Originally Posted by
79pmooney
Regarding the spokes - was there any chance he was riding non-metallic ones? The resin of carbon fiber spokes might not be high temperature stuff if it was going on a non-rim brake wheel and no one thought of disc temps.
How much heat from the brake disc do you think actually conducts it's way through to the spokes? If you think about it for a few seconds you should realise it's a ridiculous notion that the spokes are going to get hot from braking. I would say the rider just didn't think enough before opening his mouth. He obviously had a spoke failure (spokes fail occasionally as we know) and made an uneducated attempt to link this failure to disc brake heat.
A more plausible theory (if we insist on linking this failure to disc brakes) is the extra torque applied to the wheel (more specifically through the spokes due to the load path) under braking with disc brakes vs rim brakes. The wheel should be designed with this increased braking torque in mind (along with the fork), but these are likely to be super-lightweight wheels riding a bit closer to the limit. Even so, we don't appear to be having a peloton wide issue here. Just one guy who had an unexplained spoke failure at a critical time. It's not like spokes have never failed before disc brakes appeared.