Great interview with Eddie Dunbar on Second Captains yesterday. Very insightful and he really opens up. A good lad.
One episode to go on the Tour show on Netflix. Very good in fairness.
It’s excellent. Finished it earlier in the week. It’s a knock off of drive to survive but great none the less.
@backinatracksuit this might answer some of your questions. Might raise more of course.
Friday June 23 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times
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‘Simple fact is, if you dumped in the amount of doping that was being used in the mid-Nineties into Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogacar and they got to use modern training, nutrition and technology, they would blow the Alpe d’Huez record out of the water.”
Jonathan Vaughters, the EF Education-EasyPost chief executive and former team-mate of Lance Armstrong
The 1999 Tour de France was supposed to be a new start. A year on from the police raids and protests of the Festina doping scandal, this was the Tour of Renewal. And for some in the press room at Sestrière during the closing moments of the 213.5km stage nine, Lance Armstrong’s emphatic victory represented exactly that. Others had their doubts.
Armstrong had never been a climber, but there he was, setting a pace that none of Ivan Gotti, Fernando Escartín or Alex Zülle could hold. “There was a collective and audible intake of breath and, as he rode clear, there was ironic laughter and shaking of heads,” David Walsh writes in Seven Deadly Sins.
He was dominating a field proven, in the recent past, to be riddled with Erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that increases the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen. “After all the drugs last year, they said this would be slower because there would be no dope,” the French journalist Jean-François Quénet told Walsh. “This year’s race will be the fastest in history.” Quénet was right. For the first time, the race broke 40km/h.
This is the way record speeds once were: a brilliant, barely believable surface, beneath which something grubby inevitably lurked. Their interpretation required vigilance. “You can’t go faster without EPO than with it,” Walsh writes, “and we’re being asked to believe you can.”
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And yet, of late, records have been tumbling. The 2022 Tour de France was the fastest (42.102 km/h) in history, surpassing the mark set by Armstrong in 2005 (41.654 km/h). Paris-Roubaix has been covered at record speed in consecutive editions.
Ironic laughter could be forgiven, but the mood has changed. The advance of technology — aerodynamics, training, diet, talent identification — has brought this territory into view without, seemingly, the need for automatic suspicion. Is this just naivety? After all, in track and field, records set by Eastern Bloc athletes in the 1980s are still stubborn to modern advances: the two fastest women’s 400m times were set in 1985 (47.60sec, Marita Koch) and 1983 (Jarmila Kratochvilova, 47.99sec); no one has been within half a second of Kratochvilova’s 800m record since she set it forty years ago.
Team-mates Armstrong, right, and Vaughters joke during a medical check-up before the Tour de France in 1999
PASCAL PAVANI/GETTY IMAGES
“Athletics is also benefiting from better sports nutrition, better training methods, more money and they haven’t overcome the doping benefits of East German athletes,” the sport scientist Ross Tucker explains. “And they were not training with the world’s greatest advancements, because they didn’t need to, they were just juiced and running fast.
“The counterpoint to that is in swimming. They are much faster than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, when we know they were doping. The gains you get hydrodynamically from swimsuits and starting blocks, goggles, caps and better swimming pools are so large that even college swimmers are swimming faster than they swam doped. Swimming is one extreme, running is the other and then probably cycling somewhere in the middle.”
Jonathan Vaughters knows doping. He rode for Armstrong’s US Postal Team in 1998 and 1999, took EPO and human growth hormone, and has since made it his life’s work to purge the sport of performance enhancing drugs. The team he founded, EF Education-EasyPost, were one of the earliest members of the Mouvement Pour un Cyclisme Crédible (MPCC), a union created to defend clean cycling.
And for the lay person, he suggests a relatively simple method for understanding the change: watch a race tape from the mid-1990s. “It was peak doping era, like open warfare,” he says. “These guys look sloppy on the bike, they’re not as lean, they’re pushing way too big a gear. And yet they’re going almost as fast.”
Or compare a bike from the Nineties to a recent top-end model. “Get back to me as to which one you go faster on,” he says. “I raced in the mid-1990s and to me those bikes were pretty cool back then. When I ride one now, it’s like driving a garbage truck versus driving a Ferrari.”
