Background: A key tenet of sports performance research is to provide coaches and athletes with information to inform better practice, yet the determinants of athletic performance in actual competition remain an underexamined and under-theorised field. In cycling, the effects of contextual factors, presence of and interaction with opponents, environmental conditions, competition structure and socio-cultural, economic and authoritarian mechanisms on the performance of cyclists are not well understood. Objectives: To synthesise published findings on the determinants of cyclists' behaviours and chances of success in elite competition. Methods: Four academic databases were searched for peer-reviewed articles. A total of 44 original research articles and 12 reviews met the inclusion criteria. Key findings were grouped and used to shape a conceptual framework of the determinants of performance. Results: The determinants of cycling performance were grouped into four dimensions: features related to the individual cyclist, tactical features emerging from the inter-personal dynamics between cyclists, strategic features related to competition format and the race environment and global features related to societal and organisational constraints. Interactions between these features were also found to shape cyclists' behaviours and chances of success. Conclusion: Team managers, coaches, and athletes seeking to improve performance should give attention to features related not only to the individual performer, but also to features of the interpersonal, strategic, global dimensions and their interactions.
Further investigation is warranted to determine whether factors related to performance in mass-start events can be identified to improve reproducibility or whether variability in performance results from random chance.
Purpose: To further the understanding of elite athlete performance in complex race environments by examining the changes in cyclists’ performance between solo time trials and head-to-head racing in match-sprint tournaments. Methods: Analyses were derived from official results of cyclists in 61 elite international sprint tournaments (2000–2016), incorporating the results of 2060 male and 1969 female head-to-head match races. Linear mixed modeling of log-transformed qualification and finish ranks was used to determine estimates of performance predictability as intraclass correlation coefficients. Correlations between qualifying performance and final tournament rank were also calculated. Chances of winning head-to-head races were estimated adjusting for the difference in the cyclists’ qualifying times. All effects were evaluated using magnitude-based inference. Results: Minor differences in predictability between qualification time trial and final tournament rank were suggestive of more competitiveness among men in the overall tournament. Performance in the qualification time trial was strongly correlated with, but not fully indicative of, performance in the overall tournament. Correspondingly, being the faster qualifier had a large positive effect on the chances of winning a head-to-head race, but small substantial differences between riders remained after adjustment for time-trial differentials. Conclusions: The present study provides further insight into how real-world competition data can be used to investigate elite athlete performance in sports where athletes must directly interact with their opponents. For elite match-sprint cyclists, qualifying time-trial performance largely determines success in the overall tournament, but there is evidence of a consistent match-race ability that modifies the chances of winning head-to-head races.
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