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Comment by its_ethan | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I don't think people are trying to say it's a zero skill sport. It's not an indictment of you or the sport.

I see the "argument" as: in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology. This is compared to the skill of descending a mountain at speed, which is dictated by how fast you can actually make yourself go, which is a matter of physiology.

It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.

So basically, could I cycle down a hill at 50-70mph? Absolutely not. But among the people who can, then the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.

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> I don't think people are trying to say it's a zero skill sport.

I didn’t say you were, you were saying that there’s less skill involved, which is outright untrue.

> in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology.

Skill is highly correlated to physiology at the higher levels. Plenty of people practice as much as Messi, yet haven’t a fraction of his footballing ability.

> It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.

You’ve not watched the famous Pidcock descent then.

> the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.

Very little pedalling is involved at 60mph, it’s 100% skill.

> Skill is highly correlated to physiology at the higher levels. Plenty of people practice as much as Messi, yet haven’t a fraction of his footballing ability.

This is counter to your thesis. Messi's dominance doesn't come because he has elite physical characteristics. He's dominant because his level of skill with the ball at his foot is an outlier even among elites. It's not because he's pushing the physical limits of the human body.

There might be some variance in skill for elite riders, but I would guess the density curve of skill in that cohort is a very narrow bell curve, ie. low variance with relatively few outliers. This is what I mean when I say pure skill is not the major factor in success in cycling. Most riders are going to be pretty closely matched skill-wise, and the winners are going to be those that can generate the most power for a sustained amount of time.

I’ve given up on this thread because people seem to be getting very defensive and interpreting malice when there is none, but your comment here is similar to what I was trying to say. Cycling has a tighter bell curve of skill than other sports, just like all/most endurance sports.

It’s not a knock, I still enjoy those sports a lot, often more than wider skill bell curve sports.. oh well

> he said less in comparison with other professional sports.

No, we’re taking umbrage with the fact that people are saying cycling requires less skill, when this simply isn’t true. It requires different skills, that’s all.

No, you're still not getting it.

It's not that it requires less skill, relative to an average person. It's that skill is not the differentiating factor among elites.

I’ve answered this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40965857

There’s plenty of amateur footballers more skilful than professionals, yet can’t make it because they lack the physical attributes (speed/strength/stamina). I’ve watched high skill teams shredded by a team that just shoved them off the ball and outran them. Barcelona’s style under Pep wasn’t mostly skill, it included a HUGE amount of physical fitness to maintain a press to win the ball back.

A massive part of Rooney’s rapid decline was his shit lifestyle reducing his fitness and speed as he grew older.

I'm a keen cyclist (doing and watching); the elite differentiator is aerobic capacity (anaerobic for sprinters) not skill. Going fast up a hill wins GC and require no skill. Going fast down is more skilful but less important.

> This is counter to your thesis.

No, it’s because his skill is deeply tied to his body’s physiology. I wager you’d find physical traits that you simply must be born with. His height, balance, reaction times. Physiology.

> Most riders are going to be pretty closely matched skill-wise

This is true for all sports.

> winners are going to be those that can generate the most power for a sustained amount of time.

Strategy comes into it a lot, just like most sports.

Also, there’s plenty of talented footballers that will never go pro because they lack the ability to run fast or maintain that intensity for 90 minutes (fitness).

The competitive advantage is not physiological. Following your reasoning, that'd mean an F1 driver's competitive advantage is how fast they can push the pedals to get to 300kmph.

The real advantage is how fast you can navigate dangerous mountain roads which are narrow and have many hairpin turns.

I don't know that that's the analogy you'd want to use. It is correct that an F1 driver's competitive advantage is how fast they can get to 300 kmph (or just accelerate in general, since there's skill/strategy involved as to when/where to accelerate). If we're following that reasoning... the engine is that competitive advantage, and we know that to be a significant factor because there are millions of dollars of engineering effort to optimize the cars they race. The reaction time of how fast you can push the pedal is an incredibly small part of that equation.

If you're on a bike, that competitive edge "engine" is the cyclist own physiology. Yes, how fast you can navigate the roads is part of it, but is it not the acceleration/max speed out of the hairpin turn that represents the lion's share of overall time? Rather than the fractions of seconds gained/lost in the timing of accelerations at the turn? I guess it depends on the length/ frequency of turns in the course.

Just out of curiosity, would you be defending the skill required to do cross country as vigorously as you are for cycling?

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