February 14, 2009 - Young US American Taylor Phinney wins the 1000m time trial at World Cup in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Taylor defeated a field of world class sprinters including Michaël d'Almeida and François Pervis and it's not that they had a bad day. The top seven clocked a time under 1:03. But only Taylor could break the 1:02 sec barrier. His winning time was 1:01.641.
Although Taylor is reigning US Kilo champion, he's an enduro, a pursuit specialist. He had just won the pursuit the day before with a 10 sec margin.
When I looked at the lap times, it become clear that Taylor had done an enduro kilo: he started slow, but when the sprinters already started to fade, he was still accelerating.
This prompted my curiosity and I did some more analysis. The results are shown in Figure 1 and 2 on the right. I compared Taylor to two of his Copenhagen competitors: Michaël d'Almeida and François Pervis. Michaël showed a very steady performance which got him second place and François was one the fastest starters, but he couldn't hold the speed. As an additional reference I used Chris Hoy's 2007 World Championship winning race.
Figure 1 shows the lap times of the four riders. Taylor clearly has the worst start - Kaarle, Lisandra, Sandie, Willy, and Anna would have beaten him in a one lap chariot race. His second lap was still slower than everybody else's.
Lap three is were things turn around. Taylor was still accelerating through lap 3 and puts in the best time for lap three.
In the final lap, Talor is also starting to fade, but he's still so much faster then everybody else, about one second faster than Chris and Michaël and he gains almost two over François.
Figure 2 shows accumulated times. The fastest sprinters still dominate the competition at the halfway mark.
At 750m Michaël takes over François, Taylor is still behind about half a second behind Michaël and François and almost two behind Chris.
The final lap makes all the difference. Taylor gains one second over both Michaël and Chris. That's enough to take the win from Michaël. Chris had too much of a gap built up through his incredible start.
So Taylor, hit the gym and break the kilo world record. RadSprint cheers for you.
Figure 1 (Click image for full size version.)
Figure 2 (Click image for full size version.)