The hour and other records

On 25 October, 1972, Eddie Merckx got on his bicycle at an outdoor track in Mexico City and rode just over 49 kilometers in an hour, a record which would hold for 28 years(*).  If you haven't heard of Merckx, here's a quick comparison with a couple of cyclists you may have heard of:

	Eddie Merckx	Miguel Indurain	Lance Armstrong
Tours de France	5	5	7
Giri d'Italia	5	2	0
Vueltas de España	1	0	0
Hour record?	Yes (*)	Yes (*)	No
World Championships	3	0	1
6-day races	17	0	0

[If you've heard of Lance Armstrong, you probably know why I've struck through that 7 -- D.H. 26 Aug 2023]

To be fair, I believe the 6-day races weren't the old-style 144-hour-straight solo affairs, but "only" the two-person 6pm-to-2am-on-six-consecutive-nights variety, mainly done so that the other riders could make a bit more money than if Eddie hadn't been riding.  Still, it's about 17 more than most of us will ever win.

Merckx's hour ride is a cycling legend.  He'd arrived in Mexico from Europe only days before, though he had previously trained using an oxygen mask to simulate the altitude (2,300m/7550ft.), and had only minimal practice on the track itself.  On the day, Merckx breakfasted on ham, coffee and toast (spread with Belgian cheese from home) and started his ride.

His times for the first 5km, 10km and 20km broke the existing records for those distances, records that had been set in a 20km record ride, not as the first part of an hour ride.  At his trainer's advice he slowed considerably after 10km, but only temporarily -- from about 30km on in his pace was steadily increasing.  At the finish Merckx declared the ride the hardest of his life and said he would never try the Hour again, a promise he has so far kept.

Merckx's ride was an extraordinary achievement in sporting history in general, to say nothing of cycling in particular.  But records are set to be broken.  Merckx's eventually fell, which leads me near to the point of this post ... but hang on ... Miguel Indurain also holds an hour record.  Did he break Merckx's?  According to the UCI, which governs most cycling records, no, and not because someone else had broken it first.  His is a different record (or at least it is now).

Thus the asterisks.

(*) Equipment is crucial in cycling.  High-end bicycle makers are famous for shaving every last gram off the weight of the bike and making every possible tweak to the aerodynamics.   For example, I was fortunate enough to be on the Champs Elysees in 1989 to see Greg LeMond make up 58 seconds on Laurent Fignon to win the Tour by 8 seconds (out of over 87 hours total).  LeMond's win in that stage was widely attributed to the advantage of his triathlon handlebars and aerodynamic helmet.  Fignon rode bareheaded (!) on conventional drop bars.

LeMond may or may not have been the stronger rider on the day, but the difference in equipment is generally considered to have accounted for a time difference of at least two seconds per kilometer -- a pretty significant amount in cycling races -- accumulating over the course of 25 kilometers to ... at least 50 seconds.

Shave two seconds off every kilometer of Merckx's ride and he's got an extra 98 seconds, enough for another 1300 meters or so.

The bike Merckx rode in 1972 looks like an ordinary bike.  The bike Miguel Indurain rode has two wheels.  They're solid, the front one is noticeably smaller than the rear, the monocoque frame that they connect to is an irregular, aerodynamically sculpted blob and the handlebars stick out in front instead of curving ... but it does have two wheels.  Indurain's bike is by no means the most unconventional record-setting bike, but it's still an entirely different machine from Merckx's.

For this reason the UCI eventually split the hour record into two records: ones using equipment essentially like Merckx's, and the "Best Human Effort" record for any upright bike (an entirely different governing body deals with human-powered vehicles in general, and recumbent bikes are in a whole different class, with the current hour record standing at 91.56km).  Merck's record was, by definition, the UCI record.  Indurain's record was the Best Human Effort record.

This splitting of records is frankly a bit unfair to those who came before Merckx, who of course took advantage of the best technology he could get his hands on.  The bike may look ordinary, but it weighs 5.5kg, with a 90g front tire, a specially welded titanium stem and material strategically drilled away at every possible place, including the chain.  By the same logic, should Merckx be considered to have beaten Frank Dodd's hour record of 1896?  He wasn't riding a penny-farthing after all.

Could some previous record holder have done better with Merckx's bike?  Who knows?  Essentially, if you go for the UCI Hour record, you are competing with Merckx, and the implication is, no, no one before could have done what he did, even with the same equipment.

The split is arguably also unfair to those who came afterward, since the split was done retroactively in 1996, reclassifying the nine records that had been set in the interim.  In one sense, these riders had been doing exactly the same as Merckx: Trying to ride as far as possible using the best training and equipment they had available.  In this view, the split is nothing more than an attempt to enshrine Merckx's record as particularly butt-kicking and Merckx as the gold standard butt-kicking cyclist.