Still, he is careful to draw a distinction. On the one hand, overall average speeds in Grand Tours and flatter races fall closer to swimming (because of the influence of aerodynamics); on the other, climbing mountain passes at lower speeds, about 20km/h, is nearer to running in its purity, and is where the old measure of power-to-weight (watts per kilo) is king.
Between 1990 and 1999 (the last Tour before an EPO test), the average weight of a podium finisher was more than 5kg heavier than the average since 2015. The Danish rider Vingegaard, for example, winner of the 2022 Tour, is a much leaner figure than the riders of the past
TIM DE WAELE/GETTY IMAGES
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Tucker estimates the benefit of EPO at “between 3 and 5 per cent”. Vaughters puts it at 6 or 7 per cent. “At 400 watts, you’re looking at an increase of 30W [from EPO],” Vaughters says. “A bike from 1996 would weigh at least 2kg more [than today]. And from an aerodynamic standpoint, excluding the rider, at between 45km/h and 50 km/h, the power required to overcome its extra resistance would be in the order of 75W. So on a flat road, the technology has far surpassed the increase in power that doping gave. I mean, way, way, way past it.”
Dan Bigham, the Ineos Grenadiers performance engineer, who broke the hour record twice last year — once as rider (55.548km), then as coach to Filippo Ganna (56.792 km) — is similarly convinced. “We’re at the point where equipment and drag reduction are more than covering off what they were doing in the EPO era,” he says.
The tools for optimising aerodynamics have become widespread, in particular Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), with which every surface of a rider, their bike, wheels, helmet, can be analysed and adjusted depending on the predicted speed. “Ten years ago, CFD was something I was learning about at university and most top motorsport teams would use but you wouldn’t find it in a cycling team. Now it’s just part of our process.”
Breakaway riders, he says, have optimised their own aerodynamic advantage sufficiently that the old rule — the peloton can take back one minute per km — no longer applies. “Aerodynamic drag is cubic to velocity, so it’s harder for a peloton to ride fast enough to take that time out.”
The outcomes of this are visible to the naked eye. Not so long ago, riders would sit in the drops of their handlebars to improve their profile. Now, most place their forearms flat along the tops. “The back angle itself isn’t changing too much,” Bigham says. “But a forearm is basically just a cylinder, which is one of the worst aerodynamic shapes. By moving it in line with the flow, you remove a huge amount of drag . . . It’s not comfortable in the first instance. But pedalling another 20W or 30W more is a whole lot more uncomfortable.”
A modern professional is, aesthetically, much changed from 20 years ago: tighter jerseys, sleeker frames, deeper wheels, thicker tyres. Each of these aesthetic changes represents a development in aerodynamic understanding: fabrics that reduce drag by encouraging air to “stick” to the rider, customised depending on their role in the team; wheels which, in an ever-broadening range of conditions, can “effectively create thrust”; tyres that drastically cut rolling resistance.
These advances, though, are not uniform. Aerodynamic improvements have the greatest impact in fast races and reduced rolling resistance (the energy lost between the tyres and the road surface) on cobbled routes, where there is a greater proportion of drag. “It just becomes an arms race, really,” Bigham says. “In Paris-Roubaix, if you pick the wrong tyre size, the wrong pressure, you’re out of the race.” Critically — when the Tour arrives in the Pyrenees next month — the steeper the road, the slower the pace, the smaller the impact, and the more complex the questions when a doped record is threatened.
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Between tyres, frame and drive-chain efficiency, Bigham estimates a rider — on a long, slow climb — could be saving 20W to 25W compared to 20 years ago. “If you double your speed, your drag goes up eight times,” Bigham says. “When you get to those lower speeds [20km/h to 30km/h] the aerodrag is in the region of 20W to 80W, compared with 300W to 400W at high speed.”
