RadSprint put together a survey. The survey is anonymous, so you are not giving away the crown jewels.
I got more results now and below's a preliminary summary and analysis for the flying 200m. There will be additional analysis as we are getting more results and I find the time for the analysis.
If you find the results interesting, go and take the survey and make your sprinting friends take it, too. It would be good to get statistically relevant data sets.
Fying 200m
Figure 1 shows the various riders
as a function of the 200m time (speed) and the gear used.
RadSprint has made two interesting observations:
1) There's a blue area where we find most of the mid-level riders.
There typical gear ratio range is 3.4 to 3.6 (92 - 96 gear inch).
The cadence ranges from 125 to 150.
The conclusion seems to be that improvements for riders in
this area come mainly from cadence increase.
2) The red area shows the riders who have broken the
11 second barrier. All those riders have a cadence
in the range of 140 - 150 which appears to be the optimum range.
Here improvements come from bigger gears with the fastest
riders pushing well above 3.6 ( 98 - 104 gear inch).
Gears vs. Discipline
Figure 2 illustrates a relative gear comparison. The Match Sprint gear is take as baseline, i.e. 100%. The majority of the sprinters uses a bigger gear for the flying 200m (mostly 2% bigger). The Keirin is bigger, too but it spreads from 0 to 5%. There's a tendency to sue a smaller gear for the 500m to get a faster acceleration. The big surprise is the Kilo, gears are all over the place.
Kilo
Figure 3 shows the various riders
as a function of the Kilo time (speed) and the gear used.
In Figure 2, we had already seen that gear selection for the kilo
is all over the place compared to riders' flying 200 gears.
In Figure 3 we have have a closer look at kilo gears.
RadSprint sees three somewhat distinct groups:
1) Black area, riders are above 1:10,
and most likely need to improve their cadence.
2) Red area, riders with times below 1:10 who ride with avaerage
cadence of 115 - 120.
3) Blue area, riders also with times below 1:10, but they ride
with a higher average cadence of 125+.
Conclusion, go for at least a average cadence of 115 to get your
full potential, going higher depends on individual body type.
Note that the average candence includes the start phase,
cadence will be much higher once the rider reaches steady-state
speed.
Figure 1 (Click image for full size version.)
Figure 2 (Click image for full size version.)
Figure 3 (Click image for full size version.)