"clean", "suspect", "miraculous" and "mutants"

[jw1979]

Fatclimber, thank god for google, otherwise I'd never had found this.

I trust LeMond. I like the guy and I've never read anything he said and thought he sounded ignorant. Had he never been shot, who knows what would have been.

http://www.bikeraceinfo.com/oralhistory/lemond.html

Specifically from this link above, "...Wattage is the ultimate truth. You know I'm very controversial because I think that you have to look at numbers.

My wattage, relative to VO2 Max...a VO2 Max of 92 or 93 in a fully recovered way...I think I was capable of producing 450 to 460 watts. The truth is, even at the Tour de France, my Tour de France climb times up l'Alpe d'Huez yielded a wattage of around 380 and 390. That was the historic norm for Hinault and myself. You've got times going back many, many years. But what was learned recently, in the last 5 years, was that when you start the Tour de France, you start with a normal hematocrit of, say, 45 percent. By the time you finish, it's probably down 10 or 15 percent. Which means my VO2 Max dropped 10 or 15 percent. So that's why I was never producing the same wattage. And then there a lot of other factors that help performance if you've recovered. My last time trial in '89, I averaged about 420, 430 watts, which would match or be slightly down from what my real VO2 Max was."

So the question to me is, if you have another natural mutant like LeMond, and they are at their physical peak and maybe can recover even better than LeMond, either due to being even more of a mutant than LeMond or simply employing better (and legal) recovery strategies due to further scientific physiological understanding, maybe, just maybe it is in fact possible for a guy to put out 6.7-6.8 w/kg who weighs 67kgs or less.

Much above that weight, like an Indurain, and its getting further and further farfetched, but as bodies get smaller their VO2max trend towards getting higher and higher, i.e., deer mice vs. thoroughbreds.

It's easy to be skeptical if there is one year that is an exceptional outlier among an athletes career, but then again, every top athlete tends to be able to look back and point to one season where everything just clicked, physically, mentally, emotionally, etc.

We have to give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Remember, even in the last 100 or so years there was a man who was 8'11" tall! And we have people like Nikola Tesla who are so intelligent that there are people who literally think he may have been an alien. Outliers exist in everything. Say Greg LeMond is at the 7th standard deviation in terms of aerobic capacity, but what if someone comes along and is at the 8th?

 

[Fatclimber]

Thanks for providing that. I will do more researching when I have time, but if the 6.7 w/k were truly achievable in a well rested state, then he should have been able to come close in early climbing stages. None of the ones listed are even over 6, although I don't know how early in the race they were.

As red as Pantani's page was, you might think a hog was slaughtered on it.

 

[jw1979]

Thanks for providing that. I will do more researching when I have time, but if the 6.7 w/k were truly achievable in a well rested state, then he should have been able to come close in early climbing stages. None of the ones listed are even over 6, although I don't know how early in the race they were.

As red as Pantani's page was, you might think a hog was slaughtered on it.

They are all estimates though, and he would only be forced to go as hard as needed to win or be at the front. You don't need to drop your competitors by 5 minutes on a climb in the beginning of a stage race. Granted, when Indurain came on the scene running on nitromethane, it blew Greg away, right? But that was after he'd been shot, and I'm going to take a wild guess having a bunch of pellets in your body can't be helpful.

I believe he was using a powermeter for the TT he speaks of where he averaged 420-430w. No?

 

[melkemugg]

I feel quite the opposite. If readers take offense to the classifications, that's fine, but there are still plenty of cold, hard facts that should at least inspire some thought/questions regarding performances.

With the impact that dope has had on cycling, I find it only fair that it is granted a certain amount of attention. I find the trends shown by the facts revealed somewhat hopeful that we may someday witness fair competition.


Has anybody seen a response from JV about this?

Im not offended and i want to read it but my complain is more about how they present it. It does not look serious. It looks like a News of the world magazine and its covered with cheap rhetorics, fanzy graphs and everything just reeks of sensationalism. Does not matter if it based on calculation, still no hard facts besides that and it will end up as porn for the ones that already enjoy speculation.

It kind of looks like they just sum up what we already discuss and assume about riders in here. But then again, i hope i can be proved wrong as soon as i get to read it.