To an extent, this is reflected in the records that have been broken. More moderate climbs — such as the Col de Peyresourde (9.7km at 7.5 per cent), where, three years ago, Pogacar (24min 35sec) improved the mark set by Alexander Vinokourov and Iban Mayo in 2003 — have fallen. The big beasts are still the domain of drug cheats. Marco Pantani has the two fastest times (36min 50sec in 1995; 36:54 in 1997) to Alpe d’Huez (13.9km at 8 per cent) and the top 17 were set before 2007. Pantani also holds the record (46min) on Ventoux (20.8km at 7.7 per cent) and the top five are all from 1994.
But the gap is closing. Jonas Vingegaard’s ascent of Ventoux at the 2021 Tour was the fastest in the race since 1994 and last year, Pogacar, Vingegaard, Geraint Thomas, Sep Kuss and Enric Mas (all 39:12) were the quickest men up Alpe d’Huez since 2006. At the Volta a Catalunya in March, Primoz Roglic (6.87W/kg) and Remco Evenepoel (6.9W/kg) were both estimated to have held close to 7W/kg on Lo Port (8.6 km, 8.9 per cent). That is elite power for any era. And this narrowing physiological gap is at the nexus of training, diet and talent identification, factors connected by the now-ubiquitous power meter, which was invented in 1987 but remained prohibitively expensive, even at the highest level, until the mid-to-late 2000s.
Last year, Pogacar, Vingegaard, Thomas, above in yellow, Kuss and Mas (all 39:12) were the quickest men up Alpe d’Huez since 2006
TIM DE WEALE/GETTY IMAGES
“What we had to go on was an HR [heart rate] monitor and then a lot of anecdotes,” Vaughters explains. “Our training was along the lines of well, it’s nice and sunny out today, so let’s do a 200km ride. Two days later, it’s raining, so maybe let’s take today off. It was imprecise. That doesn’t mean it was all bad, but it was imprecise.”
EF Education-Easy Post monitor training load in terms of energy expenditure and intensity, measuring riders’ lactate metabolism to understand the body’s response to effort. Power figures are no longer considered in isolation. “Not just, ‘He’s pushing 400W,’ ” Vaughters says. “But are we using a glucose substrate to make that work? Or is it fat oxidation? If you’re using mainly fat, wow, you can win the Tour de France. If you’re mainly using glucose, well OK, a lot of people could do that.
“We’re constantly looking at these small differences in how the power is relating to the blood lactate, to the heart rate, to body temperature. We’re using machine-learning to model load versus recovery. The nutrition is customised per day: on this day, your training load was very high, therefore, you require this much sugar and carbohydrate, this much protein, this much fat.”
Armstrong, pictured riding down the Champs-Élysées in 2004, was stripped of his seven Tour titles for using performance-enhancing drugs
LAURENT REBOURS/AP PHOTO
And this precision illuminates the laxity of some who rode in the 1990s and 2000s, made complacent by the efficacy of EPO. “For most riders this stuff was like voodoo,” Vaughters says. Jan Ullrich would frantically cut weight for the Tour on a bowl of muesli a day; Pantani refused to wear a heart rate monitor. “In a doping culture, you kind of learnt not to believe in it, because it’s like, ‘Yeah, you can do all that crap, but come on, what really matters is the EPO.’ ”
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Between 1990 and 1999 (the last Tour before an EPO test), the average weight of a podium finisher was 70.5kg; from 2000 to 2005 it was 70.16kg; since 2015 it is 64.9kg. In part, this is a necessary shift in approach: without the EPO to enhance power output, the simplest way to improve climbing is to be lighter. For Armstrong (72kg) 6.5W/kg was 468W, for Vingegaard (60kg) it’s 390W. But it has also been enabled by technology: by better gearing (Armstrong rode a nine-speed, 12 is now ubiquitous), and by the profundity of data that allows riders like Vingegaard to be scouted. “On average the top riders nowadays would be around 2 per cent lower body fat. They also carry less muscle, their upper bodies are more cannibalised,” Vaughters explains.
In The Sports Gene, David Epstein describes a phenomenon called The Big Bang of Body Types, in which rising prize money and globalisation have led to increased athletic specialisation. Elite distance runners and female gymnasts are getting shorter (the latter from 5ft 3in to 4ft 9in between 1984 and 2014). Sumo is being infiltrated by wrestlers from countries with “generally larger residents”.
