now that’s the kind of response i was looking for. thanks.
Next time why don’t you just ask the question and provide for the answer, that way your satisfaction is guarenteed…
oh, come on, you can’t be serious. you’re still pissed?
Maybe you’re right, but I can’t imagine generating a lot of power in that position. To me it looks gawdawful but I’m sure there’s a method to the madness.
It looks butt-ugly to me, and if I tried it I’d both lose 10 mph and have a nasty pair of sore balls… but I’m not Jan. Who knows what works for each individual. I also couldn’t ride Bjorn’s position, but it clearly works pretty good for him. Then again, I would classify myself as the anti-power rider (I guess powerless would also fit). Compact cranks, high RPM, max aero- just maximizing a different variable.
on a completely different topic, i like the quote in your signature. who is this donald andtrim guy, what kind of race was he talking about, and what is the context of the quote?
I’m not pissed… I could be pissed off, but that’s not the case 
okay. that’s the most important thing to me. not to be all touchy-feely about this, but i’d much rather let an argument go than actually piss off a fellow slowtwitcher. just not worth it.
I’m embarrassed to say that I had no idea who Donald Antrim was, nor the context of the quote. A while back I was looking for a good quote for the signature line and google’d “cycling quotes”. I came up with this site:
http://www.calcycling.org/quotations.php
I came across this quote and I really liked it. Your question prompted me to find out about Donald Antrim, and apparently he’s a novelist though, as you may have guessed by now, I haven’t read any of his works. I’m also not curious enough to read his books to determine the context of the quote- sorry 
that’s a great link. see my new quote! thanks a million…
the point isn’t to just get low, but also as far forward as possible. with that setup, you are almost falling over the front end of bike. probably provides a sh*tload of power because you’re pushing more down and back. there also may be some aero benefit with this arms breaking more wind for his legs than they would if they were flat. his arms and legs sharing more of the wind pocket might create less overall drag, just like spokes following eachother. his thinner arms could provide a relatively easy way to create a pocket for his tremendously fat and glazed doughnut calorie-laden legs to work in. will help him get to the hostess cupcake factory quicker.
didn’t know YOU and JAN hung out, cool.
jeeze, and i thought that cyclists were “clearing their lungs” with cigarettes long past the point where people were in the dark about their negative effects … i guess they must know everything because of all that seat time, huh? i agree though, nobody should ever question anything that anybody does for a living, well, unless they do it for a living themselves … because, if they’re doing it then it must always be the right thing … because … they … umm, do it for a living …
i do circuitous sarcasm for a living.
Jan is much bigger and more powerful than Lance.
For some reason the “quote” button doesn’t work for me. I have seen others having this problem too.
Anyway, what I meant to post, is that the quote about Jan being much bigger than Lance has always made me curious. Liggett is always refering to Jan as “the big German”, etc. Never looked very big by my standards.
I looked up several sources for Jan’s weight and they mostly list it around 160lbs for competition, while most have Lance Armstrong’s weight coming in at 160-170 (although I think I have seen other sources listing him in the high 150’s that I find more believable).
In any case, Jan may be slightly taller but he is not much, if any, heavier on race day…according to what I can find.
I was in an LBS this weekend, and the owner (an ex-olympic cyclist) was showing us a technique where when you need more power in the aero position (passing, hammering up a small hill) you grab the aero bars closer to the stem and pull up on the bars as you pedal. He claimed that you can dramatically increase your watts this way. Not the most efficient or comfortable position, but for short bursts, he said this will work.
So this would be consistent with your theory. Maybe Jan is emulating such a position, but holding it for the whole TT. Ouch.
Absolutely. On my Syntace C2’s I’ll tape all the way back past all the bends because I like to grip exactly as you described on rolling hills or when I need a short burst of power. Dan also alludes to this in the “S-Bend” article.
As Ullrich spends the majority of his time riding a road bike in the drops, my hypothesis is this: take his hand/arm position while in the drops. Move them in closer to each other to facilitate decreased frontal area. Result: his position.
Actually I HAVE ridden with him
.
oh. cool.
My guess is that isn’t what he’s actually going for. My educated guess of the matter, on the other hand, is that since he’s ridden a variety of sponsor and non-sponsor TT bikes in the past, he really just prefers his road position and does very little specific TT training on a TT bike. If you try that cockpit position while on a road bike, you’ll find that it really isn’t that uncomfortable (unless you have your saddle tilted down a lot). The head tube on that bike isn’t particularly small and as such, his hands are still quite a bit from accidentally rubbing into the front wheel. If you compare it to his road position, his forearms would be going right through where his road bars would be. Thus, he only needs to train a lot in one position rather than two to reap the rewards of his massive power output. A far simpler explanation, no?