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Tour de France 2023

Pfff... impossible not to feel for Pogi of course. His face going up that last ramp.
 
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Lukewarm takes: Pogacar is fit, but stamina for a 3 week stage race is off. Perhaps that second rest day brought deeper pains than he's used to. Shouldn't really be hugely surprising given limited ability to properly prepare. Little concerned that might lead him to double down on tour prep next year, thus making twistedAM sad.

Hot take: UAE should never have let him near that damn pool.
 
Cid said:
Lukewarm takes: Pogacar is fit, but stamina for a 3 week stage race is off. Perhaps that second rest day brought deeper pains than he's used to. Shouldn't really be hugely surprising given limited ability to properly prepare. Little concerned that might lead him to double down on tour prep next year, thus making twistedAM sad.

Hot take: UAE should never have let him near that damn pool.
Click to expand...

Pog should skip the Tour next year and target all 5 Monuments and maybe the Vuelta (as prep for Il Lombardia of course) :D

Indeed the sad side of this Tour for me is like that it looked like we were entering a Merckxian era where winners of Grand Tours (Pog, Rog and Remco) were also winning Monuments but now its looks like we're back to the Indurain/Armstrong/Froome days of hyper-specialisation to the point that a guy who just slaughtered the rest in an ITT can't even be bothered to go do it at the World Championships. I don't think that's good for the sport as a whole.
 
Cid said:
Vino, manager of Astana Kazakhstan? :hmm:
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Vino, 2012 Olympic champion :D That still makes me laugh that race - after all the hype about TeamGB/Sky an old man coming back from doping suspension wins gold with a bribe. I know it's wrong but sometimes you got to respect the dark arts when they're so blatant.
Anyway what did he/Astana do today?
 
I hadn't realised Pog had an off at the start of the stage... Nothing serious, but yeah - Just another thing to add to the stack on his shoulders over today's stage.
 
Perhaps his preparation was affected by the crash and by racing monuments. It’s a shame because I like the idea of cyclists just going for it and he seems to embody that more than JV.
 
Seeing lots of suspicion over Vingegaard including it seems from L’Equipe - is it just suspicion or does anyone know what people think it is?

 
edcraw said:
Seeing lots of suspicion over Vingegaard including it seems from L’Equipe - is it just suspicion or does anyone know what people think it is?

Click to expand...


Three main types of doping; anabolics, stimulants, blood. Anabolics promote muscle growth and recovery, stimulants urbs should be familiar with (and their downsides), blood doping literal blood, EPO. These all work via well understood (albeit not by me) mechanisms. Like EPO is a hormone the body generates in response to hypoxia, which promotes generation of red blood cells... That's why people do altitude camps; low oxygen environment, more EPO. For a drug to be useful, it has to have that physiological effect... Steroids aren't going to be much use unless they're actually promoting protein synthesis. EPO isn't going to be much use unless it's actually stimulating red blood cell production.

If you can detect those physiological effects, rather than the drugs themselves, you can get some understanding of whether shenanigans are happening. And the thing is there aren't that many ways you can get a human body to perform above normal expectations, and they're inevitably going to have some kind of marker. Blood doping was the huge one... Whether EPO or literal blood. But it is effective because it has that direct physiological effect of increasing red blood cell count. If you monitor red blood cell count instead of directly detecting EPO (obviously they do both, but yeah) then you cut off that entire pathway. That's why you get the introduction of biological passports (ABP); they establish baselines for every athlete.

ABPs aren't perfect of course, any competent doctor should be able to design a doping programme around them. But we're talking about microdosing through a season, generally elevated levels of performance across the board. Not the kind of thing that gets you huge on the day performance. It's also high risk to continue that through a tour, as obviously you need to get your drug of choice into the bus, and then into the athlete, and be damn sure it's not detectable. Especially with someone like Jonas who is getting tested regularly. More likely to be used to optimise training effectiveness than during races, but of course there may be ways.

What happened to Tadej is written across his face in stage 17. Zwift at altitude is great, but it's not the Criterium, it's not racing. You can be hitting all the performance markers, but they're only analogues to performance in a 3 week stage race. For the TT that's probably a factor, but watch Jonas in that thing. The guy is fucking perfect. I mean not just in raw performance, but his position, his cornering etc... afaik he did recon for it, and likely has been training all aspects of TT (I mean it is also quite an obvious crux point of a stage, probably one that shat JV up a fair bit). It is an astonishing performance, I don't think it's inexplicable. An on-form Pogi with no bike change would probably have been a fair bit closer.

Finally I'd say medicine isn't just a straight up arms race. You don't routinely discover whole new pathways by which drugs can work. At least not with the same raw effectiveness as just increasing red blood cell count. And cycling is in a sense a minnow in international sport and the performance world generally... the major designer drugs scandal of the mid 2000s was BALCO and Barry Bonds etc. Undetectable (as in directly in urine) steroid. The SF giants have a payroll of around $180m. Not a budget, a payroll, for their players only. Worth $3.7bn. One team. And we've had this major uptick in fitness culture recently... You can definitely make more money as a private doctor 'coaching' amateur triathletes (men in their 40s with the kind of income that buys s-works and weeks off work), influencers, actors and the like than designing doping programs for Jumbo. At considerably less risk. Why is there this one drug only found in cycling that delivers staggering on-the-day performance for one stage where it's going to look most suspicious? It just doesn't really stack up. This tour had the narrowest of margins up to stage 16... no-one expected Tadej to crack (perhaps even him given rest day pool antics). But he did. I'm not going to ignore the possibility that something's up, but you can't just keep saying any exceptional performance is clearly doping just because it's exceptional.
 
