Re:
Tienus said:
I cant speak for Lemond but I'm drawing similar conclusions by looking at race footage.
Your (and his) line of reasoning is certainly very reasonable.
My point is: You always document very well how you get to your conclusions. It's transparent and easy to follow. And therefore it's also obvious that it's an outsider's view that works with secondary information only. That's perfectly fine.
Lemond on the other hand gets a lot of official airtime to talk about the topic. I doubt that he puts in a similar amount of effort to dissect race footage and collect other evidence as you do. But I would assume that he has access to insider information and knows a lot more than we all do. But does he? He makes kinda bold but quite generic statements and seemingly always refuses to go into specifics. I'm not sure whether he's not (yet) willing to or not able to present more tangible evidence.
It always bothers me when people are given the opportunity to voice their "expert opinion" just because of their reputation and not their actual knowledge. I hope that's not just another one of these cases.
Tienus said:
I realise there could well be legit changes amongst them.
I guess this is the crux with the arguments about bike changes. First it's not always clear from the outside whether there is a good reason for a change or not. And secondly, even if there is indeed no real reason to change the bike it's not unanimous proof for motorization either. Just because something makes not much sense doesn't mean people aren't doing it. People tend to do stupid stuff all the time when it's in fashion or just to copycat someone they look up to. Leading to some sort of strange groupthink that is hard to grasp for outsiders. And the more "detail-oriented" people want to be, the more susceptible they usually become to do things that are objectively nonsense but they firmly believe in because it appeared to have helped them a lot once or twice in the past. Always having the bike that you feel most comfortable with on a given terrain might be one of thoses cases. So when retired riders tune in to say that nobody changed bikes for fun during their careers I don't give this too much weight. It's a general fact of life that the next generation does stuff differently and the older generation doesn't always like it..
Therefore I doubt that every single bike or wheel change that has no obvious legit explanation is related to a motor. So for me there needs to be additional evidence to make such a bike change suspicious. Like for example a bike change followed by an extrodinary performance. Or a consistent pattern of bike changes that always lets the presumably dodgy material vanish in the end. There have been quite a few such cases for sure.
Tienus said:
CBS also interviewed Jean Pierre Verdy who was the head of French anti doping until 2015.
http://www.sportschau.de/weitere/radsport/motor-doping-tour-de-france-100.html
No, quite the opposite, "said Verdy in the interview to the question whether the journalists of France 2 had exaggerated." They only said the minimum. The problem is much bigger.
Just for completeness and to add a number as the meaning of "widespread" has led to discussions here before: The claim that Verdy is referring to is that about a dozen riders used a motor in TdF 2015.
That's what he said in the
original interview:
Question: Who has used motors?
Answer: It's just a minority, but probably more than a dozen riders. Many more than in 2014 and the years before that. The hungarian engineer (i.e. Varjas) was openly walking around at the start of TdF and has visited his riders.
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