At 7pm this evening (Friday 10 November), the first of the final two rounds of the UCI Track Champions League (TCL) gets underway at the Lee Valley Velodrome in London. The riders in the TCL are world-class, but when they’re racing wheel to wheel, it’s sometimes hard to comprehend just how fast they really are.
So, in anticipation of this weekend’s double helping of track action, we’ve got our hands on the power, heart rate and speed data from the best sprinters in the world. Thanks to data provided by AWS, the TCL’s ‘Official Cloud Infrastructure Provider’, we can show exactly how powerful these riders are, and exactly what it takes to cross the finish line in first place.
Read more: UCI Track Champions League: how does it work?
Each rider in the series has a peak power number, which in most cases comes from a test on a static bike. What’s interesting with the real-world track data from the data team at the TCL is the discrepancy between these peak power figures and the numbers riders are actually able to produce during a race.
Some riders, like Canadian sprinter Kelsey Mitchell, are able to meet and even surpass their pre-season power test during a race. Others, like Israeli Keirin specialist Mikhail Yakovlev, struggle to get within 500 watts of their peak power when they’re in a race.
