So there was a history of drug taking from the start. But after the scandals of 20 years ago it became one of the most tested sports in the world. So now, in my opinion, drugs are not used much compared to other relatively untested sports (maybe some microdosing). Instead sports science has taken over. Pogacar, the current TdF champion works with a someone who is a contributor in mitochondria research. Something that has made a big difference in the last few years is the amount of carbohydrates the riders take in during a stage etc. etc.
they just switched to drugs you cant easily detect.
These are riders in their twenties, that's such a long time to rely on getting away with it I personally do not think it's happening at the highest pro-level.
That’s easy to solve. Use some of the prize money to stage an elaborate heist of the blood sample and replace it with a clean sample.
I bet this would make a good movie. Could be called “Blood Spoke”.
If prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, according to some, cheating is the oldest way to gain an advantage.
I mean, just a few weeks ago, we found out about a guy who was working for I don't know how many companies at the same time, that a start-up had developed some artificial intelligence software to cheat during tech interviews and had secured some good funding. Well, but that can't happen in sport, even though it's been happening since the dawn of time. Sport is business, and business is dirty.
this drug would be worth a lot of money, but we'll keep secret except just for the one top performer, because wide distribution would increase the risk of a leak substantially.
and remember: the top performers getting busted would probably mean the end of pro cycling as we know it for decades. cycling isn't a huge money maker for financial investors like football, rather it's a money pit for sponsors. do sponsors love a podium placement more than being forever associated with dirty cheaters? they'd risk it all for modest gains. a young superstar would trade a life of a good salaried position with some more money but also a high risk of being banned from the sport forever, thus no source of income at all and also the questionable title of being the killer of a whole sport.
so imo: it's possible, but unlikely.
Doping has been a cat-and-mouse game for decades, it's not unrealistic to think this is still happening.
The fact that Pogacar this year managed to reach Bjarne "Mr. 60%" Riis levels of performance in the mountain makes you wonder if this is only standard athletic and performance science or if they're something else.
It’s also worth thinking about the incentives to test and catch cheaters. Do the organizers of the Tour de France really want to bust the biggest names in the sport? That would destroy their livelihood. Do the national anti-doping authorities want the athletes from their country busted (look how many national antidopingborgs have successfully appealed adverse rulings through CAS)? It’s in everyone’s best interest to bust a low level doper here and there to make it look like they are watching but to ignore the big names that fans are coming to see. All of this is also why motor doping is unlikely. Motor doping leaves incontrovertible evidence of cheating. Positive drug tests can always be challenged as either inaccurate testing or unintentional contamination.
sure, they pay off is high, but the risk - at least in cycling - is even higher, exactly because they've been caught once and now all eyes are on them. if pog gets popped, nobody will trust cycling to be clean ever again; it's hard enough today, as this thread proves.
After they developed that test stage speeds dropped dramatically. Now speeds are back up to where they were right before the EPO test was developed. You really think that’s natural?
Cycling has a doping scandal once every decade or two. Why would another one kill the sport this time when it never did before?
You mean, like when Lance Armstrong got caught?
It was less than 20 years ago and yet you still argue like it didn't happen. Undetected doping was indeed possible (he did it for years) and no it didn't destroy pro cycling…
i don't know how hard pro cycling was affected after his bust, i just remember reading that it took a few years to recover (i.e. a few teams got dissolved, some sponsors jumped ship).
even today, if you talk about cycling to an outside person the FIRST thing they ask you about is doping.
so in my opinion, professional cycling is on its doping redemption part - forced, whether they want it or not - because if they (and by "they" i mean Pog) get popped big time again, it's going to be viewed as irredeemable. they'd have had their chance after LA and blew it.
So imo: it’s possible but more likely than you think.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36317927/ https://www.usada.org/wp-content/uploads/R058.pdf
Now I cannot say this cannot be proven in the future, but right now it is definitely possible, and not even a secret.
She has just been suspended for 2 years for a drug which I believe (may be wrong) masks other performance enhancing drugs.
Both Pogacar and del Toro (UAE’s gc riders in the Tour and Giro, respectively) are able to keep up with (and even drop) the strongest climbers, and then look fresh as a daisy across the line. Like they aren’t even trying.
