Tour de France

[AJB Temple]

It's been a good 3 weeks this year and the Pog has dominated. Just watching the final time trial into Nice from Monaco and boy is the coverage dull. It shows short sequences of the riders one by one mostly from behind. Lots of talking - but there is nothing to say until the rider gets to the end, and that's about it. What a waste of the final day to do it like this, with no grand parade, no tactics and no actual racing.

 

[Mr P]

Are you watching on ITV or Eurosport? I'm watching the tour on Eurosport, I find they're better commentators, both funny and knowledgeable, much better than the ITV lot.

 

[AndyP]

Perfectly understand why TDF not finishing in Paris but I do not get why the last day should be a time trial.

 

[AJB Temple]

Just saw the end. Wow. Tadej won it in style. Very impressive. Didn't even seem tired at the end.

(watched on ITV sport as I don't pay for sport channels. Not even F1).

 

[StevieB]

Perfectly understand why TDF not finishing in Paris but I do not get why the last day should be a time trial.

It stops the last day procession and final sprint that is traditional, and adds a sense of jeopardy if the favourites are closer together - the fact Pog is so far ahead this year (and Roglic is absent) make the final TT disappointing, but imagine how tense it would be if they had been separated by 30 seconds instead of over 5 minutes.....

 

[AJB Temple]

If they had been separated by 30 seconds at the start, Tajec would still have won by over a minute and a half. Ving is very good indeed, and clearly gave it his all as he was bathed in sweat at the end, but after his accident earlier this year, it was always going to be tough for him and I think he's done superbly. This is the best cycling era I have ever seen. Seriously hope it's all clean.

 

[SamQ aka Ah! Q!]

boy is the coverage dull. It shows short sequences of the riders one by one mostly from behind

Adrian, cameras in front are strictly verboten in time trials. Drafting, as would occur with a preceding motorbike, would be advantageous (but unpredictably so).
As for the rest of the negative commentary above, StevieB nailed the reply and vindication thereby. I also refer you back to 1989 where a certain Greg LeMonde won by 8 seconds. Vastly different "optics" and spectacle.

 

[SamQ aka Ah! Q!]

P.S. The Pog - as you call him - is one of those unusual "sports" - as zoologists would categorize him (no pun intended) - where his prowess is so far beyond expectations and previous records as to be (temporarily) unique. Usain Bolt was another such. No doubt, given the staccato nature of such individuals occuring, we may have to wait some time for the next one.

 

[AndyP]

It stops the last day procession and final sprint that is traditional, and adds a sense of jeopardy if the favourites are closer together - the fact Pog is so far ahead this year (and Roglic is absent) make the final TT disappointing, but imagine how tense it would be if they had been separated by 30 seconds instead of over 5 minutes.....

Fair enough but that image of Bradley Wiggins leading the Skytrain on to the Champs d’Elysee for Cavendish in 2012 will live with me forever.

 

[TrimTheKing]

...Seriously hope it's all clean.

This is my concern. I love cycling and am a mamil myself, but given the amount of money and technology across ALL teams now, it just feels impossible that one person is SO much stronger than the rest. I fear there isn't a clean one among them, they just take turns in finding new ways to 'manipulate' the system...

I hope I'm wrong, I fear I'm not. The Armstrong era (it's unfair to say just him because they were almost all at it) has ruined it for everyone following because anyone who stands out now is instantly under suspicion.

Even Manchester City (I know, I'm a United fan so this will look like sour grapes...), they use a doctor that Pep used back in Spain who has links to the doping in cycling and I think may have been charged with some stuff. Any Man City player who gets a bad muscle injury gets sent to Spain for treatment by that doc and miraculously they recover far quicker than all other players... Are we really accepting that this doctor has some kind of miracle treatment that none of the multi million pound medical departments at Premier League football clubs have access to, so they MUST go to him...

 

[TrimTheKing]

Fair enough but that image of Bradley Wiggins leading the Skytrain on to the Champs d’Elysee for Cavendish in 2012 will live with me forever.

Yep that was spine tingling, watching Wiggo lead the Sky train around the final bend into the laps.

Sadly even he's tainted now after the brown paper bag affair...

 

[Mike G]

I have a lot more faith in the testing regime than some of you guys. There are two big deals with things as they are set up now: independant testers, and the retention of samples for re-testing. Notice how often Olympic athletes and World Championsips athletes are stripped of their medals retrospectively, sometimes years later. This is because of the constant updating of the laboratory techniques, and their application to old samples. There are occasional cyclists caught, but it's mostly stupidity such as using a decongestant when they've got a cold, or over-use of an inhaler when they have asthma. All of the leaders are tested every day of races (and at random times between events), and random riders are picked out every day from the peloton for testing. It's all completely out of the hands of the teams, and of the UCI. All teams have rider's contracts which stipulate dismissal if the rider is found guilty of a doping offence...........the risk-reward equation has changed utterly from the 90s.