 

[vrusimov]

They are all estimates though, and he would only be forced to go as hard as needed to win or be at the front. You don't need to drop your competitors by 5 minutes on a climb in the beginning of a stage race. Granted, when Indurain came on the scene running on nitromethane, it blew Greg away, right? But that was after he'd been shot, and I'm going to take a wild guess having a bunch of pellets in your body can't be helpful.

I believe he was using a powermeter for the TT he speaks of where he averaged 420-430w. No?

I don't know that I buy all this business about lead in his body. Greg was away from the sport for two years, while Indurain continued to ride, and yet Greg returns to win two tours. If you want to see in graphic detail where Indurain hinted at what was to come just look at the Luz Ardiden stage in 1990...LeMond laboring like an animal and Indurain smoothly pulling away from him in the saddle to easily take the stage.

 

[The_Captain]

This is not true and can be proven as an application of Bayes' theorem.

Especially in this situation where if I'm not mistaken data that doesn't fit the theory is ignored (this is more like just logging 6s whilst rolling dice, looking for evidence of a weighted die ).

Another thing to note is that this isn't a "who doped the most" analysis - a very average rider doped to the gills might not register in the mutant category - Lance anyone? A once in a generation supertalent might even come in the suspect category (especially with the potential margins for error and variations with the data here) - the truth is that we don't know for sure what the actual boundaries are - just what is statistically more likely.

 

[Alex Simmons/RST]

I suck at French but I'm pretty sure he says his formula takes into account weather and wind.

Cool, can we get the wind data for all of these rider's climbs, is it listed?

Considering that even a minor amount of air movement categorised as "calm" on the Beaufort wind scale can change the estimated climbing power to weight by +/-0.5W/kg, one could quite legitimately estimate the same climb time to have been ridden at 5.5W/kg and 6.5W/kg depending on modest variation in environmental conditions.


Interested in how the ascent times were obtained, as timing points did change.

 

[Galic Ho]

Huh? What? Faster? Cleaner? What? And somehow you can judge talent amidst the complete lack of scientific data. The only thing we know about clentadopucci is that he is a doper. Everything else is simply noise.

And I will ask you once again not to compartmentalize me. I freakin' hate Armstrong more than anything. I simply find it utterly baffling that anyone can be a fan of such a huge known doper as clentadopucci. You simply do not like cycling. It's that simple. You are somehow caught up emotionally with a complete fraud. and knowing he's a doper somehow makes it okay? Seriously? Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Asks 'not to compartmentalize me' then proceeds to do exactly the same thing. Oh the IRONY!

So everyone who doesn't hate every doper, hates cycling huh? I'd love to hear more. Tell me more, tell me more; yeah it has a ring to it doesn't it?

 

[Galic Ho]

We have to give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Remember, even in the last 100 or so years there was a man who was 8'11" tall! And we have people like Nikola Tesla who are so intelligent that there are people who literally think he may have been an alien. Outliers exist in everything. Say Greg LeMond is at the 7th standard deviation in terms of aerobic capacity, but what if someone comes along and is at the 8th?

The man was that large because medical science did not understand the cause of his gigantism. He was dead by 23.

Nikola Tesla was super smart you say? So are a lot of people.

Lemond is 7 standard deviations from the mean hey? So what is the mean for average VO2max then?

You had a point till you put in this paragraph. There is no such thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean. The maximum is 97% of all subjects in a population will fall within 3 SD's of the mean. You'd know this if you studied stats. Lemond is just outside the 3rd SD. Given the average VO2max is about 40-45, that means the SD is probably 15, thus putting the maximum outlier at 90. It thus requires a very fit and physically gifted person with a very high oxygen uptake rate at a very specific weight to crack a VO2max in litres/min/kg of 90, aka a Lemond or Hinault.

Drop the 7 and 8 SD's champ, there is no founding in statistics for that. None what so ever. You almost ruined a nice point with a load of fictional mumbo jumbo made up gobbledy ***.

 

[vrusimov]

The man was that large because medical science did not understand the cause of his gigantism. He was dead by 23.

Nikola Tesla was super smart you say? So are a lot of people.

