**** Breaking News: Hamilton Tested Positive? ***

gntlmn

Excellent article! I'm beginning to like Mr. Pound. He seems to be sincerely dedicated to reducing doping in sport. I sure hope cyclists will be forewarned and take heed. The awards and medals and wins they receive may be taken away with a test 8 years later if they are doping now.

gntlmn

Maybe they focus on the leading 80 to save money on testing. This would make sense. The others will have no chance of winning or getting on the podium no matter whether their blood vessels are overflowing with drugs and other people's blood. It isn't going to make up the time gap for them. But they better not ignore stage winners who are way back on the GC or support riders who are providing huge help to the leaders but not making a good showing on the GC. I don't know how they can do that with a smaller sample size.

philoakley

Yes, the speeds do relate to the winner of the Tour de France.

I find your peloton theory difficult to accept. The size of the Tour peloton has remained the same for the last 15 years. The average speed is up between 1-2kmh. I cannot understand why you say the peloton is not a full capacity given that so many riders in the tour are absolutely wasted after the first week. I remember Chris Boardman and Greg Lemond and Charly Mottet making such comments in the Tours of the early 1990's. Perhaps the peloton is going faster because it takes something to help it recover better. To say that a $100m carrot for a 45 kmh average will increase speeds is probably true but also ridiculous as this would be impossible to achieve without perfromance enhancing drugs.

In my opinion, the peloton is getting faster because it can recover faster (due to performance enhancing drugs) and can ride harder for longer and this, as you correctly identify,increases the average speed of the winner. In addition to this, after stomping on the flat stages for a week, the tour riders now go up the mountains faster than ever. If you look at the average speeds of the winners of big mountain stages (4 or 5 1st cat or HC climbs) in the Tour over the last 20 years, you will see that up until the early 1990's typical average speeds were topping out at around 32-32.5 kmh. This is now regularly 33-33.5 kmh which over a 6 hour stage means that the guys of the late 80's, early 1990's would be losing 15 minutes plus on the mountains. Despite better training techniques, this does not stack up in my view. Nor does the progress in distance running where athletes are breaking world records and finishing as fresh as daisies.

As you have said before, I cannot prove anything but I can ask questions and look at what is happening and express my opinion. I just think that to say that training has improved the speed of the peloton is only part of the answer with a large part unexplained.

gntlmn

I'm with you on this now. Earlier I said I wanted to get more information before I conclude about Tyler, and I think I have enough now. I agree. He's a doper, and it's a good thing for his family that they caught him. Once he gets sensitized to foreign blood, he can be more easily killed instantly with the wrong transfusion. I think this is great for the sport. These dopers don't realize that no matter how highly people think of them while they secretly dope, they are not greater than the sport of cycling. It's too bad they don't realize that ahead of time. He deserves every bit of bad press he gets now. I hope he loses that Olympics gold. I think he doped then too, and sample b would have confirmed it if it weren't damaged in freezing.

gntlmn

I'd have to disagree with you on that too. Otherwise, the leaders could attack at will and the peloton wouldn't reel them in. We know that not to be the case. The peloton often "rests" (goes below capacity) when non tour threats break away from the pack, but it goes gung ho when a gc contender goes. This tells you that it is running sub par. Do you think that they take performance enhancing drugs on the fly? How would they know when a gc contender is going to attack? They simply respond while they are riding, or don't when they are not. They don't know when to dope or when not to.

If the riders can go faster with drugs but are already going faster with drugs as you claim, then you are admitting that the peloton does not run to capacity. That's the nature of the peloton. The race is not an all out race for many of the riders. Even the leaders get to have refuge from the wind in the peloton.

Saucy

Even with my cynical attitude about doping in this sport, (and I admit its very cynical) I'm still surprised at Hamilton. He seemed like one of the more thoughtful riders in the peloton. Cycling places a lot of presure on cyclists to dope so I can understand why he did it, but I would have thought Hamilton would at least be smart enough to not get caught.

And blood doping? That is serious stuff. EPO, HGH I could see him resorting to, but blood doping? Its shocking. You can't just self-administer this can you? You would need a donor, a doctor, medical experts...I can only conclude that Phonak team doctors had involvement with this.

