Well it might depend on what you consider the cut off between pro and amateur. Pro Tour riders don’t always win races against amateurs (people with full time jobs and racing without sponsorship). Pro Tour riders were included in the linked study.
Continental riders (which tend to make up a mixture of full time / part time riders so I’d say many aren’t pro if they aren’t getting a full salary but others might disagree and count them all as pro) can sometimes have a hard time of it in amateur races if they don’t have teammates.
Amateurs can be quite good because the difference between pro and amateur is simply a contract.
But in any case, the majority of those on bike skills can be trained in little time, whereas pure fitness and power is a mix of genetics and years of training.
It is oversimplification to say that those skills are the most important sentence in that study.
There’s a bunch of genetic freaks that are in all but contract Professional or ProTour (capable) riders that aren’t picked up for various reasons not related to their cycling metrics.
Realistically, most World Tour pro’s would dictate terms in almost any “amateur” race, even if they didn’t actually win. These numbers kind of show why.
Obviously veering off track a bit here, but the perfect example is the NZ National Champs from a couple of years ago. There’s a domestic team with hugely talented young riders and a field of very, very strong continental pro’s and aspiring pro/world tour level pro’s. George Bennett, an almost pure climber type, won the Road Race, being well and truly the marked man/singled out. He darn near won the Time Trial.
They have a very special combination of incredible, INCREDIBLE, genetics, and world class work ethics.
I think what I mean is that of those in the same brackets (ie pro or amateur), in your own field if you don’t have the skills, you won’t win the race. You can’t compare putting a pro into a cat 3/4 race.
I’ve seen similar references to power after X kjs as the key metric for measuring a pro’s ability.
Obviously if your races are 4 hours long, what you can do after 3 hours is key to success. But often overlooked is the fact that to train for that, you need to be able to get that 2500 kjs in then ride more in training fairly often to work on that.
Pros are not just pros because they can race like pros, but also because they have the physiology to train like pros. Its a vicious circle!
It is called fatigue resistance. Intervals.icu has the ability to show your power profile also after a set amount of kJ.
Fatigue resistance is also what sets amateurs and junior level pro’s apart from seasoned pro’s. At some point when power meters were introduced, they found out that a power profile showing the max power ever for each interval, is not a good predictor for race performance. By looking at power profiles after x kJ, you could see how for some there is a big drop, while for others the power profile almost does not come down.
Is this the case, or simply that the only people who try and train as pros are those who get good results in their amateur days? I’m sure many of us could train like pros given the time, we just might not see the same results, though some might if they have untapped potential.
Training like a pro long term is harder than it looks.
I “trained like a pro” as a competitive swimmer through college. There was definitely a weeding out along the way from little age grouper to D1 as people reached their level where they could no longer be competitive. But there was also a weeding out of people who were fast but got injured because they could not tolerate the training load necessary to get to the next level. I’d assume cycling is similar.
Generally in most sports, highly successful folks are the ones with talent, the desire to work AND the ability to do the work and compete without getting injured or at least getting injured less often. Not everyone can train 20 hours a week, even if free from obligations like jobs or families.
There is a 4th Pro ability that separates them from amateurs - the ability to leave a party just when its getting fun and still get up at 5:30 am for a workout.