Lemond is 7 standard deviations from the mean hey? So what is the mean for average VO2max then?

You had a point till you put in this paragraph. There is no such thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean. The maximum is 97% of all subjects in a population will fall within 3 SD's of the mean. You'd know this if you studied stats. Lemond is just outside the 3rd SD. Given the average VO2max is about 40-45, that means the SD is probably 15, thus putting the maximum outlier at 90. It thus requires a very fit and physically gifted person with a very high oxygen uptake rate at a very specific weight to crack a VO2max in litres/min/kg of 90, aka a Lemond or Hinault.

Drop the 7 and 8 SD's champ, there is no founding in statistics for that. None what so ever. You almost ruined a nice point with a load of fictional mumbo jumbo made up gobbledy ***.

Oh man...And here I thought my current statistics class was a waste of time. You are indeed correct...Actually, I think 68-95-99.7% are the (3) standard deviations (rule) for normal distributions. So in a room of 1000 athletes, Lemond would likely rank second or third! If the stated 92-93 VO2 is legitimate. That, my friend, is an enormous talent!

 

[richtea]

There is no such thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean. The maximum is 97% of all subjects in a population will fall within 3 SD's of the mean. You'd know this if you studied stats.

Of course there is such a thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean in a normal distribution.

 

[Eshnar]

You had a point till you put in this paragraph. There is no such thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean. The maximum is 97% of all subjects in a population will fall within 3 SD's of the mean. You'd know this if you studied stats.

I studied stats and I don't get what you're meaning. Ofc there is the possibility of a 7 SD outlier (and ofc it's very small, but there is)
The 3SD part of your reasoning really leaves me as yeah the 97% stays in the 3SD... so what? there's still the other 3%.

 

[Le breton]

Cool, can we get the wind data for all of these rider's climbs, is it listed?

Considering that even a minor amount of air movement categorised as "calm" on the Beaufort wind scale can change the estimated climbing power to weight by +/-0.5W/kg, one could quite legitimately estimate the same climb time to have been ridden at 5.5W/kg and 6.5W/kg depending on modest variation in environmental conditions.


Interested in how the ascent times were obtained, as timing points did change.

Hello Alex,
I have looked at your graphs before and on the paper your calculations and the conclusions you draw seem fine.

However you obviously have not cycled much in the Alps or the Pyrénées. This is not Australia. It's very hard to find a mountain road with long straight stretches where the wind would have the effect you are talking about.

So I will list a few I know about.

1st and foremost, the Lautaret, from Briançon, about 1300m) to the col at 2058m. There 9 times out of 10, at noon or after noon the wind goes down in the summer. The one time it blows the other way a guy like myself can hope to gain 10 minutes w.r.t. the other situation. Well,I forgot the null case: a wind that's barely noticeable, like during the Etape du Tour in 2006.

Then there is the bottom part of the Galibier around Les Verneys up to Plan Lachat. Several km where the wind occasionally can play its part because the valley followed by the road is fairly straight. Out of dozens of climb I have once experienced wind conditions like they had this year at the Giro. I remember waiting for other guys to share the work, that was during La Marmotte in 1998.
If you look at Portoleau's calculations for this year's Giro, he quotes a +/- 5% uncertainty for that section.

http://www.alternativeditions.com/2013/06/02/les-calculs-de-puissance-du-tour-d-italie-2013/

On Alpe d'Huez, the wind "never" plays a part in the lower elevations, up to about 1500m, it's all twisting and turning.( It could be different sometimes just at sunrise when the cold air from the summits falls to the valley). Above 1500 m. the wind can occasionally be non negligible, like in 2009 or 2010 during the dauphiné race, or in the 2004 TT where it probably cost a significant number of seconds to the last racers doing the climb (earlier on it had been very calm. Between the bottom at km 1.5 and the 1st intermediate at 1395m, the 1st doped guy went 8.6% faster than the 1st(?) clean guy (Moncoucou), then only 2.4% faster between 1395 and roughly 1600m and 1.7% faster between 1600m and the finish at about 1845m. Moncoutié started at 15:54, L.A. at 16:58.

