What's your favourite gear ratio?

I sincerely hope that one day I'll get the opportunity to meet you guys and be able to show you my credentials, let alone the credentials of my coach.

You could be Tony Doyle and Alf Whiteway for all that it matters; cyclists, and perhaps particularly track cyclists, failed to grasp physics because they were bound up in superstition and tradition for decades.

Everything which is now being done on the track could have been done in 1950 if people had imported expertise from other fields at the time. We have CFD and FEA to make development quicker and perhaps cheaper, and we have some new materials which score some marginal gains, but in 1950 there were the low speed wind tunnels and sufficient available aerospace materials to make something the shape of a modern track bike with disc wheels. It wouldn't have been as stiff and light as today's all carbon fibre designs, but it would certainly have been faster than the then state-of-the-art round-tubed steel frames with high spoke-count low rim-depth wheels. It's not just about the bike either; we made what are by today's standards appalling errors in training and nutrition back in the olden days, sometimes because nobody knew better but equally because cycling coaches thought that the things which had worked in the past were still the best, even while the science was pointing in a different direction.