An Escape member’s analysis of Bruno Armirail’s baffling Worlds TT exposes a fallacy in our collective obsession with power.
Cor Vos, data visualizations by Hannes Schenk
Imagine Bruno Amirail’s confusion as he was asked to reflect on his result in the Time Trial World Championships just moments after finishing 26th. The three-time national time trial champion of France had just done something close to a personal-best average power: 436 watts for 47 minutes. He already knew his position and equipment were good. Given his previous results at a similar level, and having just delivered such power, he surely should have finished higher up the results. His power, alone, had him thinking he was on for a very strong result.
Instead, he was completely baffled by the result. He questioned if his national team skinsuit might explain the inexplicable losses. Armirail was right to be confused as he publicly pondered an explanation.
That’s exactly what Escape Collective member Hannes Schenk, a data scientist in health tech, has tried to offer (Schenk also graciously provides the TT split graphs we use for major time trial events). Lo and behold, the answer was right there in Armirail’s and others’ Strava data and it had nothing to do with power or aerodynamics.
The potentially surprising part is that close to a minute’s worth of Armirail’s deficit came when every rider was probably doing practically zero power and where being more aero was probably meaningless. Even more surprising is that, blinded by the power data, Armirail hadn’t clocked where his unaccounted-for time losses had arisen. In many ways, Armirail’s reaction and instinct highlights how power meters potentially blind us to the bigger performance picture and why, I believe measurements like power and CdA have become cycling’s McNamara Fallacy.
Competitive at high speeds: Armirail’s W:CdA is good
Schenk approached the mystery in a few different ways. First, he asked the obvious question Armirail himself was searching for an answer to: Was he simply not aero enough?
This post is for paying subscribers only
Subscribe now
Already have an account? Sign in
Did we do a good job with this story?
👍Yep
👎Nope