Canyon reveal Alex Dowsett’s Hour record attempt bike

Stealth: I'd be willing to believe Obree was "legal", but I definitely wouldn't want to stake much of my money on Boardman having been clean, given Boardman ended up with a number of strange hormone related problems...

Using Sosenka's mark as a starting point was a kind of "forced work round / smart political move" - choosing any other distance to beat would have involved some kind of admission of having gotten something wrong in the past and lots of raking over negative things, or else would have ended up with Boardman's superman record and likely very few if any further attempts. The kind of power to drag number for the 96 record is scarey

The biggest mistake that the UCI made when 'combining' the two classes of records was that although they took the sensible step of stating that the attempt needed to be on a UCI legal bike (as per the Boardman/Obree attempts in the early 90's) they set the record at the Athlete's mark. I would guess that this is the real reason why it is so popular to 'have a go' at the moment. So, not only will it be interesting to see who will be the first NOT to set a new record, it will also be truly interesting to see who will beat CB's absolute record...
After all, his 4km record has only just been beaten (by Jack Bobridge), and nobody has ever beaten his TdF prologue record. I think that people massively underestimate the performance levels that were (legally) reached by Chris & Graeme 20 years ago. Great days, great days indeed.

That Canyon looks like they've made it out of Future.

No sensible person expects a sport that is tied to technology to remain frozen in time. Nothing is being destroyed, it's just changing (as it did before). The new (old?) rules have given an apparently dead yet fascinating and easily understood element of the sport a real shot in the arm.

The athlete's hour rules using Merckx's bike as a baseline throw up far more issues than they resolve (if they even needed resolution). If you read Michael Hutchinson's excellent book about his attempt you'll get a glimpse at how complex it is and how the rules were arcane and somewhat irrelevant.

Or perhaps some of you want to return to the good old days of 5-speed downtube shifters, heavy steel frames and watching everything on a black & white TV with just 3 channels (if you're lucky) before your mum lets you make a very brief call on the pulse-dialling bakelite phone in the hallway...

Face it, this category was dead before the recent changes. Indeed we might see a short lived interest in the record and 2015 will be great, but the drama of sport has always lain within the constrain of the rules. Better that we have a clean slate that nothing at all.

As for "you can't compare with Merckx" - actually you *could*, that was the point. Bikes in the Merckx era were pretty much as mechanically efficient as today. Indeed, even earlier bikes were. The gains today are in more sophisticated aerodynamic knowledge (minimised by the classic bike regulations, but even then still present - e.g. clothing and fine-tuning the position) and much better drugs.

Even with those advantages, note that Boardman really struggled to beat the Merckx record, and only barely managed it - by 10 metres.

That so few riders were prepared to try this record in public is likely due to strength of Merckx as much as any lack of marketing value to modern bicycle vendors.

The biggest factors, by far, outside of the athlete are aerodynamic- even for thew classic hour. There's air pressure / altitude - and the trade-off between drag and oxygen availability. Then the helmet that is required today is a cost over a bald head, but on the other hand Merck had a leather hairnet with hair exposed so probably not too much difference to a road helmet and perhaps worse than a modern aero road helmet (Boardman's was covered, but still had the ribs showing). Boardman did his attempt in an aero skinsuit soaked in alcohol for a cooling effect. Merckx' clothing was tight for the era but you can still see his jersey flapping a bit, and he had no shoe covers, unlike Boardman.

Anyway, even if you don't agree there was value in the classic hour, why not just add a category?

Why *destroy* the classic hour? That was just needless vandalism.

Welshboy & Neil: So there'll be a brief flurry of interest as the current crop of riders look to take advantage of the change in equipment, and teams/manufacturers back them because of that. And then what? Then it's back to a record on a heavily regulated bicycle, and there'll be few attempts again. Unless and until the pursuit bike regulations are changed again to create another aerodynamic advantage for athletes to exploit.

So where before we had the classic athletes' hour and the unrestrictedish upright aero-bike + athlete hour. Now we've got a single hour record that will only ever be interesting for short periods (year or three) after a rule change!

It's become the "Which riders were at their peak in the wake of a rule change?" hour.

What a farce.

This is Shadowfax, the lord of all track bicycles.

It'd be interesting to know what gear ratio he's going to use....
Well, if you like that kind of thing.

The UCI dq-ed Graeme Obree for cutting the nose off his saddle to fit within the regs...

^ spot on.

In other news, that's the best looking bike Canyon have ever produced. I think it has something to do with the fact that I can only see two Canyon logos on it, instead of the usual twenty seven. They really need to change that about their bikes, and the font too, looks cheap.

So, the bottom of this article is bollocks...

Previously there were *2* hour record categories. The "Athlete's hour" category required the use of a heavily controlled, Merckx like bike. The "Best Human Effort" allowed a much wider range of bicycles, such as those Obree and Boardman used.

It was fairly straight forward: If you wanted to test yourself against the classic hour attempts, then you could try for the athlete's hour. If you wanted to try take advantage of aerodynamic gains, there was the "Best Human Effort" category.

The UCI fucked up *both* tracks by unifying the categories. Now athletes must still use a heavily regulated bicycle, however it's arbitrarily been changed to a modern pursuit bike. So, athletes can't compare themselves to the classic riders, they can't compare themselves to Boardman, Obree, etc., either.

It's made a farce of the hour record.

I wonder if Canyon will take this forward as a production track bike? They do have an aluminium model.