DirtyWorks said:
Start trawling the body building forums. Buried in among the muscle geeks are endurance dopers. There's quite a few forums and they are busy so it will take time. My problem is I haven't learned their language, so even if I understood the biology, which I don't, it's hard to figure out what they are saying sometimes.
You need an education institution pass so you too can read research and get out ahead of the dopers. It all takes time though...
My basic understanding is the peptide doping is a revolution.
Maybe. But keep in mind a few inconvenient truths:
1) any substance/program designed to increase red blood cell/hemoglobin (either directly, or indirectly, by increasing endogenous EPO), runs afoul of the passport. Yes, the passport can be evaded to some extent, but if we are concerned with what Sky might be doing that other riders/teams aren't doing, that's irrelevant. It's a fairly level playing field. Unless, of course, you think they have protection that others don't.
2) artificial oxygen vectors, which could evade the passport, have been around for a while. If the Sky riders are taking these, it's most likely not because they have access to something other riders don't, but because they have the nerve and the connections to take something relatively untested and dangerous, while the others don't. I can imagine a single rider doing this. I really doubt that an entire team would.
3) As the recent Coggan thread emphasizes (regardless of how you feel about publishing that study on LA), the evidence that training can increase efficiency is controversial. What this means is that for a rider to increase power, at least by very much, he likely has to take in more oxygen. So again, we are back to either known manipulations detectable by the passport, or artificial oxygen vectors.
In another thread there were some references to “lipid power”, i.e., burning more fat rather than glycogen. The idea is that substances that alter metabolism might be performance enhancing. But burning fat is more inefficient, in the sense that it requires more oxygen to produce the same amount of power. So switching metabolism to fats only helps if one isn’t riding at full intensity, where oxygen is not a limiting factor. Under these conditions, one can save glycogen, as Ferrari suggests in a link in that thread, for a critical part of the race where one is on the limit. But there is no free lunch. One is still taking in more oxygen than one would if one were using more glycogen, which means the CV system is working harder. And given that there are not just two speeds in a race--on the limit or far off the limit--but more like a gradation it's not clear that training one's body to utilize a higher fat/carbohydrate ratio (if that is even possible) is really going to help one in any endurance sport. At speeds near the limit, which could occur in parts of the middle of the race, the lower efficiency could work against the rider.
So again, the bottom line is oxygen intake. This is what has to be increased in order to increase power.
4) Of course, what a GT rider really wants to maximize is power to weight, so drugs that can result in weight loss are helpful. But drugs like these don’t do anything that can’t be achieved without drugs. They just accelerate the process. So I doubt that Sky’s success has come just from a better weight loss regime.
For these reasons, I take a skeptical view of the possibility that Sky is on some program unique to them. I wouldn't rule it out, but I would have to see some evidence before I took it very seriously.
OTOH, much of their success may come from the strength of their team. There has been a lot of discussion here about how multiple riders on the team are looking like Contador clones. So at least part of their success might result from practices that are not unique to them, but which are applied more aggressively to the entire team, rather than to a single rider.
I started a thread here about a week ago, which apparently was accidentally deleted by one of the mods, suggesting that if there is a team-wide doping program at Sky, it might be detected by a statistical program looking not at individual riders, but at a whole team. Any individual rider can blood dope to some extent, as long as his parameters fall short of the stringent criteria used in the passport. But if every rider on a team, or even many riders on a team, dope to a degree that comes close to significance, an analysis of the entire team might well push the result over the line.
E.g., if a single rider had blood parameters that deviated with 95-99% probability from his baseline, he would not trigger a red flag. But if multiple riders on a team all deviated from their baselines to this degree, that could be different. The odds of, say, four, five or six riders with parameters like that would be significant at a level that, if found for a single rider, would trigger a sanction. You would have the very unusual situation where you could prove statistically to a high degree of confidence that at least one rider on the team was doping, without being able to identify any single rider on the team with any certainty.
Even to apply this approach, you would have to test everyone on the team at the same time. But if you did indeed find multiple riders who individually were close to the passport limit, this would be very strong evidence for a team-wide doping program. Since no individual rider would trigger a red flag, I don’t see how it would be possible to sanction anyone under these circumstances, but the team should suffer penalties in this case.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram