Re:
very true too : Bikes are super light and super rigid, roads are a lot smoother (which now makes organisers look for unused goat paths to avoid all those great smooth roads) and distances ridden are a lot shorter than in the past. This means that this sport has dramatically changed. Except a few times a year like in Paris Roubaix or in this olympic race, riders don't ride from 150kms out at close to peak level, they wait and wait and wait and unleash all they got in the last 3 or 4 decisive kms (the Saint-Nicolas/Ans duo in LBL, the Vieux Quaremont-Paterberg duo in the Ronde before those 10 kms of flat)... They can produce phenomenal watts there, but they have a hard time sustaining their efforts because the sport has changed. But making routes harder isn't necessarily the answer if the riders keep just controling it until the last kms. Bringing endurance back into cycling is important and smaller teams help in that regard.
hrotha said:When you take into account the road surfaces and, most importantly, the gears, it's hard not to conclude that cycling has never been less hard than nowadays. A solution to all this boring racing would be to increase the hardness, not to reduce it.
very true too : Bikes are super light and super rigid, roads are a lot smoother (which now makes organisers look for unused goat paths to avoid all those great smooth roads) and distances ridden are a lot shorter than in the past. This means that this sport has dramatically changed. Except a few times a year like in Paris Roubaix or in this olympic race, riders don't ride from 150kms out at close to peak level, they wait and wait and wait and unleash all they got in the last 3 or 4 decisive kms (the Saint-Nicolas/Ans duo in LBL, the Vieux Quaremont-Paterberg duo in the Ronde before those 10 kms of flat)... They can produce phenomenal watts there, but they have a hard time sustaining their efforts because the sport has changed. But making routes harder isn't necessarily the answer if the riders keep just controling it until the last kms. Bringing endurance back into cycling is important and smaller teams help in that regard.