This was most obvious when del Toro lost to Yates on the last stage of this year’s Giro, but Pogacar does it too. They start the final climb a few minutes behind the leaders, then match the fastest rider up the climb and then magically have zero fatigue for the final sprint across the line to pick up a few spots. Yates only won because del Toro made a huge tactical mistake of focusing on Carapaz
Everyone else is dying and the riders from this one team look like they could do another stage… and we’re supposed to think that’s natural?
To me, this is an interesting comment, because on the surface it may sound true, like come on, this is common sense, but it is far off the reality that it is in front of us everyday. People want to win. They want to be better than others. You go to any gym and there are plenty of people who assume substantial quantities of hormones--test, hgh--just to look better in pictures. You go to any martial arts gym, and there are plenty of people of all ages, including 50+ years old, who are on TRT and more to win some rolls at the gym or dream about winning a cheap medal at a local tournament with 5 people in attendance.
People buy local teams because they want to be known, popular. They want to win. They want to humiliate the owner of the other team. Athletes are getting caught? Well, I strongly condemn their actions, they say.
You can do worse than reading "Speed Trap" or the book by Sandro Donati on doping, if you can find it translated from Italian.
The difficulty has been toned down a lot since the early days though. (You'll never see a 466km long stage like the first of Tour de France 1903[1] ever again).
[1]: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1re_%C3%A9tape_du_Tour_de_Fr...)
If you mean there are no prizes, then fair enough, but that's not my definition of a race.
Would you say that Tour Divide or TransEurope are not races, because enough people fail to finish them that the focus is on completion, not competition?
Another reason why the culture is different: drafting is not widely used, and pack formation is rare. This magnifies the effects of very small differences in riding speed so that riders are generally widely spread out. I know from own experience doing brevets in the 90s that it would be rare to be in visual contact with other riders. Same is true for Tour Divide, TransEurope, RAAM etc. This makes "competition" look and feel very different than in pro-cycling and cat racing where "can I hang with the pack?" and "should i attack now?" are the constant questions.
However, all the same things are true of ultramarathon running too. Limited visual contact with other racers, high DNF rates, completion being the goal for the majority of participants. Nobody says, however, that WS100 or UTMB are "not races". And the reason for that is: in this category of racing, there is no other format. Nobody runs 100 miles like the pack on a track and field event, or even the way most major marathons play out. The nature of racing WS100 or UTMB just simply is the nature of ultramarathon running races.
And so it is for cycling. When you increase the distances and terms (e.g. "the clock runs non-stop"), the nature of the event changes. PBP is nothing like any TdF stage, but it is still a race. Granted, more like triathlon where only a small percentage of the entrants are actively racing other people, but people don't say that's not a race, either.
I’m not trying to disagree that PBP isn’t a race, because i acknowledge it fits the definition of a race, but I hope we can agree that calling it a race does a disservice to its history and culture.
For similar reasons I wouldn’t consider the Tour Divide a race either because the organizers don’t call it a race. For the same reasons an ultramarathon or rides like Unbound, Silk Road, TransAm, or Transcontinental is a race; because the organizers call it one. Is this a rational viewpoint? Definitely not, but that’s fine with me.
There is a power in what things are called and I think it is important to stay true to roots.
After the event some racers upload videos for spectators and it helps them with sponsorship. This video gives a glimpse into what its like to race the Tour Divide competitively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJS106xeNA
The number of people watching the trans-europe or other similar solo events as they happen is likely less than the population of a typical US liberal arts school. The monetization that might follow from YT videos that occurs later is completely different from what the TdF manages to encourage. The winner of 2023's Tour Divide has 58k views ... even Lael only gets 300k or so views for her adventuring and racing videos. This is not a spectator sport in any sort of historical sense of that term.
Almost all records in individual sports have been broken since competitions were basically not subject to doping controls. Athletes from the DDR and the Soviet Union, and more recently from China, have used enormous amounts of hormones. Yet almost all records set in the 1980s have been broken. Is there better talent selection today? Certainly, along with better training, science, and nutrition, as well as better surfaces and shoes/equipment. But physiology reigns supreme.
This makes a lot of sense to me. A very singular goal of "maximum output" without much need for fine motor skills and strategizing. I'd guess sprinting/marathons might have similar issues?
Unfortunately for them it just wasn’t enough to make the difference in the GC.