Anyway, I am not going to list all the major climbs, but very often, like in the lower Pyrénées, they are in the woods and well protected from the wind.

Even here in the Jura, I know of 2 climbs where I go to train when it's extremely windy because in the dense vegetation I know I'll be totally protected from the wind until I get above 1300 or 1400 meters.

Furthermore, 1 meter up from the ground the wind speed is usually only half the speed at 10 meters above ground. Yesterday, going through Gex at the foot of the Jura, i could see a flag 5m above the road indicating a wind at 1 or 2 o'clock, yet I knew from the speedometer and my legs that I had a tail wind (only lasted a very short distance).
So, yes, wind can have misleading effects on the calculations, but I don't believe that the wind suddenly started to be favorable on all climbs in 1991.

When you average over many climbs obviously the uncertainties will go both ways.

 

[maltiv]

The man was that large because medical science did not understand the cause of his gigantism. He was dead by 23.

Nikola Tesla was super smart you say? So are a lot of people.

Lemond is 7 standard deviations from the mean hey? So what is the mean for average VO2max then?

You had a point till you put in this paragraph. There is no such thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean. The maximum is 97% of all subjects in a population will fall within 3 SD's of the mean. You'd know this if you studied stats. Lemond is just outside the 3rd SD. Given the average VO2max is about 40-45, that means the SD is probably 15, thus putting the maximum outlier at 90. It thus requires a very fit and physically gifted person with a very high oxygen uptake rate at a very specific weight to crack a VO2max in litres/min/kg of 90, aka a Lemond or Hinault.

Drop the 7 and 8 SD's champ, there is no founding in statistics for that. None what so ever. You almost ruined a nice point with a load of fictional mumbo jumbo made up gobbledy ***.

The statistics is weak in this one. Of course you can be 7 SD's from the mean. If you for example plot income in a population there'll obviously be someone ridiculously rich who are more than 7 SD's away from the mean.

Remember, the probability of getting an observation above a certain point in a cumulative probability function can never be exactly 0%, so you can never conclude that a single event is impossible, you can simply infer that it's unlikely.

 

[Eshnar]

The statistics is weak in this one. Of course you can be 7 SD's from the mean. If you for example plot income in a population there'll obviously be someone ridiculously rich who are more than 7 SD's away from the mean.

Remember, the probability of getting an observation above a certain point in a cumulative probability function can never be exactly 0%, so you can never conclude that a single event is impossible, you can simply infer that it's unlikely.

that's not a normal distribution though. For the rest I agree

 

[Le breton]

Of course there is such a thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean in a normal distribution.

Agreed.

It seems doable to obtain the average VO2 of a population and its s.d. up to 3 or 4 sigmas. Then it's possible to see whether it's gaussian or not.

However, to get the actual distribution up to 7 s.d. you probably need to test about 10 to 100 million people in order to get that distribution curve and its s.d. and have an idea about the tail at the upper end.

Towards the bottom of the curve, clearly there is a cutoff around 3 or 4 ml/mn.kg. The others can't be tested because they are dead or dying or on an artificial respirator.

That fact alone shows that the distribution can't possibly be gaussian .

 

[maltiv]

Oh man...And here I thought my current statistics class was a waste of time. You are indeed correct...Actually, I think 68-95-99.7% are the (3) standard deviations (rule) for normal distributions. So in a room of 1000 athletes, Lemond would likely rank second or third! If the stated 92-93 VO2 is legitimate. That, my friend, is an enormous talent!

Nope, a sample of 1000 athletes wouldn't be a randomized sample (as they have much higher VO2 max than normal people) and the sample average would obviously be far above the population average, making your conclusion invalid (not to mention that the numbers used are made up )

 

[vrusimov]

Nope, a sample of 1000 athletes wouldn't be a randomized sample (as they have much higher VO2 max than normal people) and the sample average would obviously be far above the population average, making your conclusion invalid (not to mention that the numbers used are made up )

Point taken...but don't expect a cookie... I was only responding to what GH posted above.

 

[Alex Simmons/RST]

<snip>
So, yes, wind can have misleading effects on the calculations, but I don't believe that the wind suddenly started to be favorable on all climbs in 1991..

