Clean Cyclists Now Outperform Doped Champions of Tour de France's Past (theatlantic.com) 57
Current Tour de France competitors are faster than the sport's notorious doping-era champions, according to an analysis. Tadej Pogacar produced approximately 7 watts per kilogram for nearly 40 minutes during a crucial mountain stage in last year's Tour de France. Jonas Vingegaard, generated more than 7 watts per kilogram for nearly 15 minutes during a failed attack attempt. Lance Armstrong, at his blood-doped peak two decades ago, averaged an estimated 6 watts per kilogram and took nearly six minutes longer than Pogacar on the same Pyrenees climb in 2004.
The performance gains stem from multiple technological advances. Every rider now uses power meters that provide real-time performance data. Nutrition has shifted from minimal fueling to constant calorie replenishment with precisely measured food intake. Equipment undergoes extensive wind tunnel testing to reduce drag coefficients. Teams use apps like VeloViewer to preview race courses and weather forecasting to optimize wheel selection. "The bias is in favor of clean athletes: that you can be clean and win," said Travis Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
The performance gains stem from multiple technological advances. Every rider now uses power meters that provide real-time performance data. Nutrition has shifted from minimal fueling to constant calorie replenishment with precisely measured food intake. Equipment undergoes extensive wind tunnel testing to reduce drag coefficients. Teams use apps like VeloViewer to preview race courses and weather forecasting to optimize wheel selection. "The bias is in favor of clean athletes: that you can be clean and win," said Travis Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
Or maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
they've got better doping techniques that the tests don't detect yet?
Re:Or maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
after much boosterism and fanboing TFA gets around to the topic by the end of the article.
So that history does make one legitimately skeptical of claims about magical technical gains.
No one I spoke with would rule out that doping still exists in the sport. Occasionally, athletes are still caught at it—but that now seems to happen more at lower levels of competition where the monitoring is less comprehensive. One permitted practice that offers some performance benefit is sodium-bicarbonate loading. You read that right: Chowing down baking soda helps aerobic performance in some circumstances by buffering lactic acid, a by-product of intense exercise. But eating an extra muffin won’t do it, and the gastric distress associated with eating a lot seems a natural limiter. Another, more alarming method involves microdosing with carbon monoxide—a deadly gas—to mimic the effect of altitude training. Cycling’s governing body has moved to ban the practice.
They also point out that even "the gains" are, in part, from being obsessive about tracking food intake and fueling. And that carbon monoxide training is another way to do blood doping (though apparently harder an not as effective. maybe ~3% VO2max increases vs maybe 6%-10% with EPO or blood transfusions)
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... And that carbon monoxide training is another way to do blood doping (though apparently harder an not as effective. maybe ~3% VO2max increases vs maybe 6%-10% with EPO or blood transfusions)
Seems to be a debate about what "blood doping" is. The CO2 simulates training at high altitudes, which isn't against the rules. Breathing a gas found naturally in the atmosphere, albeit at different level than where the cyclist is training, seems to me different than taking drugs, so not doping. But, I'm not a big cycling fan.
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It's not permanent. The half life under normal circumstances is a few hours.
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It binds more strongly than O2 or CO2, but not permanently. Just time removed from the source will clear it. Providing supplemental O2 will speed that up while supporting life functions if they got a larger dose.
Basically, CO will win most fights with O2 for hemoglobin, but when it is experiencing a few hundred per trip through the lungs...
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And that carbon monoxide training is another way to do blood doping (though apparently harder an not as effective. maybe ~3% VO2max increases vs maybe 6%-10% with EPO or blood transfusions)
I always suspected that smoking was being used to do this in the past. I actually experimented with inhaling incense fumes (10 years ago?) to get a similar effect but abandoned it since I didn't have equipment to reasonable track progress and it was just a side interest.
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There are many other examples of sports science pushing records though, so even if there is doping it's likely also down to improvements unrelated to that as well. For example, women's sports science was a long way behind the men's up until the 90s, when women started to improve rapidly.
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and when they add new stuff to the doping list? (Score:2)
and when they add new stuff to the doping list?
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We know this because the reality is human beings can't really do what people want athletes to do.
Every now and then one of them screws up and gets caught but it's getting rarer and rarer.
Also the public bodies that oversee and try to catch doping are more or less in on it because nobody wants to see regular human beings in sports. It just isn't as exciting.
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I admit you can't rule this out...but there's also history to consider for some in the pro peloton. I'm not saying Pogacar's completely clean, he may be a doper, but in his defense he's been racing since he was 9, and has been extremely strong his whole life, crushing riders significantly older than him in his early youth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadej_Poga%C4%8Dar [wikipedia.org]
So in his case, it's been pretty consistent with just how dominant he is in the sport. He's probably a freak of nature genetically, with a l
You need both (Score:3)
Also a stable home life that lets you train effectively.