It’s hysterical bollocks. If people can be bothered to look there’s various clips on Twitter comparing Vin and Pogs lines through a selection of corners on the TT and some sections of the descent. He was almost a second faster after the first corner. He just hit every line bang on, was still pedalling where others were coasting and so on. No drug on earth gives someone bike handling skills.

Sometimes an exceptional sporting performance is just that, in spite of what history and some armchair experts might want to tell us.
 
I reserve the right to be sceptical, and for me a performance like that tt and again on the mountain yesterday at the end of a hard tdf is a massive red flag.
 
twistedAM said:
Also all Vinge does is concentrate on the Tour. Everything is geared toward that. The other races he does are just prep for the Tour whereas Pog is more old school and wins Monuments like Flanders - the best tour of them all ;)
Click to expand...

Yup, happy that this represents my beachead position on the forthcoming Vingegard backlash :p There was a reason I never liked Froome (beyond the fact my idol Wiggo didn't like him) :D ...It's boring to just do the Tour. Pog bested VdP up the Kwaremont a few months back, which always was a hugely welcome return to riders actually being multi-faceted and interesting, as opposed from Sky turning up for 3 weeks a year for all the acclaim.

Oh, and re: doping, I don't think it's realistic here, as you just wouldn't have gone so full turbo like JV did yesterday. Even Michele Ferrari might blush at that performance.

That was a great climb though. I hope it gets reused soon.
 
Cid said:
Three main types of doping; anabolics, stimulants, blood. Anabolics promote muscle growth and recovery, stimulants urbs should be familiar with (and their downsides), blood doping literal blood, EPO. These all work via well understood (albeit not by me) mechanisms. Like EPO is a hormone the body generates in response to hypoxia, which promotes generation of red blood cells... That's why people do altitude camps; low oxygen environment, more EPO. For a drug to be useful, it has to have that physiological effect... Steroids aren't going to be much use unless they're actually promoting protein synthesis. EPO isn't going to be much use unless it's actually stimulating red blood cell production.

If you can detect those physiological effects, rather than the drugs themselves, you can get some understanding of whether shenanigans are happening. And the thing is there aren't that many ways you can get a human body to perform above normal expectations, and they're inevitably going to have some kind of marker. Blood doping was the huge one... Whether EPO or literal blood. But it is effective because it has that direct physiological effect of increasing red blood cell count. If you monitor red blood cell count instead of directly detecting EPO (obviously they do both, but yeah) then you cut off that entire pathway. That's why you get the introduction of biological passports (ABP); they establish baselines for every athlete.

ABPs aren't perfect of course, any competent doctor should be able to design a doping programme around them. But we're talking about microdosing through a season, generally elevated levels of performance across the board. Not the kind of thing that gets you huge on the day performance. It's also high risk to continue that through a tour, as obviously you need to get your drug of choice into the bus, and then into the athlete, and be damn sure it's not detectable. Especially with someone like Jonas who is getting tested regularly. More likely to be used to optimise training effectiveness than during races, but of course there may be ways.

What happened to Tadej is written across his face in stage 17. Zwift at altitude is great, but it's not the Criterium, it's not racing. You can be hitting all the performance markers, but they're only analogues to performance in a 3 week stage race. For the TT that's probably a factor, but watch Jonas in that thing. The guy is fucking perfect. I mean not just in raw performance, but his position, his cornering etc... afaik he did recon for it, and likely has been training all aspects of TT (I mean it is also quite an obvious crux point of a stage, probably one that shat JV up a fair bit). It is an astonishing performance, I don't think it's inexplicable. An on-form Pogi with no bike change would probably have been a fair bit closer.

Finally I'd say medicine isn't just a straight up arms race. You don't routinely discover whole new pathways by which drugs can work. At least not with the same raw effectiveness as just increasing red blood cell count. And cycling is in a sense a minnow in international sport and the performance world generally... the major designer drugs scandal of the mid 2000s was BALCO and Barry Bonds etc. Undetectable (as in directly in urine) steroid. The SF giants have a payroll of around $180m. Not a budget, a payroll, for their players only. Worth $3.7bn. One team. And we've had this major uptick in fitness culture recently... You can definitely make more money as a private doctor 'coaching' amateur triathletes (men in their 40s with the kind of income that buys s-works and weeks off work), influencers, actors and the like than designing doping programs for Jumbo. At considerably less risk. Why is there this one drug only found in cycling that delivers staggering on-the-day performance for one stage where it's going to look most suspicious? It just doesn't really stack up. This tour had the narrowest of margins up to stage 16... no-one expected Tadej to crack (perhaps even him given rest day pool antics). But he did. I'm not going to ignore the possibility that something's up, but you can't just keep saying any exceptional performance is clearly doping just because it's exceptional.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply, really helpful & thorough. Think that’s my genera thinking as well. Cycling’s getting more and more professional - 10yrs ago people were laughing at Sky for doing warm downs ffs!! - and as you point out Vingegaard’s ITT was next to flawless!
 
Van Aert has left the tour as his wife is about to have a baby so at least that's one first he'll have during the Tour.
It will make reading Sporza less fun though as they are shocked when he doesn't win.
 
Question if I may. They’re 6km from the end of today’s stage, what kind of wattage are they operating at?
 
Maybe I’m naive but thought this moment was a great. If you’re going to try and block the race you’ve got to do it properly and fair play for ignoring the intimidation but nothing wrong with trying.

 
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