4 5 6 THE IMPOSSIBLE NUMBER

What’s your dream threshold? Four, five, maybe even six watts per kilo… At what point does the target number become impossible except for pros? Joe Laverick finds out.

Is there, for amateur riders, an impossible number – a power figure so high that only pros can achieve it? Likewise, for pro riders, is there a figure that’s literally beyond the limits of (clean) human performance? We cyclists are preoccupied with questions like this – we are obsessed with data and comparing ourselves to the eye-popping outputs of WorldTour riders. So much data is available that you’d think it would be easy to predict who is going to be the best in the world. But it’s not. Cycling performance is like an onion, it has many layers – and in this feature, we’re going to find out why.

Cast your mind back to spring 2020: the whole world was in lockdown and attention turned to online racing. WorldTour riders were on the start line of Zwift races rather than Monuments, many receiving the unpleasant surprise of getting thrashed by Joe Bloggs, a second-cat with a full-time job. Some of these pros cried foul play – but their suspicions may not have been justified. It isn’t uncommon to hear of amateurs who have raw power figures superior to those of some WorldTour riders. Why, you might ask, are these big-number-hitting amateurs not competing at the top level? Because, as we shall see, racing success is determined by a complex interplay of power, skills, tactics, experience, instinct and fatigue resistance – to name but a few of the factors involved.

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