Tadej Pogacar and Mauro Giannetti

[roundabout]

Ok so he got better in the vuelta? since his first 9 days he didn't break 6W/kg (on smaller climbs)

Only point is that best performances should be compared with best performances

 

[ppanther92]

LOL. Compare his results the season before joining UAE and after joining UAE. Natural progression

2018? When he was 19? He won Avenir convincigly. I really don’t think it has much to do with UAE. The team is overall just bad. Millan and Pogacar might be a good match but I also think Pogacar would have made it everywhere (that doesn’t mean he is not doping ofc, just as a disclaimer).

 

[PhiLiz]

Yep. The individual bad days make a GT interesting. I remember the TdF in 1989. Lemond and Fignon with their occasional mini-breakdowns. Even Merckx had them in a smaller and weaker field. Armstrong didn't have them in the TdF, but we all know why.
Congratulations to Gianetti, the dirtiest rider and TD in history. who is still allowed to do his thing in cycling.

I wonder what Pogs competitors think. They must know something is going on.

Actually, Cancer Jesus had one major breakdown in 2000 (lost around 2m to Ullrich), another one in the first long ITT in 2003 and several mini breakdowns in that year on the mountains.

It wasn't enough for him to lose and also doesn't disprove what you were saying because it's still an amazing spell of dominance, but just setting the record straight.

 

[FrontHeadlock]

They don't seem very interested in questioning or trying to catch Pog's doping, so realistically, is he going to just run away with the TdF every year for the next 10+ years? It's not even worth watching at this point, and he's not even in his "prime" years yet. Unless it's a bunch sprint stage or pan flat TTs, Pogacar can win almost every stage he wants to.

As someone who just got into cycling a few years ago after an introduction to the sport by a colleague, one thing I LOVE about GTs is the incredible number of competitions within a competition. So even if Pog is running away with the GC, or wins a bunch of them, there really is a lot to watch.

But man, if he starts taking all these stages it's going to be a pretty boring event. Today was such a sour, anticlimactic finish. Literally ANYBODY else would have been a more interesting winner.

 

[Vonbismarck1]

Why did i immediately google pogacar doping after todays stage and ended up here?

 

[Fergoose]

Why did i immediately google pogacar doping after todays stage and ended up here?

Welcome. I think he was either sandbagging theatrically today or not feeling wonderful in the heat. It's pretty next level of him if he has started sandbagging before he has a race winning time gap - I can't remember anyone having ever done that. If Vingegaard wins the TdF I may look back on today as an almost genuine effort by Pogacar.

 

[TommyNoble]

Poggers is a smart, veteran GT rider. You don’t wanna sell the ranch in the first week, when everyone is still pretty fresh. That last full-developmental-disabilities #nochain windsprint up a 24% gradient only took him into Zone 2, he’s definitely saving matches for week three.

I mean, this is what the new era of clean cycling looks like… right?

I’m definitely looking forward to the dog and pony show in the Pyrenees.

 

[gregrowlerson]

Actually, Cancer Jesus had one major breakdown in 2000 (lost around 2m to Ullrich), another one in the first long ITT in 2003 and several mini breakdowns in that year on the mountains.

It wasn't enough for him to lose and also doesn't disprove what you were saying because it's still an amazing spell of dominance, but just setting the record straight.

I always find it strange that people refer to Lance as having a really bad day in that 2003 ITT. Okay, it certainly wasn't one of his best rides, but I think he still finished second on the stage.

More so was that Ullrich was on fire that day.

 

[PhiLiz]

I always find it strange that people refer to Lance as having a really bad day in that 2003 ITT. Okay, it certainly wasn't one of his best rides, but I think he still finished second on the stage.

More so was that Ullrich was on fire that day.

We're always speaking in relative terms, of course.

The guy finished with "foam" on his mouth, he cracked massively on the later part of the time trial. Compared with his other TT performances, it was a bad day and the fact Ullrich was super doesn't really change that.

