Leopejo said:
Absolutely not, I condemn doping. I am just saying that it's ridiculous to base antidoping on performance and output. Use them to create suspicions and focus your antidoping efforts on suspicious athletes. But this is what they are already doing, without need for wattage testing.
As I ps'ed before, when I talk about performance, I talk about the experiment in lab settings to see what a rider's capacity is. I am not talking about results in races, how many wins, second places or third places.
The fact that they are already having their suspicion, does not mean they have evidence to prove these suspicions. With measuring wattages, and let's not only focus on wattages, because if you took a good look at Gesink's 'data' you also saw HR, time, elevation, speed, altitude etc, you have more evidence then saying, 'Hey you climbed the Alpe d'Huez in 39m, you are an anomaly'. In court you can't use 'Hey you have black hair, hence you are the suspect'.
What you can use is 'Hey, you climbed the Alpe in 39m, but given your past couple of wattages, that is an improvement of 20%. That's rather suspicious. Here judge and doctor, have a look at it, is this even humanly possible?'
Or, to pull it in the CSI scene 'Hey we found black hair on the crime scene, and you have that exact same hair on your head, how did it get there. What's your alibi?'
A good point for UCI in their stance for "athletes, not technological improvements". I hope in swimming they limit suits too.
I mentioned swimming NOT to emphasise the technological advantages, but to demonstrate, rather poignantly, that human beings, top athletes, do not improve their performance a lot. Swimming has seen new records 'shattered' by marginal time differences, hence the athletes performances have NOT improved significantly.
So, where's the limit? You can't beat a WR by more than a second? Tenth of a second? This is conceptually wrong. Let a new record raise suspicions and that's it. And let's say the UCI tests you at 312 W. There's so many hurdles to condemn that 360 W performance up a mountain.
You don't need to set a limit. The limit is based on the baseline information you already have over years of collected data. Does it seem odd to you when someone shatters a swimming record with more then a second, while it has been more or less the same for decades, where new records have been set only by margins? It only happens when something drastically changes, ie swim suits, lighter bikes, more aerobikes, not because someone develops a new speed gene or spin gene that makes one go over 75K an hour in a TT... Human capacities are set within narrowly identifiable margins
The only thing that regular wattage testing would do is to give away those outliers that improve dramatically and suddenly. And those are already targeted by WADA and UCI, you don't need wattage for that.
Excatly! And wattages is a useful tool, and it could reduce the burden on cyclists, because they don;t need to be tested every day, week for doping. If the data can be used reliably, (which at one point I believe they can) the whole 'privacy' discussion, and whereabouts burden, could be greatly reduced. Many riders don't like to fill out the ADAMS whereabouts system, and some already opted to wear a bracelet that displays the exact location of the rider, just to ease the burden of letting UCI know where you are.
If wattages can be used to ease the life of riders, I don't see why not.
Only very big anomalies. People think that wattage is something magical. It is only your output. Exactly the same as your speed in a track & field event (where suits don't have that impact as swimming), where it is safe to neglect running efficiency and tactics for the purposes of this discussion. Would you go and ask runners to regularly perform a 10 k test on a threadmill? Would you take their results on the track/road away if they are too good compared to the 10 k test? You are only putting an ARTIFICIALLY SET limit to improvement - contrary to the essence of sport itself. I am all for a doping free sport, I wish suits be banned from swimming - but imposing limits on performance (don't improve more than 10 %) is absurd.
They already do that to test themselves and measure their own improvements! Athletes don't measure their own anomalies and big gains, they measure seconds, HR decrease by 1-5 beats, watt output by 5-10W per year. That's not an anomaly, they use it to confidently say 'Hey my new training worked, my watt output has gone up 10W, my heart rate has gone down by 5 beats'
Runners do have their intermediate threadmill sessions, just because it measure performance under the exact same conditions, every year/half year. It enable themselves to measure their own increased efficiency, the results of their year long training and to evaluate if they are in peak condition to run the NY marathon with a new record...
Some people said that riders could fake 'output', which to me seems difficult. A doc can see that someones output is not maxed since the HR stays too low at the given output level. (It's not only about watts)
Anyhow, if UCI puts an SRM on each rider's bike, they will be able to collect data that reflects max output, since they are in competition. It was just an idea. If they can determine the weightlimit, they must be able to force riders to use and register output data for UCI purposes...