Glenn_Wilson said:
You are inclined to give LeMond a pass (your words on the LeMondII link) with respect to V02 score due to a treadmill test.
I took a treadmill test back in 1990 and then a more scientific test later that year in 1990. My tread mill score was higher.
The thing is I think Greg and everyone else trying to figure out performance exact via V02 is pure Bull ****.
Actually, that discrepancy always puzzled me. I just deferred to Veritas, who seemed to know more about this than I did.
But how much higher was your treadmill value, Glenn? That seems to support the point that different types of tests give different results. Just because you scored higher on a treadmill than a bike doesn’t mean everyone else would.
More to the point, though, if Greg was transfusing blood in the late 70s and early 80s, as Sniper wants us to believe, why was his V02 max only 79? What did he do later that pushed it up to the 90s? Do you want to argue that the 79 value was clean? But I thought Squaw Valley was a major doping laboratory. If they were testing the effects of doping, wouldn’t they want to measure V02 max under those conditions?
Maybe that was a clean score, and he did much better doped? But then why did he hide the higher doped value at the time, but later publicize it? In fact, if he was doping, and didn’t want people to know, why would he put out a number in the 90s at any time? Wouldn’t that cast suspicion on him?
In fact, his actual power outputs on the road were quite consistent with a far lower V02max. In that famous ADH stage in which he and Hinault finished together, he did 48 minutes, which is an absolute joke by today’s standards. Sure, different tactics in those days, yadda, yadda, yadda, but AFAIK, the best ADH time pre-90s was slightly under 42 minutes, by Fignon in 1989. That stands up fairly well to current times, but is far worse than what was routinely done in the 90s. You don’t need a V02 max of 90 to do that, you certainly don’t need to rationalize a time like that by claiming you’re 90 or better.
There’s a lot of interesting information on this thread, kudos to Sniper for compiling it, but the case against Lemond comes down to something pretty simple: did he take blood transfusions beginning in his teens? Because if he didn’t, his performances indicate an extraordinary natural talent, entirely consistent with his later TDF victories. We can speculate that he was taking steroids or whatever, but there’s very little reason to believe they would make that much of a difference. It’s either blood manipulation or nothing.
If he was transfusing, he must have been doing so before major one day races he won as an amateur and pro, and also, of course, during the Tour. We have to believe he transfused in the hotel on rest days. No doubt possible, but it seems like a stretch to me. Remember, these were the pre-Armstrong years when riders like Greg didn’t focus just on the Tour. They had a full schedule of spring classics, and sometimes the Giro-Tour double. Would a rider who depended on blood transfusions really be competitive in all those races? Yes, I know, in his later years he performed poorly up till the Tour, but not in his prime years.
I also think all the discussion on mitochondrial myopathy is irrelevant. What difference does it make whether he did or did not suffer from it? It’s not needed to explain the decline in his performance, assuming there even was a decline (has anyone actually compared his power outputs pre- and post-1990?).
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