Recent content by cnort

Are "marginal gains" not a 1% or 2% increase? Forty watts is a near 12% gain - there's nothing marginal about that!

From all I've read, Lance made sure he was on the A programme (in terms of content and support), and others were on the B programme. Also, they may well have been as physically talented or more so than Armstrong, but less responsive to doping. I guess we'll never know. He was certainly driven in...

Wout Poels reminiscing riding Angliru. He said of 2011: "I remember at one point I looked to the left and it was Bradley Wiggins, then to my right, Froomey and and to my left again, it was [Denis] Menchov," Poels recalled to Cyclingnews before stage 11, with a beaming smile as he reminisced...

Cyclingnews ran an article about

They'll have the planes running faster, with less fatigued pilots. The public in general will be happy, but the plane spotters will know it's all a sham. So the seeds of civic discord are sown...

Many good points. In soccer, for example, most countries have cups as well as leagues - and teams from lower divisions can end up playing the biggest teams (and sometimes even win). So it's not so different from the grand Tours inviting some parochial pro-conti teams. As pointed out, cycling...

The question of how Armstrong's Tour palmares would be viewed if they had not been voided is interesting. Because of Landis and the l'Equipe stories, there would have been a cloud over his wins anyway. Given his pre-1999 record, I'm sure a lot of cycling fans would find his seven wins hard to...

It's not just Tadej at it in UAE. From Cyclingnews commentary at the Tour de France Femmes today: "A superb seated attack by yesterday's stage winner [Maeva Squiban - UAE Team ADQ]." That's two in a row for Squiban.

That's an interesting question. I have always believed yes on the grounds that no mud was thrown at him in earnest and his performances seem plausible in light of an extraordinarily high max VO2. His decline at the onset of the EPO era was pretty stark too. This thread has repeatedly pointed an...

Cycling is a sport of suffering, and spectators like the obvious visual cues that riders are in pain, a la Voeckler. Pogacar's seeming lack of physical distress diminishes the spectacle, but I could say the same of Vingegaard and many others. Perhaps the watts-watching means they don't go into...

I'm thinking that in a dope-free peloton, you would expect times to come down by a few seconds. Not every time, because stage and race circumstances dictate too - but the record can act as a target for some riders. I find it impossible to believe they are fully clean. My point was just that I...

I'm not sure the UCI cares too much about climbing records. I doubt a member of the public watches the Tour live to see if a record is broken - sure the fastest ascent is often not by the first rider onto the climb, and where does the climb even start? I think the UCI wants a spectacle, with...

I think some people are getting caught up in whether Pogacar is a genuine talent or not. The reality is that all the top riders probably operate in the grey zone and many are wholeheartedly operating in the illegal zone. We have no reference points for 'clean' performance for a given rider. A...

But time trials are the race of truth, and the truth don't lie! I agree though - and I think there is variability across countries in how much TT exposure you get. The UK used to be all about TTs. The more you do it the better you get.

I suspect Chiappucci was a pretty good responder, but also quite a chaotic individual - he may not have been great at sticking to a programme. Bugno had a lot of issues with self-doubt and lack of confidence. If anything is clear about Armstrong, he had no shortage of confidence or ability to...