Technology

airwise

In another I rode most of the Cols of Europe. I was riding a Seven Alaris. Straight guage Ti with welds and all of that old stuff.

Now imagine, after a whole decade, that I went back and looked at the Strava times for the ups and downs of mountains. I was shocked to see that I still had KOM's/Top tens out of thousands. This was after a decade of must have bike improvements (Hell the Seven isn't even carbon). Disc Brakes. Electronic shifting, dramatic advances in contact point tech...

Bizarre that it hadn't helped anyone in Europe actually GO quicker - despite all of the fantastic marketing.

Is a £10k bike any better than a £1.5 used set up from five years ago? Be honest. Apart from cock waving at the coffee shop, evidence suggests no.

joeyhalloran

I'd say that was poor evidence but moving on from that its impressive that you have lots of KOMs on most of the cols in Europe! You should have gone pro.

kingstongraham

I'm not sure that disc brakes or electronic shifting are supposed to make you faster going up alps.

wallace_and_gromit

From what I read, the improvements in bike tech over the last decade or so have been primarily aero-related rather than climbing-related. So a Wiggo-era climbing bike will still be "fast" now, whereas an aero bike from the same era will be "slow" now.

So climbing performances on Strava are unlikely to have been affected much by technology. (Circular routes would be a very different story, one imagines, though I'm not sure folk worry about these much on Strava.)