Originally Posted by
ancker
Also, I wonder if you're maybe thinking about it wrong. Percentage of riders with a higher than 6 W/kg is going to be pretty small, but they exist. So unless you're heavily rounding or only looking at 95th percentile, you're still going to have that final spike in the graph, even if it really only represents 0.25% of the sample.
I think the plot you listed in misleading. Try it as a bell curve. You'll see that after 5 W/kg or so, the line is essentially flat and only 30% of the sample is over the 4 W/kg mark. According to the chart, 4 W/kg is what's needed to be an entry Cat 2.
So ignoring my comment about the chart being skewed high, you can conclude that adding 0.25 W/kg to your FT jumps over less and less riders as you reach 100%.
Sidenote: I tend to think of W/kg as a pseudo logarithmic scale in terms of difficulty to achieve. 3 is relatively easy to achieve and maintain with casual training/riding. 4 much less so. 5 puts you in pro ranks, 6 puts your in WT Pro ranks.
I wish lol.
But yeah, if plotted differently, this chart would more-or-less look like a bell curve. To explain the reasoning behind the general idea of the top riders being closer, think about it this way. On a given day in July you have nearly all of the handful of "world class" riders racing against each other in one race in France. Meanwhile in my local P/1/2 crit I'm racing against people who range from "very good" to exceptional. And while there are thousands of other cyclists whose FTPs are also around the 5.0 mark give or take a few tenths, some are racing in Cali, some in the Pacific Northwest, some in the Midwest, some in New England, many throughout Europe and Asia, a few in Africa, and a some in Australia zwifting during the winter months.
You can see the same trend in many sports. As the level of competition increases, you go from a very local scale with large differences in ability to a global scale with very fine differences in ability.