INRNG Contador photo

It's really worthwhile following the INRNG Tumbler page. I'm glad I do. Because of it, I found this photo of Alberto Contador approaching the brutal finish of Stage 5 of this year's Tirreno Adriatico stage race. Contador won the stage and thus took the lead, for good, in the general classification.

Oh, the pain, the pain...

But I can't stop looking at it.

It helps I've always admired Contador. He rides with style, he pays meticulous attention to equipment details (experimenting with things such as large-diameter derailleur pulleys, lightweight wheels and saddles, and low-friction bearings), and he's always modest and polite in his interviews.

Of course, there's the inevitable doping questions: convicted doper Contador who dominated during the peak of the microdose-plus-transfusion era is back due to "a good winter". But training at altitude is no gimmick, and if he indeed went to a structured, focused off-season it shouldn't be too shocking he begins the season in shape. In previous years he's documented to have gone into the early season over-weight. This year, he's supposedly right where he wants to be.

For what it's worth, on the climb of Passo Lanciano, the final 9.10 @amattipyoraily (veetooo) extimated Contador's power at 5.75 W/kg assuming a CdA of 0.35 m2, which he averaged for 28 min 30 sec. That was the final long climb of the stage, but the above photo was taken on Muro di Guardiagrele, the far shorter but much steeper finishing climb.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more