aerozy wrote:According to Engery Lab, his average power output on the last 13K, done in 15'45", was with almost absolute certainty above 500 Watt. Seems reasonable to me, taking into account he was facing considerable headwind most of the time
If you add in headwind and a normal road bike drop position drag coefficient then you are looking at sometihng easily above 600W to maintain 50km/h.
If he can do that then imagine what his 0.95xpower 20min (LT) is on fresh legs! 500W...600W... 700W!?
I thought the very best GC riders had LT's of around 450W but then again I could be wrong.
His performance is on the very limit of the believable (scientifically speaking).
lactate threshold is often a different percentage of a 20 min. effort than 95. I wouldn't be surprised if someone like Cancellara had a much higher percentage closer to 98%.
Cancellara's effort was less than 30km long. He's also extremely aero on the bike, as evidenced by the ridiculous amount of time trials that he has won and thus I would assume that his drag coefficient is decently better than normal. He also stayed pretty tucked in the pack the entire race and did very little work and attacked Sagan when it hurt.
Sagan was immediately at a disadvantage when Cancellara opened up his gap because he came off a hard pull and then had to dig extremely deep to try and hang. Cancellara could've been very close to his limit, but since he didn't have the preceding effort it was easier to get that gap. I've been in Sagan's situation in a race before where I went over the red and it was really hard to maintain LT power immediately after. I could imagine the same being true for Roelandts and Sagan whereas Cancellara never went over and didn't have to try and recover at threshold, but rather built into the effort. Those who have trained with power can understand the difference that this makes on what you can sustain for a longer effort like that. Its also why many people blow at time trials- they go out way too hard and spend the rest of the race attempting to recover/push it at a suboptimal pace.
A 480w threshold for a top World Tour rider that weighs 175-180 is not too hard to imagine. Indurain was about the same and from the numbers I've seen from Wiggins (who is substantially lighter), its believable that a pure time trialist such as Cancellara might have a bit more in his legs.
