Originally Posted by
furiousferret
There are a couple of issues with the w/kg scale, namely most amateur races in the US (Crits) aren't reliant on w/kg. The other factor being weight loss and most people just aren't willing to go as deep as they can. Last year went down to 7% and that was thin. Gaimon told me he raced at 4%. Those extra pounds imo account for the big jump at the end of the Cycling Analytics scale; most amateurs simply aren't either willing to go that deep or don't have the need to (if they races on the flats).
I also don't think in the high end of the sport margins are tight. Aerodynamics really help mitigate those gaps but even in the ProTour there are levels. In addition to that, very few of them are good across the Coggan Scale. For their role, they need to focus on 1 or 2 of those, and others suffer.
The w/kg is one measure not an end-all - selected here because there's at least some data. I'm not linking to the cyclinganalytics page because there were some unsupportable statements (IMO) there that I wouldn't want to get sidetracked on, and I do take the self-reported numbers with a grain of salt. But is there any reason why population tranches of other performance measures won't look similar?
If you're proposing that the top of the world class elite concentrate on their own specific physiological "edge", and those different advantages tend to balance each other out in competitions, I had that same thought. But it's not clear how closely those different "edges" would actually balance, and if so it also doesn't seem reasonable to apply it anywhere other than the tail end of the curve.