 

[TommyNoble]

2018? When he was 19? He won Avenir convincigly. I really don’t think it has much to do with UAE. The team is overall just bad. Millan and Pogacar might be a good match but I also think Pogacar would have made it everywhere (that doesn’t mean he is not doping ofc, just as a disclaimer).

I think you’re being a bit obtuse here. Instead of individually cherry-picking statements and trying to explain them away, look at the bigger picture.

What Pogacar is doing is absolutely unprecedented. His performances, at his age, demonstrate genetics that come around maybe once in 100 years. Those kind of genetics don’t just “wake up” when you hit the protour. He would have been absolutely curb-stomping his competition from juniors on out. But he wasn’t.

Instead, he shows GT potential but is far from riding people off his wheel with ease. And the minute he joins a team/doctor with flagrant doping in their past, he suddenly makes a meteoric leap and can bat around the competition like a tiger playing with a bunch of newborn baby birds.

There are no miracles in this sport. I mean christ at least Froome had some wackadoodle story about Bilharzia. Silly as that was, at least there was some attempt to explain the impossible. Pogchamp apparently has super rad lactate clearance and also… talent?

Feels like a pisstake to me but hey, maybe I’m just jaded.

 

[QueenStagiaire]

So, I‘ve heard he now has a cancer foundation… Will he call it Liveačar?

 

[Ripper]

I think you’re being a bit obtuse here. Instead of individually cherry-picking statements and trying to explain them away, look at the bigger picture.

What Pogacar is doing is absolutely unprecedented. His performances, at his age, demonstrate genetics that come around maybe once in 100 years. Those kind of genetics don’t just “wake up” when you hit the protour. He would have been absolutely curb-stomping his competition from juniors on out. But he wasn’t.

Instead, he shows GT potential but is far from riding people off his wheel with ease. And the minute he joins a team/doctor with flagrant doping in their past, he suddenly makes a meteoric leap and can bat around the competition like a tiger playing with a bunch of newborn baby birds.

There are no miracles in this sport. I mean christ at least Froome had some wackadoodle story about Bilharzia. Silly as that was, at least there was some attempt to explain the impossible. Pogchamp apparently has super rad lactate clearance and also… talent?

Feels like a pisstake to me but hey, maybe I’m just jaded.

I love this stuff from the physiologists. Someone else who had major talent and ridiculous lactate clearance ...Contador! Someone who had crazy talent, amazeballs VO2 and lactate clearance ... Indurain! I mean, we could all go on about this. This is what we see with a combo of talent and a 'just right' program. Gianetti is just soooooooo suspicious to ride for. And Matxin. I mean, these two make Riis look like the crusador for cleanz.

 

[ppanther92]

What Pogacar is doing is absolutely unprecedented. His performances, at his age, demonstrate genetics that come around maybe once in 100 years. Those kind of genetics don’t just “wake up” when you hit the protour. He would have been absolutely curb-stomping his competition from juniors on out. But he wasn’t.

Instead, he shows GT potential but is far from riding people off his wheel with ease. And the minute he joins a team/doctor with flagrant doping in their past, he suddenly makes a meteoric leap and can bat around the competition like a tiger playing with a bunch of newborn baby birds.

No, sorry, I don't agree with the "dodgy team" argument as the main story here. Is UAE dodgy? Yes. Is Pogacar doping? You don't have to convince me on that. I just don't really see the meteoric leap. Go to the road race forum and in his thread. On the first page (after he won Avenir), posters are literally saying "he might be the biggest talent of them all", "future Tour winner", "high hopes", ... I just don't see the purpose in over-mystifying his development and there was never a leap as with Froome (since you take him as example). And again, thats in no way meaning he isn't doping. Also talented athletes can/must dope. I just think the age argument is indeed a good one. Since you are saying he was an elite WT rider 2019, he should have been one 2018 already. But why draw the line here? Why not 2017? 2016? 2015? Its always just one year.