More generally, there is a lot more to each stage and to the race as a whole than the general classification.
If power to weight is all we cared about, we could rank all riders based on their power curve as measured on an indoor trainer and call it a day.
For the athlete, or for the team?
For professional racing strategy is in the hands of the team members on the sidelines - it's less of a team sport (as in athlete) and more of a group sport (as in information parity.) Whether it's motor races or TdF, there's a significant number of factors to consider. What you are going to have your team do? What are other teams doing? What you should do in response to what they're doing? What will they do in response to your response? What is the average performance of your team? What is the current and maximum performance? What's the condition of the equipment? What tires are being used? What is the forecast for the next few hours? How will changes in weather impact the equipment used? Will you have enough spares to make it through? Do you have good comms between you and the athletes? Etc.
For example, sometimes two athletes on the same team might be one behind the other, only for the coach to tell the lead to let the other teammate to pass. For the audience, it might be unclear why or it might even feel unfair, but there are reasons why they made that call.
Maybe the leader looks gassed and needs to hang back to collect himself.
Maybe they want to encourage the secondary by giving him the reigns for a while, and in turn, push the lead to work harder.
Maybe they want to keep the wear and tear a little lower on the lead by holding him back in case a team close behind ends up overtaking in a sharp turn up ahead.
Maybe they're worried about a pile up that hasn't been cleared yet.
Maybe the sun will be facing the direction of their next turn, so the secondary is providing shade for the lead.
So on and so fourth. An individual athlete can only receive and process so much of that information in a cohesive way.
Compare cycling to football (European of course). Nothing about cycling compares to the complex strategy and player skill involved.
Teams in cycling are just there to leverage drafting. It's all pretty boring and just comes down to power output in the end.
I believe long distance running takes that spot
Is it? I don't know how to ask this without it sounding argumentative, but how are you measuring this?
Just by the number of times an athlete is tested a year?
If so where are you getting the data for this to compare it to other sports drug testing regimes?
> Cycling now spends far more money on anti-doping programs than any other sport
I did see that but it doesn't answer where they got the data to conclude this:)
This doesn't explain why cycling seems to attract more doping than running. I don't even know if it's true that it does. But there might be something there given the institutional problems cycling has had with doping. Back in the day, it was entire teams doping, with the team staff and doctors in on it, and it's not like they all left when the sport tried to clean up. Either way, the reputation has stuck around.
Cycling was also at the center of the explosion of EPO use between the 1990s and 2000s -- there was no known screening process originally and it was extremely effective at improving performance in endurance sports with low amounts. Cycling has spent a lot of time working to restore the reputational damage from that period.
I remain optimistic.
Medication for human use has been availabe in various forms and brand names since before 1990, as Epogen, NeoRecormon, Eprex and lots of other names.
EPO is used in medical conditions.
Several anabolic steroids are prescription drugs and can be used in cases of muscle wasting or cancer.
Most people don’t understand the consequences that come with using these drugs. They’re often not a free lunch where you take the drug and become a better human being across the board. There are negative consequences for altering the body’s systems directly in most cases.
In medical conditions doctors can weigh the tradeoffs and use drugs sparingly to achieve an outcome while monitoring the negative effects. When a 20 year old gym bro starts juicing with excessive doses to get swole, they’re not thinking about how it’s going to damage their testes for the rest of their life or disrupt their HPTA axis.
* cycling is a mix of moderate money and lots of drug testing. there are significant incentives to dope, but it's fairly hard to do these days since there is a lot of testing.
* big money sports (in the us especially - nfl, mlb, nba) are the jokes of the testing world. they rarely test and often inform their athletes when a test is coming. the big money basically assures that the incentive to dope is also big. but you'll never get caught if the testing process is a joke, so there is nothing to report.
This reminds me of compliance training when I worked at a trading firm.
>Canada is perceived to have the least corrupt stock exchange in the world.
>>Makes sense ... wait perceived?
>Yes.
>>So no one looks at the actual amount of fraud?
>No.
>>...
>...
The bigger difference is that endurance sports have more options for doping than others.
Frankly, I think too many things are banned. Blood doping seems no worse than sleep chambers and hgh in correctly applied regimes would take some of the punishment out of football.
There's a reason athletes refer to PED tests as IQ tests. Only the very dumb or careless get caught, but the reality is nearly all of the athletes in these leagues have used PEDs at some point in their career.
