DirtyWorks said:
I also stumbled on this document possibly from February 1991
http://d3epuodzu3wuis.cloudfront.net/C118.pdf
a treasure trove of data both on armstrong and the us national team btwn '91 and '95 (i'm going to pin it up).
indeed for anyone still interested in sorting out the armstrong natural vs a doped one, it is an invaluable prime source. as i said before,THAT question is the
only subject left that still excites me about the despicable human being who's apparently possessed an elite athletic body
but was he a world beater ?
i scanned the 54 pages real fast. in addition to some comments by m. index (which seem sound imo), i'd make the following very tentatively:
-armstrong's physical.
his height and weight controversy from the coyle study are well known. in the document, he was measured at 180 cm/ 80 kg in '91 and at 178 cm/ 77 kg in '95. the little fact that was largely unknown or ignored is that his % body fat in '91 was 6.5% and 4.2% in '95. meaning,
he was at the absolute healthy limit when weighing 78 kg, thus putting a question mark to his ability to drop kgs much further as we are told by his fans. i do not exclude musculature reduction starting with his '99 streak, but we need his % body fat to properly evaluate the touted weight reduction contribution to w/kg increase without doping
armstrong's blood chemistry
as already noted, having the hg above 16 and hct almost 49% as long ago as '91 is quite suspicious when his base level was said to be low 40s. additionally, and this was never mentioned before as far as i can deduce,
his iron chemistry (not just the iron level but ferritin, tibc etc) support the notion that he took epo in the early 90's. to remind, in those days the standard procedure required massive iron supplements (or injections) along with epo injections. this would cause either an overshot in iron levels or a change in iron metabolism. what i saw is the change bordering on the limit values consistent with the epo usage.
also curious was that armstrong's triglycerides and total cholesterol were abnormally high. this would be indicative of either his consistently crappy diet (unlikely) or...a habitual anabolic steroids use (which are know to raise the values). admittedly, it could also be the result of something else or his natural state (which i doubt).
armstrong's aerobic/anaerobic data
vo2 max of 80 in '91 is confirmed as a true elite mark. but the threshold of 75% and the corresponding watts (340-350) was sub par. in another place the testers even noted that he would need about 400 watts to compete at his level in the itts. they called it an area to develop. perhaps. but the often reported numbers of 450+ watts in the tours are clearly above the training effects (appr 10%) for improving the threshold. massive blood doping would have been required.
the testers also noted his remarkably low lactic acid accumulation and the unusual ability to perform at simulated altitude (related to his unique hg saturation). these could be his true, natural attributes.
there was some other less than remarkable data, including his sub par explosive and anaerobic scores. i also noted that the famous cadence increase was not supported by the pedaling efficiency tests.
overall, more data to both to consider him an elite but not necessarily the world smasher he turned to be.
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