Tadej Pogacar and Mauro Giannetti

[Gratemans]

The thing is with Hatch etc. they're between a rock and a hard place. Most of them are self employed so why would they start shouting the odds? Plus they do that and they're open to liable stuff.

I've made this point before: journalism now works way different than back in the 90s or 00s. Independent journalism? It's still here, but largely underfunded to the point that there's still independent journalism, but hardly any investigative journalism. And the news outlets certainly don't let their investigative journalists focus on something admittedly unimportant in the grand scheme of things like sports.

And independent journalism is now a small part of the media. Most are nowadays, like MartinGT said, self employed and entirely dependant on the popularity of the sport. Focussing on doping and possibly revealing a big scandal would just mean they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

 

[Divergence]

There's talk about synthetic hemoglobin, gene doping, papers in science of sport/medical journals about the limitations of the bio passport and ex riders stating they are at loss about what is happening. That's not nothing.

That can help explain how they are able to output high average power during the whole race and how they are able to output insane effort at the end of a long hard race, but it can't explain the oxygen consumption needed to do so, Redoute and RAF yesterday were just alien even for a completely fresh athlete.

Sure, there is talk in scientific papers but in the past there was talk about riders using it, people being riders using it, whole teams getting caught and so on... I hope you can see the difference. And, of course, the bio passport is not the best at detecting and catching dopers, but there are still direct blood and urine tests which can detect the presence of banned substances. All of them in combination work much better than whatever they were doing 20 years ago.
On the topic of oxygen consumption: I have read the calculations but it is a bit vague in my opinion. I would like to see more data on the efficiency of top endurance athletes and also the physiological processes are not well investigated.