bike becomes essentially meaningless.
TT is different. You can see it on threads here. Our sport is extremely difficult to actually KNOW much of anything. The ball moves too fast and spins even faster, and the player is moving around a lot, so it's really hard to wire and tube them up without interfering with what they are doing. To the extent that it is done, it has maybe been done once or twice on a small number of very high level players and what was learned may not always teach much that is useful to amateur players, even decent ones. It does seem pretty clear that a 1400 player will not get their best results with a Butterfly sZLC blade with T05 on both sides, but is an all-wood blade always the right choice for them, what rubber, what handle shape, what weight, etc. etc. is always trial and error, without much that is quantitative in terms of results of the trial.
So a lot of what we think we know is based on impressions that might be wrong. In one notorious case, we hit a ball and we think we are feeling something people call "dwell time" and while we certainly feel something, it is certainly not the length of time the balls is spending in contact with the rubber. In our sport, the kinds of cameras and technology needed to capture what is actually going on are super expensive.
And so there is a lot that is based on opinion, some based on lots of experience, some on less, but resolving the opinion based on actual data is impossible. And threads about "what is a good equivalent to Tenergy 05" or "should I get a Viscaria or an all-wood blade", or "which rubber has more spin", or "how can I learn a Chinese loop" generate tons of discussion based on very few facts. (The last one amuses me a lot, since Xu Xin and Fan Zhendong both have "Chinese loops" and it is hard to imagine two players whose technique is more different").
Anyway, that is something that has struck me in the last couple of years about our sport, and it has caused me to question at least some ideas I used to believe as a matter of course.
The thing that strikes me most is how much more is actually KNOWN about cycling than TT because it is fundamentally simpler and so many things can be readily measured -- these days even for amateur cyclists at an accessible price. It is ideally suited to high level geekery. By contrast, TT is almost impossible to accurately measure many parameters in real time, and even in some cases where sports scientists can really engage with it, it only occurs in a few countries and is only available to, say, national teams like the CNT.
In cycling, for $300 in the US or equivalent in Europe, Australia or UK, you can have video capture and power output-based fitting, where the positions of bars, seats, and shoe cleats can be set in optimal positions (in millimeters) to maximize comfort and cycling efficiency. People who race at a level comparable to what some posters here do in TT can do this while monitoring respiratory and blood gasses, can get their positions optimized in a wind tunnel, etc. So a lot of choices that people make can be optimized in a rational way. It wasn't always like that, of course. But it has been that way for several years now.
Another thing is that in cycling, an amateur rider is not going to be making themselves WORSE by riding a bike that is too fast for them. Now, they may well be wasting a LOT of money for the most marginal of gains but they are not going to be slower by riding a faster bike. If a decent amateur rider takes a $12,000 bike or a $4,000 one on the same course of, say, 50 miles, under identical conditions, chances are that extra $8,000 gains them maybe 10 seconds, which matters a lot in the Tour de France, but not to me. And that is in a race against the clock. If there are other riders are present -- a full peleton and tactics become a big issue -- then things like when to attack, and how to locate oneself within a large group at various times completely dominate and the choice of the $4,000 vs $12,000 bike becomes essentially meaningless.
TT is different. You can see it on threads here. Our sport is extremely difficult to actually KNOW much of anything. The ball moves too fast and spins even faster, and the player is moving around a lot, so it's really hard to wire and tube them up without interfering with what they are doing. To the extent that it is done, it has maybe been done once or twice on a small number of very high level players and what was learned may not always teach much that is useful to amateur players, even decent ones. It does seem pretty clear that a 1400 player will not get their best results with a Butterfly sZLC blade with T05 on both sides, but is an all-wood blade always the right choice for them, what rubber, what handle shape, what weight, etc. etc. is always trial and error, without much that is quantitative in terms of results of the trial.
So a lot of what we think we know is based on impressions that might be wrong. In one notorious case, we hit a ball and we think we are feeling something people call "dwell time" and while we certainly feel something, it is certainly not the length of time the balls is spending in contact with the rubber. In our sport, the kinds of cameras and technology needed to capture what is actually going on are super expensive.
And so there is a lot that is based on opinion, some based on lots of experience, some on less, but resolving the opinion based on actual data is impossible. And threads about "what is a good equivalent to Tenergy 05" or "should I get a Viscaria or an all-wood blade", or "which rubber has more spin", or "how can I learn a Chinese loop" generate tons of discussion based on very few facts. (The last one amuses me a lot, since Xu Xin and Fan Zhendong both have "Chinese loops" and it is hard to imagine two players whose technique is more different").
Anyway, that is something that has struck me in the last couple of years about our sport, and it has caused me to question at least some ideas I used to believe as a matter of course.