2013 season in review: The year of speculating wattage

It started early and it started fast and it continued relentlessly throughout the 2013 season. What watts is so-and-so -- usually Chris Froome -- putting out on such-and-such a climb? Is it worse than Lance Armstrong in his pomp? Is it within the threshold of normal? Normal being what a professional could put out without the need for drugs, but still beyond the normal for you and I. Nobody really knew for sure but a fair few began to speculate and so a wave of wattage began to grow and grow, sucking more and more onto it until it swept over the 2013 cycling season, threatening to take away the enjoyment many are supposed to be experiencing when watching a bicycle race.

Now don't get me wrong. Wattage has its place in cycling ... it helped Sir Bradley of Wiggins win his first and only Tour de France. It is the power output of a cyclist through their pedals at any given time ... divided by the riders weight in kilograms, you are left with a figure that determines a riders watts-per-kilogram. The one with the highest number over a stretch of road -- often fantasised about on climbs -- is the one who goes the fastest. It's a new(ish) technology, an expensive technology, and one that is in widespread use on the computers of cyclists throughout the professional peloton. If you know your maximum wattage at your present weight you know when you're at your limit and how best to judge a ride. It goes against the purists dream of riding by feel, but technology is a fact of life in the 21st century.

What we found in the year that was 2013 however was that the guessing game of these figures has went beyond what is fact on the riders computer into what is fiction among speculating fans.



Without access to the UCI's biological passport, without access to the data on a riders computer, and without access to the results of anti-doping samples, some fans found that this might be their best window into the likelihood of drug use still in the peloton and a few 'experts' were happy to feed their need to know.

The whole thing kicked into high gear at this years Tour de France when Chris Froome raced away from his rivals to win in spectacular fashion. Keyboards were mashed from basements across the globe and figures produced and often figures that led some so believe Froome was not winning clean. someone would start their stop watch at an arbitrary point on a climb and stop it at the top then use that time along with the distance and the weight of the rider to formulate a watts per kilogram number. These varied wildly at times and normally came to the fore on the days in which Froome did well or his number was high. His time up the climb was then compared against the likes of Lance Armstrong on the same climb years before by watching video for Armstrong to pass the same reference points.

It sounded good in hindsight, but it doesn't really work. The timing charts were interesting as a rough guide, but were shown to have a decent degree of inaccuracy by others who felt it impossible to measure the exact starting point the same for every rider what with cameras often cutting away at different times.

The home-made calculations of wattage as any kind of reference was even more inaccurate:

Simply taking a riders speed up a climb and factoring that against his weight was ridiculous. Elements such as the following were not factored in: Wind direction, wind speed, humidity, temperature, road conditions, bike equipment, was the stage early in the tour or later in the tour, did it follow several hard days or several easy days or a rest day, did the climb in question come after a bunch of other climbs or a relatively flat climb, was the pace leading onto that climb high due to attacks or steady due to everyone waiting for that climb, was the GC battle tight putting more pressure on the Yellow jersey to push it on that climb, was a rival up the road forcing the race from the lower slopes, or did the attacks come later making the lower slopes that more steady?

All those elements would have to be factored in and until they were (impossible unless the data came straight off the riders computer), then common sense would suggest you take these numbers with a silo-sized grain of salt.

When such arguments were put forth, the attention turned to pressuring the teams, namely Sky, to release the power data of their riders, namely Froome. The issue with this is that releasing it to the public would also release it to the rest of the peloton. If a rival of Froomes new definitively what his watts per kilo output was he would know what the standard required was to drop Froome. He would know when Froome was riding beyond himself at a pace he could not sustain and adjust his own effort accordingly. You would never see a Formula One team release their telemetry data to the public, and thus their rival teams, so why on earth would we expect Froome and Sky to do the same? To appease the doubters simply isn't reason enough.

Common sense could not prevail in the war against wattage speculation however and it continued throughout the year. Thankfully it didn't overshadow and nor will it be what the season is remembered for. But it was still there, lurking in the corner of the season, desperate to receive credence among the every day fan. And it will be back again next year with a vengeance. We may be shifting into a cleaner era of cycling but with it comes a natural doubt. People desperate for the new era to be real, others desperate for the drug scandals to continue. The likes of Froome can thank their predecessors for that in part but a point has to come when you let the cyclists do the entertaining, let the testers do the catching, and let yourself do the enjoying.

For some that point has yet to arrive and so don't expect the watt calculators to go away anytime soon.