On the other hand, how do you compare a ride like Merckx's to one like Indurain's?  At the very least you'd have to adjust for the difference in equipment, and that's problematic at best.  Ideally, you would send the aspiring record-breaker back in time to Mexico City in 1972, sit them down in a replica of Merckx's bike and let them at it. 

Or would you?  Is your challenger the same height and weight as Merckx?  Indurain is considerably taller and heavier.  Do they ride in the same style?  Surely there should be some allowance for differences of that sort.  A rider taking on Eddie in a stage race had a choice of bike, within limits.  So perhaps you set general guidelines of design and equipment on the assumption that within those guidelines the advantage you could get over Eddie's own customized machine would be minimal.

This is what the UCI in fact did, and it seems reasonable.  It's notable that since the split the Best Human Effort record has not been broken, while the UCI record has been broken twice.  Cyclists have voted with their pedals, so to speak.

Even so, it's a mess:

• How long did Merckx's record stand?  The UCI record stood from 1972 to 2000, but that's in part because everyone was chasing what turned out to be the Best Human Effort record.  That is, they weren't trying to replicate Merckx's ride.  Merckx's record was just short of the overall best human-powered performance at the time, Francois Faure's 50.53km, set in 1938.  It was the best upright bicycle performance for twelve years, until Francesco Moser beat it in 1984 using a mutant beast with two wheels.  It was the best performance-on-a-bike-like-Eddie-Merckx's for 28 years, until Chris Boardman beat it by about ten meters in 2000.
• Could Merckx have done even better if he'd focused on the Hour instead of keeping to more or less his usual schedule?  Merckx was a road racer at heart and in the run-up to the hour attempt he won fifty road races, including his fourth Tour and his third Giro.  I don't know how many he entered and didn't win.   Unlike Merckx, Boardman (along with a couple of other record holders) specialized in track racing and time trials and followed a training regimen aimed specifically at beating the hour record [That's not quite right.  Boardman did race in the Tour and other stage races, but not to nearly the extent Merckx or Indurain did.  I should also mention Boardman's rival Graeme Obree, whose innovations in bicycle design had a large part in the UCI splitting the record, who focused mainly on the Hour.  --DH].  Can we really compare the two?
• The Mexico City track was outdoors, and though conditions were good on the day, there must have at least been some amount of smog in the air from the city's notorious traffic.  Would Merckx have done better had he used an indoor track in a place with better air? 
• Then there's altitude.  Mexico City's air is considerably thinner than at sea level, important in a sport like cycling where aerodynamics are crucial.  In the 1968 olympics there, Bob Beamon broke the world long jump record by 55cm (21.75in), about half of which can be explained by a tail wind and the thinner air.  That record stood for 23 years, and in the same hour Lee Evans set a record for 400m that stood for 20 years.  On the other hand, it has to matter in an endurance event that just as there is only about 75% as much air to get in your way, there is also only about 75% as much to breathe.  Marathon records tend to be set at or near sea level.  Boardman broke the UCI record in Manchester.  Would he have done better or worse at altitude?  Most of the recent record rides have been near sea level, which gives some indication of current thinking.

So what's really going on here?  Merckx is unquestionably one of the great riders of all time, and his hour ride was something that very few people in history could have done.  We would like to acknowledge that, and also have some way to compare his performance to those of today's and future stars.

The first part is easy.  Cycling fans know who Eddie Merckx is and just how impressive his record is.

The second part is only possible if you let go of the idea of perfect comparison.  If you really wanted to be scientific about it, you would build and maintain an official track and a set of official bikes in various sizes.  Each cyclist would do, say, twenty or thirty hour rides on an official bike.  The aggregate results would then be compared statistically to answer the question "What is the probability that rider A is faster than rider B?"  You could then say that -- to totally make up some numbers -- Merckx is faster than Indurain with 60% confidence and Moser with 85% confidence.

That's probably not going to happen, but that's really just part of sports fandom.  Would Merckx have beaten Indurain in the Tour?  Would Ali have beaten Tyson?  Would Jordan's Tar Heels have beaten Manning's Jayhawks?  Would Bird's Celtics have beaten Russell's?  Would 1970 Brazil have beaten France in 1998? Would ... it's all part of the fun.

In a physics lab you can measure the same thing over and over again and say with some certainty that X is greater than Y.  In much of life we look for these clear distinctions, but we forget about the error bars.  We don't take uncertainty into account.  We can feel gut-certain that Merckx's Hour was The Best Hour Ride and anything that might look better is really down to something else, like a better track, but we don't really know.

In fact, Merckx, Boardman and the rest are all great riders with abilities far beyond what most of us could ever hope to have.  Ranking them, or designating "the best" and "all the rest" has a certain primitive appeal to our brains, but tends to obscure that fact.  Likewise, a record says something about a competitor's ability and determination, but it only says so much.