86. EDITABLE CHARTS WITH PRO CYCLISTS POWER PERCENTILES VALUES

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

In a previous KisW Research Note, we saw what are the actual power numbers required to be in the professional male road cycling peloton and to excel in different race typologies.

These data came from a retrospective analysis of the maximal mean power outputs recorded in training or races over different fixed duration (from seconds to hours) of 144 male pro road cyclists from 4 different teams (2 World Tour, 2 Professional). The sample included multiple grand tours and monuments winners. The timeframe analysed was between the 2013 and 2021 season. This research reported the percentiles value for maximal mean power outputs for all the different effort durations. What does percentile mean? To simplify, if a cyclist has values above 50th percentile, he is in the best 50% of the peloton for that effort’s duration. If a cyclist has values higher than 90th percentile, he is in the best 10% of the peloton (so top level) for that effort’s duration.

To evaluate riders’ potential I created an excel file where you can plot riders’ power numbers and view them together with the percentile values of the research cited above.

In this file you can have both a ‘between riders’ comparison:

Example in the file for 1min and 5min efforts. A, M, G, E, D are different riders. The horizontal lines represent the percentiles (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile).

as well as a single rider evaluation:

Example in the file for 1,5 and 20min efforts. The blue bar represent the rider’s values, while the horizontal lines represent the percentiles (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile)

Using properly the file (following the instructions we put within it) you can have a good idea of where the riders you are evaluating (you can put also your numbers if you are a cyclist) are when compared to pro road male cyclists. Keep in mind that these percentiles values were probably obtained in a fresh state. The ability to perform high power at the end of long and hard races (durability) as well as in a third week of a grand tour (recovery) are other important factors to consider to be among the bests in certain scenarios of pro road cycling.

You can download the excel file with the charts here!