 

[Peyroteo94]

No, sorry, I don't agree with the "dodgy team" argument as the main story here. Is UAE dodgy? Yes. Is Pogacar doping? You don't have to convince me on that. I just don't really see the meteoric leap. Go to the road race forum and in his thread. On the first page (after he won Avenir), posters are literally saying "he might be the biggest talent of them all", "future Tour winner", "high hopes", ... I just don't see the purpose in over-mystifying his development and there was never a leap as with Froome (since you take him as example). And again, thats in no way meaning he isn't doping. Also talented athletes can/must dope. I just think the age argument is indeed a good one. Since you are saying he was an elite WT rider 2019, he should have been one 2018 already. But why draw the line here? Why not 2017? 2016? 2015? Its always just one year.

Great post. Pogi is super talented. The way he won tour de L'Avenir show that. Since his early years, he had a huge engine compared to other riders so don't act like he was a donkey who turn a beautiful horse. Of course, no one would expect him to be this good but c'mon he is not a random guy like Froome.

 

[Mex_17]

Yep. The individual bad days make a GT interesting. I remember the TdF in 1989. Lemond and Fignon with their occasional mini-breakdowns. Even Merckx had them in a smaller and weaker field. Armstrong didn't have them in the TdF, but we all know why.
Congratulations to Gianetti, the dirtiest rider and TD in history. who is still allowed to do his thing in cycling.

I wonder what Pogs competitors think. They must know something is going on.

I wonder the same thing. If you're a GC guy at another team, why would you ever want to enter a race where Pogocar has entered? It seems like a massive waste of time and energy.

If you watch the starting line at the stages in the TdF this year, I've noticed that pretty much no one is talking to Pog anymore. All the other riders are socializing with each other, but the last couple stages, it's looked like everyone is pointedly avoiding talking to Pog.

I also wonder about Bahrain, when they are getting raided before races, but meanwhile they are a terrible team. If I was on the Bahrain team, being raided by police, I'd probably point out to the media that the most obvious doper is the TdF leader.

 

[GuntherL1]

Actually, Cancer Jesus had one major breakdown in 2000 (lost around 2m to Ullrich), another one in the first long ITT in 2003 and several mini breakdowns in that year on the mountains.

It wasn't enough for him to lose and also doesn't disprove what you were saying because it's still an amazing spell of dominance, but just setting the record straight.

You're right about the loss in 2000. Was that on the Joux-Plane?
He finished second in that ITT in 2003. That isn't a breakdown.

 

[Monte Serra]

Could understand Pogačar launching a cancer charity, considering the recent death of his mother in law. But reading what's actually written https://pogacar.org/ , one gets severe Armstrong vibes.

It is difficult to understand imperfection if we don’t understand perfection in the first place and through the lessons learned from studying the perfect metabolism of elite athletes, like Tadej, it is possible to understand imperfections in cellular processes that can lead to multiple diseases, including cancer.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1545705843836043265

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/fmk_RoI/status/1545705843836043265

 

[BR2]

Could understand Pogačar launching a cancer charity, considering the recent death of his mother in law. But reading what's actually written https://pogacar.org/ , one gets severe Armstrong vibes.

It is difficult to understand imperfection if we don’t understand perfection in the first place and through the lessons learned from studying the perfect metabolism of elite athletes, like Tadej, it is possible to understand imperfections in cellular processes that can lead to multiple diseases, including cancer.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1545705843836043265

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/fmk_RoI/status/1545705843836043265

What on earth is that text? It reads a bit like "if everyone had the perfect metabolism of an elite athlete like Tadej, people wouldn't have cancer"...

 

[Rackham]

What on earth is that text? It reads a bit like "if everyone had the perfect metabolism of an elite athlete like Tadej, people wouldn't have cancer"...

"if everyone had the perfect metabolism of an elite athlete like Tadej, people would travel to work faster on a bike than in their cars".

 

[Ripper]

Not sure if it is just the timing of the pics and I was not watching the live feed (so no video yet). But did pog just look like he was not even trying on the final jump to the line? Almost like "hey, I'm here so I might as well get some time"

Anywho, not sure if pog is "playing with their balls" or wanting to pad his lead and might pay for it later. I would suspect more the former, but I guess time will tell.

