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- And you missed that I wasn’t contradicting but enhancing or adding to the discussion :-)
I am surprised MJ made it that far without some of this having been picked up earlier.
To further make my point, yes, by all means correct/improve anything that you can later in life but like disease, think of prevention before asking for cures, even in cycling a lot is crucial at the early stages but unfortunately, unlike athletics, cycling is a sport that rarely takes (youth) coaching seriously, if at all, it’s basically each to himself and we’ll pick the better ones once there’s enough development. About the only thing young cyclists get forced to learn is to ride with high cadence and that isn’t even coach induced but almost institutionalised. And as I tried to imply, no matter how much you perfect technique, we are all absolutely unique in our mechanical motions, you just have to watch the posture and strides of runners to note how dissimilar each is, and a crucial point to always remember is that by trying to force a better technique you may gain something somewhere but lose more elsewhere, you have to know whether it leaves you « comfortably within your natural boundaries « , eg, no point to improve your saddle position for more aerodynamicity if you’re going to have to ride uncomfortably for hours coz your mental state will drag more on your performance than your aerodynamics gain.
- this isn’t really a discussion about cycling anymore, but that’s cool. so, i live in the united states. there are a lot of things that i don’t like about the way things work or fail to work here, especially compared to many other developed democracies. but one thing the united states does do well is it secures an extraordinarily high level of free speech. now, am i disgusted by the likes of alex jones and how he USES that freedom of speech? you bet. and there are infinite examples of people saying things i’m disgusted and outraged by. but unless someone is going to hand over control to censor
- I feel you missed my point - those who can be coached and can change can improve with new insights. And it helps to have people who see what needs to change to move that along. I’m focusing on the biomechanical expert in the article, without whom Jorgensen wouldn’t have improved. Context matters.
- Yes, but also what eyes can’t do. I was an athletics coach for kids for years and you can see and try to correct as many faults as there are but some requirements are just not possible. It’s very hard to visualize but we all know from experiences, in sport, the most obvious one is the swimming conundrum, you can never become a top level swimmer unless your body grew into it young, maybe gymnastics would be similar. And outside sport, it’s as easy as learning to twitch your ear, if you can ;-)
- Look, I respect your view but you need to question them out of principle too so I’m going to ask you to ask yourself the same question as someone else, should a living Adolf have been given a platform for discussing war tactics? Should Alex Jones have been allowed to continue his Sandy Hook accusations? Somewhere along a scale society has to draw lines, individuals in their head don’t but the internet is open, it’s society, those who want to exchange non-compatible societal IDEAS can still do so, in private amongst themselves but not market them publicly. Besides wasn’t it part of the deal he was not to be involved in cycling? A public show about cycling seems to fly in the face of that but I guess as so often, it was a poorly worded « contract » and with a lack of morals, limits were bound to be tested, again ;-)
- Well, perhaps we still consider sport* to be more of a men’s thing? * I have to say that watching my partner at her badminton club that seems to be one of the rare sports where a more balanced attitude is ambivalent, perhaps because most prefer to play mixed doubles at that level and it’s a very social sport at club level and each match type has equal weighting towards a tournament total?
- My daughter coaches in a different sport and I am constantly amazed at her stories where she just /sees/ the way an athlete is doing something wrong and how they can do the particular thing they need to do better. It’s as if her eyes work in slow motion. She uses film to help them see it as well, coaches them on how to turn this way here, bend that way there, angle this joint in this fashion, use this muscle differently at this moment - someone with that vision is incredible. In her first year of coaching a new team, half her athletes have reached new personal records or school records. All this is to say that I’m not surprised that Jorgensen (or Pogacar, or others) gets better with a new trainer/coach/biomechanical genius to help them improve. It’s amazing what the right eyes can do.
- A wonderful rider and I’m really glad to read that Voigt champions her. She’s been a rider of such dominance for so long that people seem to forget, except how can you after such a long and illustrious career?
- This is the kind of thing that more people should say about Armstrong. He f’ed it up in a big way, leading others and bullying too many along the way. He broke cycling so that people still turn their backs on it.
- look, as far as i’m concerned, lance can talk about whatever the hell he wants to talk about, as long as he’s not giving instructions on how to separate anthrax spores or build a fissionable weapon out of your cell phone. with lance as with most everyone and everything, the marketplace of ideas will decide his legacy, and whether or not he has one. that’s a-ok by me.
