GB Track Team

[The Cobra]

So GB dominate the track in Beijing. 4 years later they dominate the track in London with mostly the same group of riders.

How come the rest haven't caught up with team GB's secret sauce?

Or are the others clean and GB is doing the other clean nations out of olympic golds?

Or maybe, and I know this is crazy... GB riders are simply better!

About time the Australian hired Gert, these Olympics are way too easy for us.

 

[Franklin]

He's worse than Bruyneel and is going to leave a nasty legacy on GB and world cycling...

Sorry, but we truly don't know that yet. I'm all for keeping the heat up and am tired of the handwaving fans, but this is putting the carriage before the horse.

Let's try at least to stick to facts and deduction instead of emotional outbursts.

 

[Magnus]

If it's the fastest, then every team would experience faster times. This isn't bobsled.

Were many performances better?

Denmark's performance was their best ever afaik (with this team) and certainly better than expected. Don't know about the others.

 

[Franklin]

So GB dominate the track in Beijing. 4 years later they dominate the track in London with mostly the same group of riders.

How come the rest haven't caught up with team GB's secret sauce?

Or are the others clean and GB is doing the other clean nations out of olympic golds?

Or maybe, and I know this is crazy... GB riders are simply better!

It's anyone's guess really. Yet as long as we don't know we need to ask the hard questions instead of handwaving.

Keep in mind that in these cases the zero-hypothesis should be suspicion about doping. History, Game Theory and the Goldman Dilemma are really clear about this.

 

[Stueyy]

That explanation fits the Men's results where Team GB had lackluster results in 2011. I'm assuming "on the program" is a euphemism because recent history shows sudden improvements at an international level are suspect.

Yes.

It's going to be scraps for all the other teams at the velodrome, like at the tour they don't care how obvious it is. No positives means innocence doesn't it? Don't get caught and it obviously didn't happen...

 

[Ingenerius]

....


If you watch the recent documentaries on Wiggins or Pendleton, or listen to Geraint Thomas and Mark Cavendish talk, and you still label them dopers I think you are very poor judges of character.

....

This is a bad argument and I think you know it. People in my country will say the exact same thing about any one of our athletes. All our athletes are through media etc made out to be wonderful human beings and every single one has great back stories, overcoming this and that, simple farmer still chopping wood in spare time etc. etc. I've seen countless of features and documentaries on our athletes that all portrays them as people with great character that would make it impossible for them to dope. And I think this is also true for countries like Russia, US, Spain, China etc. All athletes everywhere are portrayed this way in their home country.

But we know that this is not true. So glorified documentaries, features, interviews etc. is a poor way of judging character and sure as hell is not a reason to believe someone is clean.

 

[Franklin]

I feel there is a disconnect between the sporter cheating and acting in real life. Jan Ulrich is a good example. Met/saw him twice and unless he's the best actor in the world he's a nice guy. Everything we see about him (youtube vids riding fondo's for example) confirm this. He also was a big time doping cheat.

Taking doping isn't just done by bad people, nor does it all of a sudden make a good guy a brute.

 

[Ingenerius]

I feel there is a disconnect between the sporter cheating and acting in real life. Jan Ulrich is a good example. Met/saw him twice and unless he's the best actor in the world he's a nice guy. Everything we see about him (youtube vids riding fondo's for example) confirm this. He also was a big time doping cheat.

Taking doping isn't just done by bad people, nor does it all of a sudden make a good guy a brute.

Couldn't agree more.

Also, Ulle Ulle Ulle

 

[Caruut]

If you watch the recent documentaries on Wiggins or Pendleton, or listen to Geraint Thomas and Mark Cavendish talk, and you still label them dopers I think you are very poor judges of character.

Geraint Thomas has been paid to promote those expensive and useless magnetic "PowerBands". It's not illegal, but in my mind it is immoral to try and hoodwink the public like that. Thomas is clearly not too bothered about entering the arena of the morally ambiguous for personal gain.

As for the character of Bradley Wiggins - Darryl has a story or two, I believe.

EDIT: Not that I think character is necessarily relevant - Tyler and Ulle are prime examples. Even if it were relevant, I really don't see that the British athletes have such squeeky clean characters.