 

[kingjr]

Not sure if it is just the timing of the pics and I was not watching the live feed (so no video yet). But did pog just look like he was not even trying on the final jump to the line? Almost like "hey, I'm here so I might as well get some time"

Anywho, not sure if pog is "playing with their balls" or wanting to pad his lead and might pay for it later. I would suspect more the former, but I guess time will tell.

I think he's mates with Matthews and perhaps wasn't too eager to pass him.

 

[Ripper]

I think he's mates with Matthews and perhaps wasn't too eager to pass him.

What I am saying is everyone looks like they are pushing hard but pog. Playing with balls it is?

 

[kingjr]

What I am saying is everyone looks like they are pushing hard but pog. Playing with balls it is?

I don't think so.

 

[TommyNoble]

What I am saying is everyone looks like they are pushing hard but pog. Playing with balls it is?

Whether battling against cancer, or the top sprinters in the Tour de France, when you have achieved cellular perfection like Tadej has, it’s all just playing with their balls.

 

[Tim Cahill]

I hate to ascribe nefarious intent to the young man without proof in this instance, especially since he suffered a bereavement, so I think in this particular case he believes himself to be doing good.

I've just read that website however. 11 references to the noble work of Dr. San-Millan, though it seems he has only co-published two short and not particularly cited papers on cancer metabolism and only started looking into it in 2017, it's hardly an academic record worth writing home about.

Some of the claims are also false? See these posters;

Since then, the path to understanding and curing cancer through genetics has been “remarkably unhelpful” according to Watson. The lack of progress through cancer genetics to cure cancer has led to a renewed interest in the Warburg Effect

It sounds a bit pseudosciency in places. This bit about how there has been no progress in using cancer genetics to treat cancer is rubbish. Gene therapy, personalised medicine and bioinformatics etc. are the future of most cancer research/treatments

The Armstrong parallel is completely unfair and I need to preface by saying I assume nothing but the best of intentions from Tadej, but I agree with you on everything else. Two papers, a review and a bad cell line expression paper, from the guy's personal doctor, discussed at length on the front page as the sole evidence for this breakthrough in cancer. And the goal of the foundation is to fund labs that study this. Smells like a cottage industry to me. Would be really bad if any money ends up in that lab, but either way it's a good method to get grant money from other sources into that lab.

I didn't read the review but I skimmed the frontiers paper (I'm a geneticist and I have to preface that I view any frontiers paper with a lot of scrutiny. It's not exactly a publisher viewed in a favourable light). Their controls in that paper are wrong. AFAIK they're just using qPCR to get expression levels of genes of interest in a couple different lactate environments and the control is a glucose environment without lactate. So yeah, if you greatly alter the environment you're going to get increased expression. You have to control for expression of your target genes relative to the change in the background expression levels genome wide. And if they had done that, I'm willing to bet that those would not be significant outliers genome wide. It's essentially like taking two gardens with several crops, fertilizing one and not the other, then taking the strawberries out of both and concluding from the large fertilized strawberries that fertilizer is particularly important for strawberry yield, without mentioning that every crop in the fertilized garden had a bigger yield.

The mentions of cancer genetics basically being a waste of time are also ***. As is the faff about needing to study humans with "perfect mitochondria like Tadej" in order to understand mito in people with diseases. Utter ***. The front page also plagiarizes that frontiers paper saying something about oncometabolism being an emerging field in the last decade, and it's not my field so I can't speak directly, but the paper is very sparse in citations in the paragraph talking up this "renaissance".

I hate to be so critical about what can only be a well intentioned endeavour funded by a very young man with a moving personal motivation, but that website does not inspire confidence. I also find it curious that it's a registered nonprofit based in the United States (I assume because it's being run by his coach who is based in Colorado?)

It would take a brave man to call this sort of thing out publicly like Kimmage did years ago, but it comes across as quite weird/predatorial? I have no expertise in this field so obviously happy to be proven wrong but the tone seems like it's just there to shill whatever snake oil San-Millan is selling.