German.
Variable sock height.
before, you needed to ride one of these:
now, you can ride one of these:
In a nutshell:
Prior to early 2014, to be eligible for the official UCI hour record, you had to be on a traditional track bike a la Merckx’s when he got the record in the 70s. Aero gear (disc wheels, pursuit bars etc) were banned.
They’ve changed the rules to take in modern aero track bikes, so as long as it’s UCI legal it’s okay to use for the record attempt.
All other aero attempts (O’bree/Boardman/Moser) were disallowed (as they retro’d the rule changes) and moved to “best human effort” classification or somesuch.
edit: what tate said
paging HMC and his photo-captioning skillz
Perfect explanation, thanks
I’d love to see more people have a go at this! Comparing this to Sosenka’s record is a bit wrong, its a good starting point for the new rules that hopefully wont be messed with for a while. Looking through the record progression, best ride for me is Oscar Egg in 1914, stood for nearly 20 years, but the best thing is the context… his 44+ km were ridden on a pre-WW1 technology bike and velodrome, and Coppi, 30 years later on a mid-WW2 tech bike and velodrome was only 1500m or so longer… very awesome.
If Jens can do that speed I can only imagine that guys like Tony Martin and the rest of the big hitters in the TT world would almost easily beat the current record.
that struck me too, an extraordinary effort given the conditions
Oscar Egg was probably off his tits on pre-war EPO.
speed you mean?
While the current record holder has access to much better stuff.
Yeah… like red meat, fresh fruit, vegetables and yummy lollies that aren’t coloured with lead based dies 
I can only imagine the standard of the previous record holders if they were only allowed to use ‘normal’ track bikes compared to the UCI regulation bikes of today. They must of been super human almost.
Now I get Jensie’s playlist
look at Ullrich, what a mad dog.
I was more focused on the sweet sweet Dura Ace 7410 groupset…
Still the greatest groupset of all time?
what the fuck is wrong with you people.
ftfy