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That's one way of looking at it, although he went into the Giro underprepared after a horrific accident. I thus don't see why, if he is in great shape and performs with the best in Switzerland, he should have to exorcise anything going into the Tour. If he is at the right level then just let him race.
Elevation plays a part yes. Low elevation unipuerto climbs are by far the best for extreme W/kg efforts, and I do think elevation is too easily ignored when very high W/kg numbers come out. And this is arguably what makes Hindleys climb insane yesterday, as he did 6.5W/kg for almost 19 minutes at like 1700m average altitude.
Elevation plays a part yes. Low elevation unipuerto climbs are by far the best for extreme W/kg efforts, and I do think elevation is too easily ignored when very high W/kg numbers come out. And this is arguably what makes Hindleys climb insane yesterday, as he did 6.5W/kg for almost 19 minutes at like 1700m average altitude.
Even then it's still a high value. It's not like some big GT unipuerto performances are much higher. I think Yates at Alpe di Mera, Roglic at Moncalvillo, and Roglic/Valverde at Acebo, as well as Valverde in Catalunya 2017 were all in similarish ranges.
Now while the number is raelly high it's hard to extrapolate. If you ever see the W/kg vs time graphs from CyclingGraphs or Lanterne Rouge you may note that whether a number is really high or not compared to others does not really seem to correlate with wether it was the winning or best performance of that day. Some mighty performances compared to the rest of the field can often look really weak on such graphs.
If you take Almeidas example here. Sega di Ala looks like one of his weaker climbs. Yet it's the only time he was the best of a group of WT GC riders. Meanwhile on Piancavallo, his best performance in this graph, he was hard dropped. I'm sure that even for frigging Nibali Piancavallo 2020 looks like a good performance.
I think calculations are reliable enough, the unknown factors just mean we should not stare ourselves blind on the outlier performances where these unknown variables enable huge performances.
Because in May 2021 the 60/61 kg weight was not based on only balanced quality training. Nor on a good basis. The weight loss was forced. Boxers, weightlifters, judocas also apply that forced weight loss before their competition or for their one day that they have to perform. Although they do lose some strength, they usually manage to survive that match or match day in their weight category. But stageriders can't. Maybe a few days. But not for weeks. That's the reason Evenepoel did't perform after a few days, last year in the Giro.
I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out what was meant.
Yeah, nowadays we also have enough riders post their actual numbers on strava that we can make very educated guesses that usually are pretty close to reality.
My favorite example is that Froome's Finestre climb in 2018 was a full 2 seconds faster than 2015 Contador when he got dropped like a rock at the end.
Yeah, but that stage also got raced full gas from the start and Yates went balls to the walls for 2 weeks, making every hilly stage super hard. People were collapsing left and right at the end of that Giro.
Something like that. Then he had to take another longer break just after. There is a reason why he went into the Giro with 0 race days. You can’t argue he had anywhere close to a “normal preparation” to last season.
Well I don't know that it's that much down to overall fatigue, considering Zoncolan was much faster in 2018 than in 2014 and 2011, and 2011 still had the Gardecchia stage as well and probably had the overall hardest route. I think it's more likely to be day by day variation. Pratonevoso the day before was fast.
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