Huh?

Kinda an epic blow up. He lost almost 2sec. in the last kilometer (which only takes slightly over 1min.).

Going out hard in a 4000m is a not uncommon tactic (demoralize your opposition), but it backfired pretty badly for him. Pursuiters have a pretty good sense of pacing, so it may be residual fatigue.

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Oh, alright. That makes sense.

We really need the split data and intended schedule before passing judgement. With the hour he didn't execute the strategy so that was poor execution. Whether he'd have succeeded by following the strategy is another matter but don't ruin your chances by not doing so.

Let's not forget he rode a 4:10 pursuit at sea level, so he does have some idea in this event.

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1.06 first km - gaining 3s on a guy who was only 1s down in qualifying - not too harsh to judge that as poor pacing. It was a nail biter in the last couple of laps.


Unfortunately it seems like the idea is that he is as strong as several years ago. Would be interesting to know if his support team has changed.

given this and the hour record attempt, it does seem kind of unbelievable he did actually get it together and clock 4:10 at some point. I guess the strategy of going for broke pays off once in a while.

Still not enough info for me to judge. What was the qualifying ride order?

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I'll bow to your knowledge over that of the fastest man ever over 4000m.

Boom!

I was thinking the exact same thing. But then again if he'd succeeded then we'd all be praising his ballsy attempt :) One thing was for sure, it made for an interesting viewing :)

I sourced the data.

Here are his half lap times charted:



and zoomed in (which hides first half lap time):



I think this tells a slightly different story to the narrative.

At some stage I'll get to a comparison with Kueng.

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Finals comparison:

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Pacing chart with a pacing fade guide line included. The red line is the slope of pacing fading at a rate of 1 second per km, which if you are inside of that I consider it to be good pacing. Fade more rapidly and you probably went out too hard. However being less doesn't mean optimal, and one would want to examine if you went hard enough to begin with.

A bit depends on your power profile / phenotype. We can see that the nature of Kueng's pacing was somewhat more conservative at the start and I think he could possibly go faster overall with a slightly faster start.

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In the post race interview he readily admitted that it was a case of raced it not paced it and it didn't pay off. He still won silver at the world champs, it not exactly a disaster. Particularly when his goal is Rio. He's an interesting character.

It didn't really seem to pay off in 2010, either - see Fig. 5:

http://www.trainingandracingwithapowermeter.com/...-pursuit-part-3.html

FWIW, my wife made the same mistake (i.e., going out too hard) in qualifying at nationals in 2002, and ended up with the 3rd fastest time. Fortunately for her, though, back then they still had a semi-final round, so she was able to correct her approach and went on to win (although she had to go beat the then-UCI #1 and eventual World's 8th place finisher to do so).

All of which leads to Coggan's #1 rule of pursuiting:

1. Don't go out too hard.
2. Don't go out too hard!
3. DON'T GO OUT TOO HARD!

I was just thinking about this...same energy systems at play as when Bannister and Landy were trying to break 4 minutes at the mile so what you say should be exactly the same....same deal with the 400m freestyle or 400 m IM.

Thanks for finding the data and showing them. People forget that the time gaps depend on the other rider. Nice illustration.