No comment…
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I know my rim brake bikes are lighter and feel faster but I ride my integrated cable roadie because of my vanity 
if you want hookless rim blow outs you have to go disc brake…
Is this even debated any more? I feel like the industry (and customers) have already decided that disc brakes are all-around a better option, despite being slower in some circumstances.
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Is it debated? Well, I posted a video that should put that debate to rest ;-D
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i have a rim break mechanical madone with cables fully intergrated.
I think it was the industry that mostly decided this, and not the consumer.
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That sounds like perfection
I’ve upgraded to disc brakes and electronic shifting, wider tires, and will soon be riding tubeless too. I’m never going back.
You wouldn’t be able to, unless you want a five year old second hand bike. Or an entry level bike from a very limited choice of manufacturers. The industry already decided for you.
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Just recently got electronic shifting and disc brakes
Oh my goodness. This IS amazing. So happy with this after 40 years + without
Probably won’t do tubeless with multiple bikes. Some which sit for months at a time
But you never know
I don’t quite get the hype about disc brakes. On average in a race I use them twice. On the turnaround and before getting off. Now if I were doing Nice then I would certainly look into renting a road bike with bars, but truthfully, if I were doing Kona as I remember it you needed to brake four times (once for special needs, once for each turnaround and once at the bottom of the hill). School me!
My bike (a once upon a time super bike) is now a teenager, which I am not.
It might outlive me.
For your use case it may not be important. Not everyone rides in such conditions. Discs are way better in the wet and when braking going downhill. I wouldn’t want to go back to rim brakes.
Reminds me of when I was having brake trouble with an hour or two left to check in before Tremblant 70.3 and thought I’d need a recabling (I heard the dreaded ping when biking down into check-in, followed by loss of brake).
The bike mechanic looks at me and with a smirk asks “how well do you know the course?”
Now, truthfully, it was only my back brake (front was fine) and I know the course well enough that I’d probably be fine using the brakes only at the turn arounds and into T2. But that’s not a course I’d want to risk it. (as it turns out, he was able to fix it, but then the whole thing was rendered moot the next morning when the smoke cancelled the race)
You are quite right, if you train on your bike, ride in all weathers and the local countryside has hills and stop signs then you need a bike that works and discs certainly work better in nearly all conditions (maybe even snow). But I don’t train on my race bike, don’t do long country rides or ever ride in the rain. I can count on one hand the number of races where it has rained over thirty years of doing this daft thing we all do. So unless someone can show me that I will finally, miraculously, break an hour in an Oly, by buying a new disc equipped bike, I don’t think it’s necessary for my level of talent…:0)
I’m definitely lacking in bike talent but I really like riding and prefer to do it outside. Light rain doesn’t prevent me, and I have to negotiate hills and traffic. I just really like modern bikes too.
We must be racing very different races
Last years half distance had 30 - 90 degree turns.
Wish I had the disc brakes then
For you not riding in the rain and doing only out and back races with no hills rim brakes are all you need
In triathlon (or TT) disc brakes aren’t used for braking performance. The disc and caliper are slower than a rim brake, but the rim brake introduces design constraints that can be removed with disc brakes. Wider forks, hidden cables that actually work, and (the big one) rim shapes that don’t need a flat surface adjacent to the tire. Just replacing rim with disc on a like-to-like setup is surely slower, but an optimized setup on both favors disc. And yes, rim brake setups are about as aerodynamically optimized as they can be, this isn’t an industry thing but a physics thing.
The actual calipers on road/TT bikes still look a lot like the original MTB types. It’s not going to be long before an aero model comes out. The low hanging fruit is the hose connection in open air, would be simple to move it underneath the mounting point. Of course you’d then have to remove the caliper to get to the hose, and need a hole in the frame at the right point, but the industry has never catered to ease of maintenance on high-end bikes.
Or if your were winning the tour the France just 2-3 years ago descending at 100+ km/h, rim brakes were also all your needed. Well, that plus the legs…
It’s so interesting to see how just a handful of years ago disc brakes on a tri bike were resisted and considered pointless, now so many people talk about rim brakes as if they’re dangerous on a tri course. Maybe it was the novelty of something different but I took my 2014 P3 off the trainer, just for the heck of it, to race Maine 70.3 in July and had a blast, as well as a solid bike split, with the simplicity of mechanical shifting, rim brakes, and horizontal dropouts. I know there are other variables but I was actually faster on that bike in Maine with I think 3K+ of climbing than I was on my PRsix2 at Eagleman a couple months prior and the reality of the difference in braking never even entered my mind during either race. It really skewed my argument for the necessity of upgrading a bike.
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