I haven't read all the links to the medical discussions about this testing procedure but the ones I have read, the medical experts and Pound seem very confident that the testing is sound. Tyler should save his euros and retire instead of going through a protracted legal battle. I would eventually love for him to speak out about the doping problem but I don't see him doing that.

antoineg

Does anyone have any information about individual time trial speeds (average, preferably, instead of winner) for various events and years? No offense, gntlmn, but I'll bet that data would put the nail in your rhetorical coffin.

philoakley

I think that you have to review what the peloton's capacity is. Full capacity would in its purest sense be flat out all day, every day. Having an easy day in the tour (usually between the Alpes and the Pyrenees) reflects the fact that most of the peloton is tired. Those who escape probably sat in the bus during the mountain stages (ie they could not go flat out) The peloton is therefore not sub-par but is taking a rest because it physically has to.
I am not admitting the peloton does not run at full capacity, anything but. I am arguing that the capacity of the bunch has been enhanced by doping. It seems from your theory that you expect the peloton to get faster every year. You still haven't convinced me as to why the pace on the mountains has increased despite riding harder on the flat stages.

philoakley

So if Tyler is a doper, do you think his domestiques are clean? But if only 1-5% are doping then most of them must be clean by your reasoning. This is despite the fact that they work their backsides of until the last few km's of mountain stages to set the pace for the doper.

philoakley

Average speeds have increased. Sean Yates in 1988 did 52kms at 49.3 kmh without tri-bars. Now 52-53 kmh is not unheard of. However, I would be in complete agreement with Gntlmn here that training and technology have made big differences. Tri bars give big increases whilst the specifc training for the hour record over the years has been of immense benefit in increasing the speed of time trials. My issue is one of the speed of the grand tours which in my opinion has increased due to improved recovery rates which are explained by doping rather than training.

sportzgurl

I tell you what, tomorrow i will do my best to find out who Greg Lemond is and what he did, i promise!!

When Tyler was first under investigation, everybody said that they didn't think he would do that. That he was one of the most honest riders in the peloton etc etc. Even Lance Armsrtong said he was surprised to hear it. So if Tyler can dope then what does it say about the rest of the peloton?

I agree with what you said about everything else though. Well put!

About Vuelta though, could the UCI be on the verge of a major bust on blood doping? Cos a hell of alot of riders have "the shits gonna hit the fan" virus! I mean lets say that most of the riders that pulled out were covering their butts, theres big names in that list!! Floyd Landis for one. All i can say is thank god Jan Ullrich wasn't there!! So im off to read up about Lemond!!

gntlmn

The data I have seen thus far on this thread has everything to do with the flat stages, not the mountains. There have been comments about the mountains, but no hard data. So my comments have been limited to the speeds in the overall, which would include the mountains, but not focusing only on the mountains. Bike weights have come down too. Someone commented that they used to weigh the same as they do now. Well, that may be, but that's not the same bike. Those bikes were mushier.

gntlmn

No, I don't think that it should go faster every year. A lot of that has to do with rider attitude and whether they want to reel in various attacks.

It's kind of hard to support the contention that the peloton is going faster because it is doping. All you have to do, as I stated before, is to imagine how the race would change if the objective were not for one rider to win, but for the peloton to reach the finish line at a faster pace. Then this argument, that the peloton is going faster because it is doping, becomes moot. The peloton can go faster in any given year by shifting riders around within itself. It has no motivation to finish at a greater average speed except to influence the lead gc people's standings. This can result in completely different tactics depending on how the race unfolds. Thus the peloton can change speed.

What they were complaining about in this year's Tour was that the peloton was moving too slowly. Remember those first several stages when the riders kept crashing and crashing and crashing. If you didn't get in a crash, it was almost a miracle. When speeds picked up, and riders thus spread out more, then there were fewer crashes.

If we are going to analyze the average speed of the peloton, then we need to look at the average speed of the peloton. We have not done that. We have looked at the average speed of the 1st place riders in each tour. The speed of each first place rider has a lot to do with both the peloton and the riders on that person's team. So what I am saying is that we don't know yet about the average speed of the peloton because we don't have these numbers. Put them up, and then we can analyze them.

When you put up the average speed of the winner, and then I refute that to say that that is influenced by speed of the peloton, you cannot refute me by asking why the speed of the peloton keeps increasing. How do you know? You have not provided me with the data to confirm that the speed of the peloton is increasing. You have only provided the winning times, not the peloton times. There's a big difference.

It's not at all easy to see this. You can't even look at the final gc every year and know what power outputs each rider put out. Some made far better use of the draft during the race. Others were better domestiques but faded quite a bit when they were "resting" before their next helper session. Others didn't finish at all. How do you conclude faster peloton speeds? I don't see any concrete conclusions on this here.

gntlmn

When a rider gets caught doping, he is guilty when he got caught. The rest is speculation (ie, when did he start, who else is doping, etc). Someone else from Phonak was caught doping this year too. In fact, an entire team could get caught doping, and it still wouldn't budge the 1% number.