I have read, generally accepted and consistently for years, that in the upper reaches of cycling performance, and even merely strong racers, the differences get tight. Every minor edge is worth pursuing because one competitor is close to the next. I have generally accepted that, as practically self-evident. And, people who race confirm that so I tend not to question it.
But I've started to wonder if that might only be true for a handful of world-class elite, and maybe even the opposite really pertains. It there a table of performance vs percentile anywhere, that supports the consensus above? I look at the famous Coggan chart for example, and it looks like the difference in performance increases for each percentile tranche, not decreases.
Cyclinganalytics.com
The percentile tranches are from reported values by CyclingAnalytics site members. I arranged the "FT" column into a scatter plot:
And it looks to me like the high end shows a drastic
increase in performance for a given percentile difference. If the difference between top competitors really get smaller, that line should be flatter not steeper.
I saw a similar situation from running statistics, which is what prompted this. The X-axis is reversed from the above chart: Percentage of "faster than runner" rather than percentage of "runner is faster than":
My suspicion is that this reflects the general situation. Is there some data that sheds more light on this? Are there some special factors or confounding variables that invalidate it, or is our general assumption in fact wrong? What do you think?