For most of its history, cycling — with a few exceptions — has been concentrated in western Europe. Between 1903 and 2005, the Tour was won by athletes from 11 countries (France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Germany and the US). Already, in the 17 years since, it has been won by seven (Spain, Luxembourg, Australia, UK, Colombia, Slovenia and Denmark).
The number of nations represented rose from 11 in 1980 to a peak of 36 in 2015. And though this fell back to 27 last year (the same as in 2005), the spread is more even. Italy, for instance, averaged 40 riders per Tour between 1995 and 2005 and 16 since. Meanwhile, the number of Slovenian riders has risen from fewer than one per Tour, to nearly three, with two victories. The most specialised athletes are now getting through.
“That [riders in the 1990s] were even remotely close to these riders — man they must have really been doping because there’s no way you can overcome all this other stuff,” Vaughters says. “Simple fact is, if you dumped in the amount of doping that was being used in the mid-90s into Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogacar and they got to use modern training, nutrition and technology, they would blow the Alpe d’Huez record out of the water.”
For all this confidence, Vaughters has reservations. He would like cortisone — a corticosteroid which can be used to cut weight, but is only banned in competition by Wada because it has medical uses — to be restricted year round, as it is for teams in the MPCC (Jumbo-Visma, UAE Team Emirates and Ineos Grenadiers are not). And he wants more testing, though, according to a report published by Wada in January, only athletics (31,178), football (30,750) and aquatics (16,263) were tested more than road cycling (12,586) in 2021. There have been no positive tests on the World Tour this year.
“I really feel strongly that the amount of money that is spent on testing needs to be higher,” he says. “It’s the No 1 hurdle to the credibility of the sport and I want to get over that hurdle. But the improvement now compared to the mid-1990s is something the sport should be really proud of.
“I can say very confidently that the peloton is infinitely cleaner than it was in the mid-90s and that it’s also faster. Those things are not mutually exclusive. But if you’re saying, ‘Oh, now boil it down to individual cases’, that’s much harder. And for me to whitewash that and say, ‘Well, I’m not even going to look at that with a critical eye, because I just believe that the equipment and nutrition is so much better’ — that’s also not appropriate. Because, obviously, the history of the sport is what it is. And you can’t just turn a blind eye to that.”
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I got to the end of the show, it’s really good, Jaspar disaster is my main man now and the little English fella who goes down mountains like Barry Sheene
Jasper is a great lad. Having a good season this year.
On episode 3. What the fuck was yer man at boxing Pinot on the head?
He had drunk a Pinot egregious.
Just watched the Pidcock Episode. He’s had some career already for a lad that looks like a child.
It’s interesting to see the stuff that goes on on cars, team buses, etc in the background. Vaughters must be only delighted with Ben Healy this year.
Geraint Thomas comes across as an alright sort
Yeah, he does. He did the super domestique role long enough to allow him be selfish as a leader without coming across as a bit of a cunt
Really looking forward to it. First few days will be very interesting in the Basque Country. Possibly won’t be so many mad crashes because the sprinters won’t really have a chance until stage four.
Hard to see beyond Vingegaard or Pogaczar for the overall. Pogaczar has only two days racing since breaking his wrist at Liege so he’ll have to be on it from stage one.
Dark horse: Jai Hindley, won the Giro last year.
Possible stage winners: Quinn Simmons who just won the US title and Birman Girmay from Eritrea.
Cav has a good chance to win a stage and beat mercxx’s record.
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How about the speccy French fella from Netflix, I liked him
Gaudu? Might win a stage. Struggled badly in the heat in the French national race last Sunday.
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Looking forward to it this year.
First week will be very tough, just looking at it there last night.
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Puy De Dome hasn’t been in it since 1988. I thought the organisers had said it would never go there ever again?
After years of negotiations they got permission. It’s very narrow and there’s a railway track running along side it on the way up. Maybe not all the cars will go the full route. Johnny Weltz was the last winner up there. He ended up as Lance Armstrong’s Directeur Sportif for a while until Lance got him ousted in favour of Johan Bruyneel.
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