If, like me, you devote much time to pretending to be an expert in the field of bicycle racing, you will be familiar with the question that takes the form, “Just how good would [insert famous old bike racer] have been with modern training?”
Most recently the rider dropped into the question was Beryl Burton. My first thought was, “Just how much better would it be possible for her to have been?” The second was, “How do you know she wasn’t getting it exactly right, for her, anyway?”
We know very little about what exactly made Burton so good (or Coppi, or Anquetil, etc) – we just have the end results. Was it spectacular aerobic capacity? Efficiency? Aerodynamics? We can guess, but it’s basically a mystery.
It is not a…