If you're missing any one of those three you're just not going to be able to go toe to toe with somebody who has all three of them.
And in a world with a billion people on it you're going to have plenty of people who have all three. At that point everything else is luck.
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Informative)
Motors in the seat stem apparently.
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You are referring to mechanical doping [wikipedia.org]. It exists, but at the TdF and other headline races on the pro circuit, motors would be really hard to hide. To be useful, they'd have to put out 10s of watts for many minutes. You can't run a motor like that without producing a heat signature that's easy to spot (race officials have IR cameras out on the course). The bikes of the main contenders (like Tadaj) are routinely X-rayed, which would immediately reveal a motor. Lastly
Re: Or maybe (Score:3)
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And some things can never be proven from tests. Blood transfusions, for example. Initially, you could identify this case under a microscope, as they actually froze the blood. Now, the blood is simply chilled, not frozen. No damage, no change from what naturally appears in one's blood. There's even been a couple of cases of identical twins showing up to a race, with one there only to 'offer support'.
The other fun specter creeping in is gene doping. Increase production of *something* - hemoglobin, ACTN3
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they've got better doping techniques that the tests don't detect yet?
Yeah, or maybe hardware improvements aren’t getting the credit they deserve.
Equipment undergoes extensive wind tunnel testing to reduce drag coefficients. Teams use apps like VeloViewer to preview race courses and weather forecasting to optimize wheel selection.
Put the athlete of today on the hardware of yesteryear if we truly want to compare.
Better yet, juice ol’ Lance up so much Tropicana reaches out for a sponsorship deal and send him spinning on the new shit.
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Nothing like EPO could be used these days with the testing. EPO has such a huge performance increase on cycling, it cant be some new doping method like this.
Tadaj has performed at this level since he broke into the professional scene, the smells of doping aren't there like with the EPO era.
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To some extent, yes. Mostly it marks a shift to what's called "mechanical doping" where you hide an electric motor and batteries in your bike. It turns out adding a motor makes you go faster than taking a bunch of drugs.
Shouldhave put clean in quotes (Score:3)
No way we can tell if they are actually clean for at least a decade. Only then will tell all books and new, better tests actually confirm that the athletes are clean.
Kidding? (Score:2)
You mean they have better gynecologists today.
Asking for a friend (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Asking for a friend (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the various times for the mile or marathons to get your answer. In bike racing, yes, technological advances have helped, but better training and food intake help more.
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In bike racing, yes, technological advances have helped,
Well, except for one significant technological advance, which was banned by the Union Cycliste Internationale in 1934, because it made the current champions look like chumps. Charles Mochet had invented the Velocar, a pedal-powered 4-wheeled vehicle that got used as a pace vehicle in bicycle races. It was difficult to maintain speed in turns, so Mochet experimented with variations on the design, eventually splitting it in half to create the first recumbent bicycle. To get exposure for his invention, he conv
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Nutrition and training definitely get better over time increasing the expression of innate capability of the individual.
But so has selection of athletes (i.e. choosing those with higher innate capability from the population) so more people at say the 99.99th percentile might make their way into a sport today whereas maybe they were only at the 99.9th percentile before... The former China is the absolute best at this currently (but the Soviet Union was up there ). And capitalism / free market does stuff
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except the Yao Ming case. activity like that will probabilistic create "better at birth" athletes.
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Humans get better all the time. Technological advances help, but humans can do wonders on their own, just look at sports without any tech to lean on. Heck in some cases the limited tech available was ignored, e.g. in 1960 a new world record was set for men's marathon. The significance is that the new record holder had the wrong shoe size sent to him so he ran the entire marathon barefoot.
Sports like Javelin throwing are unchanged technically. In the 1900s the record was 62m, now it's nearly double that. Run
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No. Humans are the same old bags of mostly water. It's the training techniques that improve. Unless there's some state with a cycling-focused eugenics program out there...
Are they really better today? (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting videos out there discussing this. Some interesting points:
1. Athletes train year round now and are able to achieve higher gains - they used to take months off and lose conditioning
2. Nutrition: cyclists use to take much less nutrition during these long races, they now ingest double the nutrients from 5-10 years ago. This is due to altering the nutrient mix to help aid and speed ingestion.
3. Sleep: there are cycling teams that literally clear out hotel rooms and replace mattresses, add lighting, A/C and air filtration systems to improve sleep quality.
So are they better, or just better prepared? I would say that the selection of people who fit the design of a professional cyclist just keeps getting smaller -- enduring years of constant training, having a digestive system that can handle the high/concentrated nutrient intake levels -- but also have all the physical attributes that make for great cyclists already (VO2 max, size, body type, etc) is getting smaller.