All in all, I am confident we are watching clean racing. I think the regime needs to be tightened up around motor-assistance, perhaps with a "parc-ferme" -type arrangement, and tagged bikes (including spares), but as far as riding clean goes, I can't see how things could be done much better.

I was drug tested regularly when playing cricket, and this would have been a seriously lightweight regime compared with cycling because there are no performance enhancing drugs imaginable which would help on the cricket field. Just to give you an idea of how these things work.....

......one day at Worcester we were walking off the field at the end of a really close one day game. Knackered and de-hydrated (keepers can't drink because they have no way of leaving the field to have a pee), some guy in a white coat sidled up to me and told me I'd been selected for testing. He then followed me around the changing room as I got showered and changed, and then he took me to a toilet and watched as I tried to pee in his sample jar. He gave me sealed bottles of water as my only source of rehydration. Have you ever tried, naked, to pee in front of some other bloke, watching you face-on? Obviously not......but it isn't easy. It's even more difficult when there is a minimum sample size, and you're massively dehydrated. It took me two hours of guzzliong water to produce a big enough sample.

Cricketers share cars for journeys between matches, so 2 of my team mates were sitting around waiting for me for 2 hours, and we finally got awqay around 10.00 at night. With a 3 hour drive home, none of us got to bed before 1.00, and we were on the field the following morning at 9.00 to finish a Championship match. A couple of days later it was me sitting twiddling my thumbs as one of my team-mates took his turn to try to fill a sample bottle.

 

[TrimTheKing]

I get all that Mike, but having read a number of books from people who were in league with (or coerced by) Armstrong that suggest the drug developers are well ahead of the testers (as you would expect) that I can't help the skepticism.

I agree on the actual doping because eventually that would be picked up, but I'm convinced blood doping is or could be still happening.

The blood passport which each rider has is great, but only works from the very first time the baseline test is done for the passport. It's naiive to believe that there aren't people out there taking bungs to tip people off of an impending test, so a rider could blood dope to boost their hematocrit level to the maximum just before baseline testing, articifially inflating their bodies natural hematocrit ceiling, then keep doing that through a race.

Obviously I base this on zero evidence so I could be completely wrong, but it's got such a long history of the drugs beating the system it's really hard to trust it now. I do 100% want them to be clean though and hope I am totally wrong.

 

[AndyP]

I think back to to when I first started watching the TDF, end of the Lemond era beginning of Big Miguel Indurain, pre doping….. I do not know but I remember reading that he had a natural but highly unusual enlarged heart and lung capacity and a ridiculously low resting heart rate in the mid 20s, therefore his ability to keep his phenomenal cadence in time trails and up the slopes was unsurpassed. Perhaps the current exceptional riders have not dissimilar physiological advantages?

 

[AJB Temple]

Interesting perspectives and you and I discussed this Mark when we met up. Whenever sport is professional, health and fitness are monetised. It is inevitable that people will push the boundaries. However, I do believe that some people are extreme physical specimens that make them much better for a while. Usain Bolt was in this category and before him so was Michael Johnson. Femke Bol in the Netherlands may be getting into that area soon. In rowing, which was my favoured sport, Redgrave and Pinsent were in the category of "built for it". I've trained in the same gym as MP (when I was thinner....) and seen him and others at top level sustain a work rate for several minutes that was significantly above my peak 2000m ability (which was quite good). A friend of mine was in the Olympic 8 and he was really built, (6 5 and a machine) and even he thought Matt Pinsent was a freak of nature.

The asthma drugs overuse thing that Mike mentioned is interesting and I'm not convinced by it. I have used steroid inhalers for asthma all my life. In a bad attack there is a tendency to up the dose and frequency. For most asthmatics, me included, over use of Ventolin or similar, quickly ramps up the heart rate, sometimes quite scarily, and rapidly causes fatigue and poor concentration. However, lifelong asthmatics may tend to have larger than average lung capacity and so do many pro cyclists....

I suspect the cycling teams all have much the same access to top doctors, nutritionists etc and they can all use hyperbaric chambers (as Pog does) if they want as it's perfectly legal. The playing field therefore seems level to me. In the past few years the advantages between Pog and Ving has swung between them fairly evenly it seems.

 

[AJB Temple]

Andy made broadly similar point as I was writing.

 

[SamQ aka Ah! Q!]

The hyperbaric chamber use is interesting. Cav used one to recover more quickly from that catastrophic crash inflicted on him by Sagan. I presume AJBT, you are referring to similar injury/fatigue recovery regimes by other contestants?
Paradoxically, a couple of years ago, everybody was on Mount Teide and similar high places for high altitude training; they came back with enhanced erythrocyte counts, ergo, more oxygen capacity. I spent two separate fortnights at altitude (circum 3000m) and can vouch for it's efficacy. Richard Carapaz and Nairo Quintana etc had this naturally, given their origins.