[whamlastxmas]

The semantics of it are silly and pointless to discuss, since she's not accelerating those extra 84MPH using only her own power. There's a lot of aerodynamic influences happening here and this is more of an engineering feat than an athletic one.

[bla2]

The GP is factually wrong, this isn't "semantics". Your comment moves the goalpost to "well the aerodynamics help". This is true: The slipstream moves at the speed of the car ahead, so it's like she has no headwind slowing her down. She still needs to accelerate 84 MPH (on top of maintaining 100 MPH). Think of doing this on a gym bike where you don't have headwind either. This is very much an athletic feat.

It's also an engineering feat, but again TFA: "As they targeted the overall record, their team revamped the same dragster that was used to set the men's record" -- they're reusing last time's engineering.

[whamlastxmas]

This record is like having a record for bench pressing with the aid of hydraulic lifts. How much do the hydraulic lifts help? How much is the person contributing? The whole premise just seems really stupid, and it's even dumber if they were to make the headlines "Woman smashes world record bench press at 23 tons". Just throw someone in Elon's hyperloop vacuum tubes on a bicycle fixed to the rails, make them wear a pressurized diving suit, and let them go to town. I'm sure they'd break 184MPH and it would be an equally pointless dick measuring contest.

[huhtenberg]

Fair enough.

Yes, she also needed to accelerate from 100 to 184, which (I am guessing) is a significantly lesser feat than maintaining a balance on a salt lake surface and keeping herself in 3 meters of a slipstream area. This is all remarkable, but the point was that this setup is probably not what most people would imagine when told of "a woman riding bicycle at 183.9 MPH".