Echelon - crazy wind!

[tomato coupe]

Originally Posted by nooneline

counterpoint:if echelons weren't hard, then echelon racing wouldn't blow apart races. but it does.

Echelons don’t blow up a race because they’re hard to execute, they blow up a race because only a fraction of the riders in the peloton can fit across the road. The ones who can’t either end up stretched out in a single file (where they have no protection from the wind) or they form a second echelon. The second echelon often consists of weaker riders, and they may not be able to keep pace with the first echelon

[BdaGhisallo]

Originally Posted by 54ny77

Perhaps that means the skinny jeans set are putting out very impressive power for their size, plus aero benefit of modern gear (however incremental, depending on conditions).

Quick search turned up this very informative time chart on Paris Roubaix:

http://www.bikeraceinfo.com/classics...aix-index.html

Some examples:
Marcel Kint 41.5 km/hr. in '43
Peter Post 45.1 km/hr avg in '64
Fabian Cancellara 42.2 km/hr in '06
Phillipe Gilbert 43.2km/hr in '19

That's with each race +/- ~10k distance, depending on route that year.

And if you want to call "peak doping years" late 90's and thereafter, the speeds weren't meaningfully different either.

You also need to factor in the change in the character of the route. Prior to the late 1960s, most of the famous sections of cobbles we know today were not in the route. Town mayors were ashamed of their cobbles, feeling they hinted that towns were too poor to pave old roads, so when PR would highlight them by using them mayors would rush out and pave them.

Those old cobbled roads were in much better shape than the farm tracks the race seeks out now - many of them were Route Nationales roads. The French pro Jean Stablinski, a rider local to the area, was asked by the organizers to find some new sections for the race to use as they were worried the race would die out due to the cobbles disappearing.

He knew of most of the brutish sections that form the last kilometers of the race as we know it and brought them to the organizers' attention. He knew of the Arenberg Forest section because he had worked below them in the coal mine. So from 1967 the race route gradually shifted east to take in the new cobbled sections and the race got a lot harder. The next three editions had average speeds between 36 and 38 kph. The avg speed dipped down as low as 36.3 kph in 1973.


So the race is a lot harder and the equipment better but the I think the over-riding factor in race average speeds is the weather. In a good year like 2017 you'll see the average above 45 kph and in a year with diabolical weather, like 1994, you'll see the average dip all the way down to 36.16 kph.