So my answer is that they are getting better in comparison to athletes from before, we are just finding people that better fit the requirements for each sport. It's like when all the sports teams were whites only, people didn't necessarily get better but the people in those sports were better than before.
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So my answer is that they are getting better in comparison to athletes from before, we are just finding people that better fit the requirements for each sport.
Which is why I've never much liked elite level sports.
They literally feature a collection of genetic freaks. It's nothing like normal, human sporting fun.
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Which is why I've never much liked elite level sports.
They literally feature a collection of genetic freaks. It's nothing like normal, human sporting fun.
Barring doping, they are human and represent the extremes that a human can reach naturally. Isn't that what sports (highlights for sure) are for, people in awe over what another human can do?
"Hey! That's the same species as me" (as I sit on the couch stuffing bon-bons down my throat)
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Yeah...
After decades of insane efforts to improve doping and avoid detection, they somehow only just discovered proper training, proper food and proper sleep and
, miraculously, it's actually better than doping!
Right.
Do they explain why proper training, proper food and proper sleep without doping is better than proper training, proper food and proper sleep _with_ doping? No? They're full of shit.
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Do they explain why proper training, proper food and proper sleep without doping is better than proper training, proper food and proper sleep _with_ doping? No? They're full of shit.
Agree, the easy way will always be taken (at least by some). Look I've been fooled enough on this front to be anything but skeptical, however it is interesting to see some of the things these people do to improve performance that you or I can easily (and safely) do to improve our personal performances. Look at the last 5 years - sauna, ice baths, compression pants, sleep technology, nutrition information - hard to believe that all of that is not at least a part of the performance gains. But, as you said, t
Only one way to find out (Score:2)
This
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Agree a lot of this helps!
I read an interview with someone who joined Pogacar's squad in the last year, and was talking about how he almost never does any 'social rides' any more. That 'every ride is a workout and training ride'.
I think some riders/teams (maybe many or most) have actually been on the 'soft' side. LSD rides used to be the norm. Pretty sure that doesn't happen with the fastest riders now. (LSD = Long, Slow, Distance, and they'd often emphasize the S.)
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Another interesting part of this, for sure. Zone training as well as personal performance and recovery tracking has been another big change.
They also do blood testing every hour on some of their training rides for tracking and performance monitoring - some riders have their own testers and test themselves in the off season.
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So are they better, or just better prepared?
Why not both? We don't judge human performance by our natural ability to do something without any preparation. Your first point is a clear one, training. We train to improve performance, we eat to ensure our bodies are able to improve performance, we sleep to ensure our bodies are at peak performance.
They are one and the same thing. Even if the gains are short lived, they are actually better. They just won't remain better if after setting a record they change their lifestyle to sitting on the couch and eati
Imagine if... (Score:2)
Wait! What? (Score:3)
Bicycle tech improvements lead to more physical output? Seems that this would be the other way around.
If you want to put out 7 watts per kilogram, I'll loan you my old steel Schwinn. You won't go very fast, but it will take about that much power just to get the flat tires rolling.
Oooooorrrrrr Maaaaaybeeeee (Score:3, Interesting)
They are better at concealing tiny electric motors and batteries in the frames of their bikes.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
What A Joke ! (Score:2)
And did you check the bike for any electrical motor? No, I thought so.
Lance got away with cheating (Score:2)
He got caught in the end, but by then he was famous and rich. He still is. Live strong, my cheating brothers.
I'm confused. (Score:3)
I'm definitely not a cycling strategist; but the various optimizations described sound like they are either neutral(like lower drag frames), or potentially even more helpful if you can find a way to sneak a few drugs in(like tighter diet control and better route planning that would potentially reward the ability to make quick metabolic adjustments under specific circumstances); none of those changes sound like they are skewed in favor of baseline users specifically.
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it's not about a bias in favor of clean athletes, it's an acknowledgement of how effective the PEDs are. i.e. these are explanations about how today's supposedly clean(er) athletes could possibly achieve performance level previously only seen with PED use.
W/o these explanations (and even with them) the assumption is that they're doping again in some new way.
"everyone agrees" that if you added EPO on top of the new obsession with eating and sleeping they'd get even better results.
Why do they ... (Score:3)
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That's basically the case for all elite level sports.
Doesn't make doing the activity yourself less fun though.
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Fair point.
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What are you talking about? Exercise literally causes your body to release endorphins which makes you feel good. People "enjoy" it regardless of what it is.
You think a cyclist has any hope in hell of getting into a top tier race if their approach to training and racing is the same as some cubicle worker who just had a stack of TPS reports dropped on his desk?
Just because you don't enjoy something doesn't mean others don't.
Did they really? (Score:2)