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Cycling Doping Fallacies

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Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#21

Post by Zigurd »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #19
Zigurd wrote: post #7

Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. I recently bought an old high-end Look racing bike after taking up cycling for fitness, and I went down the Look, La Vie Claire, Bernard Tapie, Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong rabbit hole. Doping is just the surface of what must have been a money laundering cocaine fueled sex crazed decades long party.

> It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. You can't buy the engine for professional cyclists. Even though they were doping, people like Armstong are still individuals with insanely high VO2max levels, beyond anything you could achieve through training alone (i.e. you need genetic good luck too). So I am not sure where you see the similarities with F1 ...

I meant the milieu, not the sport itself. It's about providing a party for executives of corporate sponsors.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#22

Post by KeplerBoy »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #19
Zigurd wrote: post #7

Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. I recently bought an old high-end Look racing bike after taking up cycling for fitness, and I went down the Look, La Vie Claire, Bernard Tapie, Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong rabbit hole. Doping is just the surface of what must have been a money laundering cocaine fueled sex crazed decades long party.

> It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. You can't buy the engine for professional cyclists. Even though they were doping, people like Armstong are still individuals with insanely high VO2max levels, beyond anything you could achieve through training alone (i.e. you need genetic good luck too). So I am not sure where you see the similarities with F1 ...

You also need some inherent talent to be competitive in F1. Yes, you can buy yourself in, and you can be taught how to drive the car safely and fast, but that's not enough to win.

See lance stroll (not saying he has no talent, but the gap between someone in the top 10% and top 1% of aptitude is large)

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#23

Post by stevage »

There's a link to this graph here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240105023309/https://nitter.no...

Took me a very very long time to make sense of the chart.

Watts/kg up, minutes over which that power output was sustained to the right.

White points are Vingegaard climbs in the past, yellow points are Vingegaard climbs in 2022, pink points are other cyclists.

The yellow and white curves are just trend lines? They seem to just be distracting.

And Riis's climb of Hautacam in 1996 is "off the charts" by being very high and to the right.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#24

Post by Zigurd »

nradov wrote: post #20
Zigurd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If professional, or, for that matter supposedly amateur sports were not so subsidized and blown out of proportion, as well as having regulatory and antitrust exemptions, it is likely there would be a lot less money in it and therefore less incentive to trade one's health for fleeting money and fame. There is another article on the front page today about how the right amount of fraud is not zero. Align the incentives…

People enjoy watching exciting sports. They are willing to pay a lot for that entertainment, and also tend to patronize the sponsors. This incentive will last as long as capitalism.

That incentive won't go away. But we don't need to give subsidies or bend regulations as well.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#25

Post by stevage »

ajcp wrote: post #4

> I do think that history has treated Mr. Armstrong unfairly for the essential act of his cheating. > To be sure, Mr. Armstrong brought much of his disparate treatment on himself. Perhaps history, but I think modernity has been far too kind to Mr. Armstrong. I'm floored that Lance Armstrong is still given a degree of celebrity and room as a public figure, and still more that he can make money off of that. That his ce…

>and all the while he openly and literally tried to destroy the lives and reputations of those who said as much

Not just "tried", he completely destroyed a couple of journalists' careers.

This is not something that should ever be forgiven.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#26

Post by dogmatism »

1) Armstrong was (is) an asshole who destroyed careers and lives, which is part of why they threw the book at him as opposed to others

2) That said, 7 in a row is still incredible. While he had a few incidents, he was always able to recover and never had an injury or illness that knocked him out. If Roglic could say the same, he'd probably have won at least 2 Tours if not three

3) Of course they're still all doping. WvA winning on Ventoux... Pogacar winning Tours de France and Flanders? Pas normal

4) Speaking of all still doping, the ongoing involvement of former dopers really goes against a stated desire for clean racing. Inigo san Milan making bones with his "zone 2" bullshit...dude was team doctor for Saunier Duval. University of Colorado should be embarrassed

5) all that said...who cares? The NFL barely tests because who wants to watch 1950's football? Same with cycling. I'd rather see van der Poel do inhuman things. Cadel Evans era was boring

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#27

Post by lovemenot »

Scoundreller wrote: post #17
diath wrote: post #6

Unpopular opinion but I really think that all competitions should be untested like WSM. As it currently stands, the competition in most sports is about who has the resources to best hide their PED use.

WSM = World’s Strongest Man? (Google first suggested Weston Super Mare, a UK semi-pro football club but I don’t think that’s right).

Steroids: putting the Super in Weston Super Mare.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#28

Post by sollewitt »

If you are competitive with a naturally low hematocrit level you have more “headroom” for doping to unnaturally boost your performance, and vice-versa.

Lance had a naturally low hematocrit for a road cyclist, which made him respond disproportionately strongly to EPO. He’d have been mediocre off the sauce in a clean field. The end.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#29

Post by nradov »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #19
Zigurd wrote: post #7

Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. I recently bought an old high-end Look racing bike after taking up cycling for fitness, and I went down the Look, La Vie Claire, Bernard Tapie, Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong rabbit hole. Doping is just the surface of what must have been a money laundering cocaine fueled sex crazed decades long party.

> It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. You can't buy the engine for professional cyclists. Even though they were doping, people like Armstong are still individuals with insanely high VO2max levels, beyond anything you could achieve through training alone (i.e. you need genetic good luck too). So I am not sure where you see the similarities with F1 ...

VO2 Max isn't a particularly good predictor of road cycling race results. Athletes can only sustain their VO2 Max output for about 7 minutes (plus or minus). But stage winners tend to be either sprinters with high anaerobic power output, or climbers who can sustain a high aerobic power-to-weight ratio for much longer than 7 minutes. All pro cyclists have relatively high VO2 Max metrics but this is more incidental rather than something that they specifically train much.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#30

Post by stevenwoo »

I don’t buy his theory that Lance was clean early in his career because he only won one day races up to that point. Exogenous EPO was available for the first time by the time Indurain began his run on the Tour de France several years earlier- this was quite startling because he was huge weight wise by grand tour standards up to that time. Armstrong might just have not dialed in the doping just right in those early years, the system exposed in the USPS fraud trial was very extensive. For a similar surprising result for a relatively heavy one day specialist I remember one of Armstrong’s teammates Hincapie winning a stage with a mountaintop finish and thinking they’re really just shoving it in our faces now.
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