Did you just hear about this new race in Kona(well I hear it was 40th anniversary), and this is your first time hearing about it??

Were the other 6 threads talking about this not enough?? What has this to do with Lionel anyway??

I was away this weekend so didn't follow

Was just surprised that she broke the woman's bike record by 18 minutes!

I guess I'll fish through the other threads to see what people made of that

I forgot the pink, just busting balls ⚽️

Yeah, but it was her own course record... So it doesn't really count. /pink

Race day conditions were a total outlier this year, we're talking once in a career perfect. Last year the conditions were great, this year it was just bonkers.

I was out on the course on race day, and I rode the course yesterday, and if that race was a day later none of those times happen.

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Conditions have a huge impact on cycling speed, so comparing one person's time last year to someone else's time this year isn't very useful.

Ryf is more bike-centric than Lange is, but her record-setting bike leg was still about 4% slower than Lange's bike leg was this year. And about 7% slower than Wurf's record-setting bike leg. Differences of around 1-2mph... it's considerably closer than the hour record, but still a sizeable gap.


Since pro cycling is mostly mass-start, it's a complicated comparison to make. Women's pros would have little trouble hanging with the men's peloton when it's cruising along on the flats, but they wouldn't be contending bunch sprints.

ah yeah, good point - with a marathon you could say the lead women are often about 20 minutes or so behind the lead men - you cant really do that easily with biking



possibly worthless, but I just put the finish times from wikipedia into excel table below - no names just to keep it for interest sake


- dark green on the "mens and womens times" means fast for that gender, through to light green - then light yellow to dark yellow, then light orange to dark orange, and light red to dark red which means means the slowest
- green on the "time difference times" means that its relatively small compared to other time diferences and then yellow, then orange, then red means the largest gap between the top male and female finisher




so a quick look might show that
- a lot of the fastest and slowest times happened on the same years
- the smallest time difference is half hourish - and has happened here and there over the last 30 years