bikeguy said:I know about the Nike swift skinsuits. However, I wouldn't credit Armstrong's
7 TdF victories to that. Speaking of genetic gifts, the cyclists with lower VO2 max's in the study I linked to had higher general efficiencies than their more 'gifted' counterparts.-Bikeguy
This is getting really off topic (there's a sticky about this over in the training forum), but just pulling up the results of stage 20 of last year's tour the top 10 were within 3 minutes for 55.5km. Armstrong only beat Ullrich by 23 seconds. Would he still have won if he and his team hadn't spent so much time and money optimizing every aspect of his equipment and his biomechanical interaction with it? We'll never know. The article you linked was kind of interesting despite the high variance of the data, but they only looked at some general efficiency parameters and didn't examine pedaling technique at all.