It is a sport literally built around doping. You can't take things to the Tour De France level and recover from those workouts without drugs. Beating the test is part of the sport.
In the NFL/NBA, drug testing is just a theatrical performance. I know in the NFL because careers are so short, the players basically have a gentleman's agreement that whatever you have to do to stay on the field is fair game.
Cycling though is just such a sport of watts per kilo there is no way around doping being a huge variable.
The stupidest thing to me is every player basically says they will do everything they can to win , no matter what the sport. Everything but the thing that will help them the most in PEDs. For some reason the public just wants to believe this bullshit.
You absolutely can. However, you will almost certainly be impacted as the days progress, and this doesn't work well for the largest spectator single sport event in the world.
Also, watts per kilo is irrelevant in pack cycling and flat time trials. It only matters on when climbing.
Add on that most of them only play for a few years and there is every incentive under the sun to dope and maximize their earnings. I'm not endorsing it but if its essentially a widely accepted secret and you cant compete without it then you get what you incentivize.
NFL players can be tested once during the season. It's a joke.
NBA players can be tested four times in-season and two more off-season. Less of a joke than the NFL, but still pretty relaxed compared to cycling.
I wonder if this contributes. Imagine you're a sport person, your job depends kn your performance, you are at the mercy of your team, and it's not even like you can win. So why not help yourself to some pills.
But then, as siblings say, I don't even know if cycling is worse than other sports.
Second, no one sport has more cheating than any other with similar stakes.
Third, "cheating" is more of a spectrum than binary. Travelling with the basketball is cheating and sometimes penalized. Having your husband kneecap your Olympic skating rival is cheating as well.
Fourth, "cheating" is relative and always in flux. You could head slap an NFL receiver in the 1970's, but no longer. Forward passes in the NHL were illegal in olden times, but fine today.
You have heard much more because from cycling over other sports, because the other sports don't want their dirty secrets aired out, and you heard about the huge scandals in cycling in the 00s.
so, if they don't cheat as much, what's left? todays cyclists are actually a lot better than the stars of yesterday, mostly due to better nutrition. training efficiency also improved as the young stars of today are of the first generation that grew up with power meters.
i'm not very knowledgeable in the sport and my last point is a bit of an assumption, but here we go: pro cycling is mostly based in europe. the UAE team is swiss, astana qazaqstan team (a team representing the state kazakhstan) trains in spain and austria. girona (spain, near the pyrinees) is _the_ classic cycling hotspot. this means testing by officials is comparatively easy.
in other sports the training facilities are, for example, in the chinese mountains, russian provinces or in the iranian back country. getting regular testing there is hard. so imo no: cycling today is probably less dirty than most others sports.
tbh i think pogacar is just one of those rare genetic talents that show up from time to time to dominate a sport, but is doubted more than others due to cyclings tainted history. it may be possible he uses newly developed drugs that are undetectable, but i'd say innocent until proven guilty is still applicable here.
Whether it is so more than other sports... I don't know. As was mentioned before, in cycling as in other endurance sports, doping can push you very far. Then there is the way the whole sport is organized. In the tour de france, privately sponsored teams compete against each other. I think this is very different to, say, a world championship. A country or trainer may have the interest of pushing their athletes beyond what is legal. But in a privately sponsored team, the pressure could be much higher.
But I'm not surprised they want "extra help" with that
recovery help is where it's at these days i expect, in most sports.
there are obvious performance benefits for traditional endurance sports, but the testing infrastructure is pretty robust and the financial incentives are much less than those big team sports. it's harder to dope (and get away with it) and the financial pressure is less.
Sure, there's no drugs that will turn you into prime Messi. But there are drugs that will let Messi play like prime Messi for 90 minutes, 3 times a week, 48 weeks a year, which is incredibly valuable.
That's not the same in basketball or most other sports. You can't just jump on gear, lift weights and suddenly become Michael Jordan. Plenty of people could beat Pogacar if they could use anything they could, though, just like manufacturers could build an F1 car that would dominate every race if they could circumvent the rules.
Basketball is highly skill based.
For a professional athlete it’s not hard to be in shape enough to run for an entire game. It’s just not a limitation.
For cycling, it’s nearly all physical ability.