Vittoria Bussi (Aguascalientes, 13.10.2023, 50.267 km)



The picture above links to: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8YJ0gzXoAA3pUC?format=jpg&name=900x900

 

Article in "road.cc": Flying Vittoria Bussi becomes first woman to break 50km barrier as she reclaims UCI Hour Record

On october 13th 2023 Vittoria Bussi made history, becoming the first woman ever to break the 50km barrier at the high-altitude velodrome in Aguascalientes. She already broke the hour record before, reaching 48.007 km in september 2018 (also in Aguascalientes), the record stood for three years before Britain’s Joss Lowden and then Ellen Van Dijk surpassed it in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Bussi wanted to reclaim the record and started her ‘Road2Record’ campaign, which brought together aerodynamic, training, and nutritional experts with the specific goal of enabling her to surpass the 50km mark for the hour. She also launched a crowdfunding campaign to support her attempt, raising over €12,000 on GoFundMe.
The planned date for the record was october 11th, but on that day the temperature dropped dramatically, which would have created unfavourable conditions. Thus the attempt was postponed for two days.
There was no livestream due to the limited budget, and after the succesful attempt only a few pictures were released. The pictures show her riding a Hope HB.T bike with the aerobar unusual high, so her position on the bike is much more upright compared to the “standard” low aero position. Additionally the gearing was also unusual big, with a giant chainring by taiwanese manufacturer “digirit” and a quite small sprocket. The actual gearing is kept secret by the team , looking at the pictures (trying to count the teeth :-)) I estimate a 68 or 70 teeth chainring and a 12 or 13 teeth sprocket, which would be the biggest gear in the history of the hour record.... I still hope more information will be made public in the future.

Since there has been no video coverage of the attempt, right now the only detailed information is from Xavier Disley ( twitter.com/xavierdisley )

I extracted the lap time data from this graph by mouse clicking. This is of course not very accurate, but good enough to create a graph showing the comparison between Bussi and van Dijk:

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