Thanks for the info and insight, and you are right, I don't know those climbs from personal experience, only from the power meter data my clients have provided and which validated my method of estimating W/kg, which covers most of the major French alpine climbs.

I certainly haven't suggested the weather changed in 1991, but who knows with global warming, perhaps can we blame that on Lance and Hein?

More seriously though, it is possible to to apply the maths to parse out from power meter data the likely impact of wind, and to show on what parts of a course it was negligible, beneficial and detrimental, and to what extent. You do need a little knowledge of the rider's morphological characteristics, and their power meter file from a quality power meter along with an accurate elevation profile, but it's certainly do-able via the technique of virtual elevation profiling.

When you average over many climbs obviously the uncertainties will go both ways.

Or it might indeed have a tendency to bias certain climbs in one particular direction as you pointed out, meaning the W/kg estimates for a given climb might tend towards one or other of under or over estimation.

But I totally agree, the data should really be looked in terms of the general trends over the longer term. Picking out one individual ride however will have a lower level of precision because of the uncertainty of the inputs - and that's really my point.

What is precisely known (we hope) are the rider's actual climb times, so why not simply chart those for each climb and avoid the precision problems when attempting to first estimate and then normalise to W/kg estimates? The trends will still be there if you plot each climb separately.

Not sure if it's being added or considered or already done, but a database of climbs, precise timing points, rider's times during official races, dates and comments on the conditions and race situation would be quite an interesting resource.

 

[LaFlorecita]

So you're saying that 444 is greater than 472? You may want to look a little closer, it appears there was no miscalculation but perhaps a misread by yourself.

No, I thought the riders were in order of ridiculousness. I dunno.

 

[jw1979]

The man was that large because medical science did not understand the cause of his gigantism. He was dead by 23.

Nikola Tesla was super smart you say? So are a lot of people.

Lemond is 7 standard deviations from the mean hey? So what is the mean for average VO2max then?

You had a point till you put in this paragraph. There is no such thing as 7 standard deviations from the mean. The maximum is 97% of all subjects in a population will fall within 3 SD's of the mean. You'd know this if you studied stats. Lemond is just outside the 3rd SD. Given the average VO2max is about 40-45, that means the SD is probably 15, thus putting the maximum outlier at 90. It thus requires a very fit and physically gifted person with a very high oxygen uptake rate at a very specific weight to crack a VO2max in litres/min/kg of 90, aka a Lemond or Hinault.

Drop the 7 and 8 SD's champ, there is no founding in statistics for that. None what so ever. You almost ruined a nice point with a load of fictional mumbo jumbo made up gobbledy ***.

1/10

Thanks for the reminder to ride my bike more, read books in print more, and spend less time on the forums.

 

[hiero2]

Cool, can we get the wind data for all of these rider's climbs, is it listed?

Considering that even a minor amount of air movement categorised as "calm" on the Beaufort wind scale can change the estimated climbing power to weight by +/-0.5W/kg, one could quite legitimately estimate the same climb time to have been ridden at 5.5W/kg and 6.5W/kg depending on modest variation in environmental conditions.


Interested in how the ascent times were obtained, as timing points did change.

Suggest you go to the linked article for starters - back up at the start of the thread. Buy the book or magazine - I'm not sure which it is - but it is apparently available.

 

[Alex Simmons/RST]

Suggest you go to the linked article for starters - back up at the start of the thread. Buy the book or magazine - I'm not sure which it is - but it is apparently available.

I thought it was in French, or did I miss an English language version?

 

[Le breton]

.........
it is possible to to apply the maths to parse out from power meter data the likely impact of wind, and to show on what parts of a course it was negligible, beneficial and detrimental, and to what extent. You do need a little knowledge of the rider's morphological characteristics, and their power meter file from a quality power meter along with an accurate elevation profile, but it's certainly do-able via the technique of virtual elevation profiling.

That would be an interesting exercise, very time consuming though as you need to a lot of adjusting and "bootstrapping".

Sounds like you might have accumulated enough data to write a book of your own on that topic, but you probably would need your clients to agree to it.

 

[Le breton]

I thought it was in French, or did I miss an English language version?

http://www.alternativeditions.com/not-normal/