Watching the Giro yesterday was driving me crazy once again. I can’t stand the normal formation of these 4 riders breaks. Day after day they are riding in double echelon. What a waste of energy. It just doesn’t work. It makes everyone more tired and the break slower. I took some snap shots of the screen to show what I’m talking about.
Here they are riding like this forever. At least two guys in the wind at all times.
Yep, more riding in the wind.
If you look closely at this shot from above, 3 out of 4 riders are in the wind. Diamond shaped, new formation.
Then here, the field, with HTC at the front chasing, riding single echelon. This is normally the proper way to tempo, but if they had a couple guys from other teams helping, then could be riding a double echelon.
I’m guessing there must’ve been radio problems. W/O DS’s telling them how to rotate in the wind, they just couldn’t figure it out.
I was just explaining this yesterday to my teammates for the Okie TTT champs tomorrow. These pics are perfect.
They are doped Steve. No need to ride properly when you can put out 500 watts for 4 hours straight.
Riders intuitively begin double-pacelines because that’s what they’ve been taught from the get-go. It’s so ingrained that they just don’t even think about it. Logically, and one look at a TTT should prove it, a single-paceline with guys taking 10-20 second pulls then pulling off (not the second guy overtaking! dumb-dumb-dumb!) is provably the most efficient way to maintain the highest avg. speed. I tell this to people on the Wed. Night Ride _all the time_ (b/c I’m usually chasing the faster guys), but they just don’t get it, or refuse to get it. If there’s fewer than 7-8 riders, the double-paceline is wasting everyone’s enery. But, inevitably, some d-a comes all the way from the back at 28 mph, goes to the front and fades immediately, dropping the entire groups avg. by 2-3 mph. Very annoying.