 

[DirtyWorks]

Can I say that I think this is the worst post I have seen on any forum, relating to any subject, ever?

Did you bother to go to the UCI's site? That's where I got it. You don't see the same thing on the Women's side. There, Team GB is near-dominant in the recent past, so Olympic results reflect recent history. That suggests their recent performances were both likely and possible.

Can you explain what was happening in 2011 Team Pursuit such that Men's Team GB ends up fourth overall and then turns around to set WR times? It's pretty unlikely. Not impossible though.

How does Team GB's 2011 team sprint go from an aggregate 12th to WR in 2012? If they were dominant four years ago, as the four years passed clean riders tend to consistently reflect that same dominance. The Men's results do not reflect that. The Women's results do.

 

[Stueyy]

I feel there is a disconnect between the sporter cheating and acting in real life. Jan Ulrich is a good example. Met/saw him twice and unless he's the best actor in the world he's a nice guy. Everything we see about him (youtube vids riding fondo's for example) confirm this. He also was a big time doping cheat.

Taking doping isn't just done by bad people, nor does it all of a sudden make a good guy a brute.

Everyone else is doing it, it is only fair I do it as well so I have the same advantage that everyone else has. It's not cheating if everyone is doing it. Conscience is now clean with that type of attitude and how many times do you think an elite athlete gets told that?

 

[Dalakhani]

Tweeted this evening by Amandine Thomas-Commin of L'Equipe:

Les British agacent [Clara] Sanchez: "Comment élever notre niveau en 3 mois ? Je n'ai pas de solution miracle. Peut-être qu'ils en ont une"

{The British annoyed Sanchez: "How to raise our level in 3 months? I don't have a miracle solution. Maybe they have one"}

 

[Bumeington]

Combination of things. Steep banking, long straights, wood etc.

Best way to make it fast on the night: get a full house in and turn off the air con.
Apparently, it's sweltering in there.

Controlled - 28 degrees exactly

 

[MacRoadie]

Controlled - 28 degrees exactly

That wooden track has to be kept within very specific temperature and humidity numbers.

Sometime a velodrome's humidistat and thermostat have to play catch-up, especially if the building fills quickly, but the system is designed to get back to optimum conditions as soon as possible.

 

[kielbasa]

This was posted by Krebs303 in the Chaos thread. I wonder if it doesn't belong in The Clinic:

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/3-completely-cr.php

The article mentions Brits experimenting with these things.

 

[Darryl Webster]

At elite level sport morality and ethics often become very grey areas.

In a sport as tainted as cycling were gains from doping are huge its very easy to conclude there is no option. Often the ethical bar is set thus : if you pass medical control then there's no offence, if you stretch the rules and the judges don't see, there's no offence.
There was never a clearer case of this than Moser,s hour record.
To me that is when cycling began a very slippery journey to were it is now.
Every regulation was flouted/ made ambiguous ..the bike, the wheels, the clothing, the track surface ( a special coating was applied) and, as we learned later, blood banking.
The maize is complex. When we learnt of the US team blood banking during the 84 LA games , my first thought, unbelievable as it might seem now , were, " well if its there own blood, stored and then returned then how is that doping ? ".. I'm sure I wasn't alone in that thought.
I guess that's the "win at any price" headspace of many elite athletes.
To the victor the spoils, to rest anonymity and the crumbs.
Its truly a reflection of society at large.

 

[gheizhwinder]

There seem to me to be four options:

a) There is a squad-wide doping programme,
b) Individual riders are doping and disguising it from the GB directors,
c) Individual riders are doping and there is a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture within the squad,
d) They are clean.

Does anyone dispute that these are the options? The scale of GB domination suggests that there are no weak links in the squad, meaning if b) or c) are to hold, almost every individual is seeking their own juice from outside sources.

So do those who think these results come from doping generally think a) is the case?

One more thing - is the idea that 6,000 people cheering you on can actually give you a performance boost completely laughable? I haven't seen this mentioned yet (although admittedly haven't read every post). I'm presuming not many of us have experience of whether this is possible or not.

