Interesting what Joe has stated. Even in his own podcast he was “only” saying 3:30, so another ten minutes off at that pace is a massive difference.
Surprised to see all the photos have the main man riding tail gunner. I thought it was well established that the penultimate man in the line actually has the easiest ride? Hence in the 1:59, even with running, they had two more guys behind Kipchoge.
My personal view is aligned with the article writer. I think Joe has set himself reasonable targets for swim and run (if he’s recovered his form properly from covid). He’s a well established long course athlete who would know his power numbers and what he can run off that effort, if he can stick to normal solo race power and just get sucked along to a faster time. You also have to think that the run should benefit from 30mins less actual riding time. That’s a big calorie saving.
Blu’s run split seems a bit ridiculous, but those Norwegian’s seems very confident in their numbers / metrics to say its capable.
I think the challenging part will be doing that after the bike. If you read the BBC article on Kat Matthews, she rightfully acknowledges something I think has been overlooked a little bit. Riding a pace line in a tight TTT formation for upwards of 3.5hrs is going to be mentally exhausting. Even if Blu is (somewhat) taking it easy. To then think you can execute the perfect marathon is rather optimistic for me
Remember you also have the cost of the rotation, whenever the paceline is changing lead you lose one rider in front, and also need to adjust to avoid moving up putting you much more into the wind - so that might change things - also possibly that something other than a paceline is best as you’re not trying to minimse average drag, but minimise drag purely on one individual - they want to be right in the middle of a peloton for that, so perhaps more of a wedge with some rotation around to do it - problem is finding enough other riders with the power they’d need to hold more of the tough positions.
Even if they have 8 bike pacers I would be surprised if all 8 were used together, I’m pretty sure they’ll use some way of resting pacers for a bit before swapping them back in
Some of the target predictions sound mental to me, but Norway have a rep for walking the talk so I’d have my biggest confidence in Blu matching them. Skipper and Matthews are last minute add ins and I’m thinking it’s a Hail Mary - we either make it or we don’t approach. Which is kind of fine in this event - the whole point is to see what’s possible really rather than win the race so the odds of a blow up escalate rapidly.
Matthews calling out a 7:30 might be the bravest shout…
Thats on the interview I posted above - a 12.5% increase in speed for the same paced run due to drafting. Seems fanciful to me but I so rarely look at TTTs I have no idea really.
