The Hour Record

13/10/22 22:46 Filed in: Riding

Near the end of the 19th century, the first man established the “hour record” at around 35 km in 60 minutes (the women’s hours record came MUCH later and isn’t the topic of conversation for today). Now, the hour record is a cool cycling thing based on how far you can ride on a velodrome in one hour – that’s it: ride for 60 minutes and see how far you went.
When, in 1972, Merckx set the record at 49 km, it was out of reach for a long while. Ten years later, Moser was able to take that up to 50 km by using newly developed disc wheels and a lo-pro frame to gain an aero-advantage over the Merckx set-up. In 1992 it got bumped up again. First by Obree and then by (then) recent Barcelona Olympic Individual Pursuit gold medallist Boardman at 52 km.
Obree, Indurain, Rominger, Rominger and Boardman kept pushing the distance upwards in five steps to well over 56 km (56.3). Then the UCI stepped in and threw out 25 years of progress by telling everyone that Merckx was once again the record holder. From that day forwards, all record attempts had to be done on a 1970’s style bike. There were a few attempts, a couple of successes, getting the record up to 51 km. But the main problem was it didn’t appeal to anyone. At least the 90’s flurry of activity was based around the then-current Individual Pursuit regulations and any decent time trial rider would feel at home on a pursuit bike.
Then the UCI leadership changed and they opened up the hour to current pursuit bike rules again. The last decade has seen another whirlwind of records upping the distance from both strong GC riders and time trial specialists. They collectively pushed the record up to nearly 55 km (still not equal to Boardman’s 1996 record of 56).
In September an unlikely holder emerged at the end of one hour with a 55 km distance: an engineer from a pro road team, who is apparently a pretty handy cyclist himself, put all of the marginal gains he knew about into his personal attempt with fantastic success. That was just the prelude to the main event. On the same team was double world champion Ganna. Early on the morning of October 9th (8th where he was) Ganna took his fancy Individual Pursuit equipment and crushed all the records with a 56.7 km record.
That is far enough that it might be some time before anyone can better it.

Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

The Hour Record