look, every DS in the 90/00's understood the Hct/Vo2 formula. They also understood that when your body suddenly has 20% more RBC that unless you have muscles to absorb that additional oxygen that it is wasted. One thing Jan had was muscle in all the right places. Lance had this as well. Surprisingly Pantani also had this. Roberto Pregnolato, Marco Pantani's soigneur. said he was the most densely muscled rider he ever worked with.
20%?! In the nineties, maybe, but not after the EPO test. The typical transfusion of 500 ml. is about one-third of that. And during a GT, much of the transfusion goes just to reverse the normal decline in HT, so I don’t see a big issue with the extra oxygen being absorbed. The fact is that a typical racer has a natural HT about the same as a typical non-racer—low to mid 40s—but training results in a large increase in mitochondria and in the activity of certain aerobic enzymes. I don’t see how a 5-10% increase in oxygen intake is going to be wasted. If you really buy into the theory that more muscle mass is necessary to make use of increased oxygen intake, you would have to accept as a corollary that a rider without the benefit of increased oxygen intake would do worse than normal, because of all that muscle sitting idle.
As for having “muscle in all the right places”—I would assume any GC contender fits this description, and to the extent he does, is going to do very well relative to the competition all-clean or all-doped. This is beginning to sound like the “Lance had a heart three times larger than anyone else” arguments. Speculation based on little hard evidence to support a pet theory.
Take two riders with identical Vo2. One has a natural Hct of 41 the other is at 48. Both can boost their Hct to 50......which one gets the most benefit? How does a rider who gets a 2% boost in Vo2 compete with one who gets a 13% boost?
Definitely true, but it undercuts your argument that Ulle’s success was due in large part to having the right doctors. If you have a relatively low HT, and are operating pre-passport where anything up to 50% is allowed, you are going to benefit more from blood boosting regardless of who your doctor is. But based on the information I've seen, neither Ulle's nor LA's HT was exceptionally low. As I said before, an average HT is in the low forties, which suggests about half the peloton had the same advantage as these two, or even greater.
Now add in the cocktail of drugs, under expert supervision, that when administered correctly and on schedule add lean muscle mass that can put that additional RBC to good use.
Are there any scientific studies supporting this? I didn’t think so.
No doubt, some programs are better at adding muscle than others. But anyone taking these substances is going to be capable of more power, regardless of whether he's blood boosting or not. And conversely, anyone blood boosting is going to be capable of more endurance, regardless of whether he's adding muscle or not. You seem to be implying that the program was tailored to coordinate the increase in muscle mass with an increase in oxygen intake. I doubt very much that the doping doctors were trying to do this, or that in fact one could do it. You boost your blood as much as you think you can get away with. You put on as much muscle as you can while not lowering your power/weight ratio.
Really this discussion could be about any top rider from those 15 years. The key differentiation in a group of talented riders who trained hard was how they responded to the program. It is something that the doctors and DS' were well aware of at the time. It is also something that is found in most discussions of PED's in others sports. Some athletes, like Ben Johnson, Kelli White, etc. respond far better to doping then others.
Again, this sounds like unsupported speculation to me. I'm sure some athletes do respond to PEDs more than others. But other than the fact that an athlete with a low natural HT can raise it more—pre-passport—than one with a high HT, there is very little hard information to allow one to conclude who is a high responder and who a low responder. E.g., some individuals respond better to a given dose of EPO than others, i.e., have a greater increase in RBCs. There are studies demonstrating this. But are there any studies which identify which riders respond better in this sense than others? Of course not, no active rider can ever participate in a study involving EPO. And even if we did have these data, we lack information, as I pointed out earlier, allowing us to say which athletes benefit most from a given level of RBCs. As discussed here a while back, the relationship between oxygen intake and power is complex and variable. IOW, it's quite conceivable that a high responder to EPO, in the sense of greater synthesis of RBCs, could be a low responder in terms of how much power increase results from greater oxygen intake. It isn't all a matter of muscle mass.
Just because a couple of riders and cycling analysts said he was the best talent of his generation yet never speculated as to why (which one has to with the type of doping being practiced at the time), that doesn't take into account his absolutely abysmal form the large majority of the time he raced.
Seven TDF podia in ten years? That is abysmal form? Much has been said about the large margins of victory of LA in most of his Tours. Much less has been said about the large margins Ulle usually had over the third place finisher. If LA had been busted in '99 for corticosteroids, as he should have been, Ulle would have gone down as one of the great GT riders of all time. Yes, even after Puerto. I'm not arguing that he should have or shouldn't have, but just that his palmares were definitely not abysmal.
He was hounded out of the sport, yet he could have served a suspension with plenty of time to come back and redeem himself. He chose not to.
I was a little surprised by that, too. But by the time he came back he would have been at an age, mid 30s, when riders very rarely win Tours. I don't think after all the bridesmaid years he was interested in more podium finishes.
All three have one thing in common-ridiculous performances that announced to the cycling world "I'm here, I'm on dope, and no one can stop me"-Ullrich at Arcelis, Indurain's time trial from Tours to Blois, and Armstrong at Sestriere. I see no difference between these three performances.
Who wasn’t on dope at that time? To explain how LA won seven TDFs, the argument is that he had a better program, guided by Ferrari, than anyone else, supplemented by protection by UCI. With Ulle, it seems that some are now trying to make the case that he just responded better than others. All of this is useful speculation, but let's not delude ourselves into believing that we have a lot of hard evidence to support it. In LA's case, we have some evidence of protection, but no evidence yet that he used anything not available to others. We really have no direct evidence at all that Ulle's success was due to being a high responder.