 

[Ingenerius]

Well, the deliberate falling over farce clearly shows that british cycling/Sky is happy to do cover-ups and also force a 19-year old guy to go back on his words and blatantly lie on tv. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_BUZ9EHKHo

It is starting to get hard to have faith in the Brailsford program.

 

[Darryl Webster]

This was posted by Krebs303 in the Chaos thread. I wonder if it doesn't belong in The Clinic:

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/3-completely-cr.php

The article mentions Brits experimenting with these things.

Jesus H Christ, were the feck does it end!.

1. The Super-Cooled "Chamber Of Horrors"
Did you know there is a cryotherapy chamber at the Olympics? It's a device that gradually takes participants down to the insane temperature of -220 degrees Fahrenheit. One immediately thinks of poor Han Solo being frozen in carbonite — not the best preparation for physical activity — so why would anyone willingly freeze themselves? In a word — performance.

The practice of cryotherapy has taken off and "studios," as they're called, can be found around the globe. However, researchers in Poland have been perfecting the technique and opened a cryotherapy center in their Olympic Health Center in 2000.

Those who are game are suited up in special socks, underwear and ear protection to avoid frostbite. The process begins with acclimation: entering a cold-but-not-cryo-cold chamber for a few seconds; entering a colder one after that; and then finally the big kahuna, the cryotherapy chamber.

Some of the toughest athletes in the world call it the "chamber of horrors." That's because taking your body down to extreme temperatures has some interesting effects. Your blood vessels become more narrow, and both your blood flow and metabolism slows down. Physically, you probably feel burning or pins and needles as your body reacts.

Those who stick it out for the two-minute sessions reap the benefits. When you leave the chamber, your veins expand to four times their normal size, pumping tons of oxygenated blood back through the body and helping to heal damaged or overworked tissue and joints. Plus, your endorphins have kicked in from the trauma of being in the cold, and they rush around the body with a pain-killing effect.

With that kind of quick recoverability, it's easy to see why everyone from weight lifters, race walkers and swimmers are using the futuristic chamber at the Games."

This aint "sport" , this is science with athletes as lab rats.

 

[buckle]

I just see it as mainly a platform for sneering at successes and more and more that sneering has been directed at my country and countrymen, resulting in borderline racist remarks at times.

Just because other great cycling nations have built that greatness through the needle of a syringe, it doesn't dictate we are doing the same.

I'm torn between you actually believing that or that you are just an arrogant, racist, English troll. Actually, on reflection not sure if there is a difference TBH.

There is very little difference.

 

[twothirds]

Just out of curiousity, how many of the posters here ride the track, much less have ridden it at a level that comes close to elite?

 

[Darryl Webster]

Just out of curiousity, how many of the posters here ride the track, much less have ridden it at a level that comes close to elite?

Bronze Junior worlds TP. Mexico 1980, Bronze Commonwealth Games TP 82, 7 times British TP Champ 81..87. 2 X Individual Brit pursuit champ 84,85..and a few more medals in 50km points.

 

[twothirds]

Nice! . I only has because it is clear that there are posters here that make some pretty strong statements, then end up asking questions which clearly show that they know nothing about riding the track.

I don't know whether any athlete's performance is clean or not, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but if your opinion isn't educated, then don't espouse it as fact.

 

[BroDeal]

Jesus H Christ, were the feck does it end!.

1. The Super-Cooled "Chamber Of Horrors"
....
This aint "sport" , this is science with athletes as lab rats.

I'll go with that. It reminds me of Formula 1. Before the engineers got involved, it was a real sport. Now it is a rolling science experiment. The soul of the sport was sucked out and replaced with Poindexters figuring out how to shave fractions of a fraction of a second from lap times. Cycling, with its concentration on aerodynamic bikes, helmets, clothing, freaking cryo chambers, basically marginal gains, is headed down the same path.

It is the reason I think the sport should go old school. It should be man against man, not engineer against engineer.

 

[twothirds]

anyone who thinks the design of the bankings makes a 3 second difference over a 4km pursuit is living in another galaxy

Statements like this don't lend much credence to what you have to say. You've clearly never ridden more that one track before.