WATTS THE DIFFERENCE SPRINTING BY NUMBERS
More than four hours separated Marcel Kittel from the yellow jersey the first time he finished a Tour de France, in 2013, and an outsider would be forgiven for not believing he was the quickest man in the race. But Kittel’s story is that of a pure sprinter who, at the height of his career, was arguably both the fastest and the slowest rider in the peloton, destined to endure weeks of suffering on Europe’s toughest climbs in pursuit of the supernova flat sprints that saw him take the WorldTour by storm.
Now, a study of Kittel’s performances in the Tours of 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, during which he won 14 stages against generational fastmen including Mark Cavendish, André Greipel, Peter Sagan and Alexander Kristoff, has laid bare the demands the German faced on the sport's grandest stage.
It reveals monstrous performance numbers, his power reaching nearly 1,900 watts and his speed a blistering 75 kilometres per hour, and also reveals the dark side of life as a world class sprinter, suggesting that his power-toweight ratio was “the minimum required to finish the Tour de France or any other grand tour”.
Kittel tells Procycling that when he was racing the Tour, he imagined stages into small chunks to trick himself into pushing through, and that at times he was reduced to tears by the pain. The rewards for his suffering, however, were huge.
