- Sep 29, 2012
- 12,197
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Wallace and Gromit said:
You are someone who is not sure (convinced) whether he is doping or not.
I am sure (convinced) he is doping.
Your post here implies that when someone talks Wiggins up, you think positively of the article. ie the opposite of what I think.
So we have someone who thinks Wiggins is doping, disliking soft journalists kiddy gloving a rider.
And someone who thinks a rider might be doping, looks like it, but isn't sure, loving the glowing articles written about that cyclist.
One of us being consistent. The other doesn't care if cyclists dope. The only difference is that: I care that they dope. I don't want them to dope. I want it stopped.
Perpetuating the lie that is Wiggins' transformation - as this article hints at but then justifies or explains away with some focus BS and what not, is perpetuating the same mythology that surrounded Lance Armstrong. It's a sick, sick joke.
Dear Wiggo said:
I tend not to read the "puff-pieces". I hate that sort of stuff, even if it's written about one of my favourite riders. It's pretty obvious around two or three sentences in what type of article is being penned, and I only bother with ones that look like they're going to be objective.
I like well-reasoned, well-argued articles, of either hue. Thus I tend to favour those based round numerical analysis. I don't necessarily dislike an article if I disagree with its conclusions. It may surprise you that I actually really enjoy reading your contributions here, even if I think your analysis is sometimes a tad biased.
- Feb 20, 2013
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leon7766 said:
I'm "British", I dont like him, I didnt like Benny Hill either but lots of non Brits do like Benny Hill, so are very capable of recognising "British" humour. It's not as if he's Sartre!
Wiggins just aint funny and if you think it's "funny" to mouth off the way he does - then that lies with you.
Personally i couldnt care less what he does off the bike, just dont do it on my TV.
But on the bike, well frankly I'm embarassed. It just isnt true. and like so many who were deluded by wonderboy, the same thing is happening again.
And, to say it's the "British Way"... well, no, in addition to that being such a cringeworthy thing to say, it's been done before. Everything they do has been done before, by a whole rake of teams who achieved actual "Marginal" gains. Only 1 team I can think of has shown similar meteoric improvements - USPS.
of course all of this is just my opinion... I KNOW nothing for sure...
thehog said:
Really? Does this include those who abuse their wife, are unfaithful or who abandon their children? You must observe a strange moral code if so!
If you could take your head out of the sand for a minute, you'd realise that I was highlighting that even his wife thinks Wiggo's behaviour as a cyclist is tw*t-like, which is hardly a ringing defence of Wiggo's behaviour. (It would be unintentional as well, as I don't defend anyone's behaviour, except that of my rather exuberant children!)
- Feb 10, 2010
- 10,645
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thehog said:
I just watched the Kimmage trailer. Super-Brad never delivered the right kind of righteous indignation when doping accusations appeared in 2012.
Hopefully Super-Chris is getting some acting lessons to properly deliver the "You are not worth the chair your are sitting in..." He's going to need it.
It's difficult to cover the lies. There are so many ways to screw it up, like blowing your denial screed.
And yes, the fallback position is always "with us or against us." Hog, why are you such a hater? What year is this again??? 2009?
- Jul 16, 2011
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martinvickers
BANNED
- Oct 15, 2012
- 4,903
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armchairclimber said:It's going to be a funny summer in the clinic. I like a bit of apoplectic rage.
It's all part of the Carnivale. If you don't want to see the two headed snakes and the bearded lady, you don't come in...
martinvickers
BANNED
- Oct 15, 2012
- 4,903
- 0
- 0
Benotti69 said:
Well, pay the girl your Quarter and step in the tent and see - no freebies at this circus.
- Jul 16, 2011
- 3,251
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- 15,680
- Jul 16, 2011
- 3,251
- 812
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Benotti69 said:
You are so right. It needs a GPS app on an Android Phone. Brilliant. Thanks Benny.
- Jun 14, 2010
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Benotti69 said:
No, your reading it wrong. It's one of those don McLean American pie metaphor ones
eg the joker=bob Dylan.
Satan= Mick jagger
2 headed snake = Wiggins and froome obviously. Snake because they have venom(well some do) = poison=...
it works on another level in that ricco was the cobra - 1 type of snake, but sky are more complete. Theres not just the venom of the cobra but the intimidation of a boa constructor, and the ability to change positions over time also possessed by the chameleon snake.
Bearded lady- at first evryone thinks it's cound. But why bearded? beards symbolize intelligence. that rules out mc. And lady doesnt neccesarily mean female. Could be any of the qualities women are associated with. Traditionally ladies played the behind the scenes roles in a household. Making everything while the men do manual labour.
bearded lady is a compound of kerrison - intelligent (alleged) and leinders - the lady - the one who prepares everything.
Carnivale is the tour which has been referred to as such many a time, and come in= switch on tv.
Personally I will come in, to the carnivale. Not because I'm into watching crazy stuff like that. I'll come in to watch how everyone else in the room tries to convince themselves that they are seeing something else.
- Aug 12, 2009
- 3,639
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The Hitch said:
So a hydra then. Cut off the head, another two replace it. Only way to kill it is by fire. Sounds promising.
Beards per se are a norm for many people the past 50 years. They've got something to hide. Now whether this means Froome bats for the other team in terms of doping or sexuality, well that is anyone's guess. He is rather chummy with Porte now isn't he?
People create the narrative THEY WANT TO HEAR. Few see everything for what it mostly is. Pro cycling has a narrative. A story to tell. A story they want the masses to believe. Most of the riders and teams are on board with that. It's how the game works. Despite what some of the guys who troll here would have us believe, the second reasoning and questioning are dropped, one opens themselves to be used and misled. Where is the accountability as a benchmark for proof of being legit? It's simply not here in cycling. So the narrative sold by the UCI, teams, riders and race organisers must be questioned. They require the public to be aware of only so much in order to make money. Proof? Look at LA last year. Wiggins and Sky thought it wise to trumpet the cause as a model to mirror. They did so because they know the public believe them to a degree simply because they say it. For those folk questioning is not part of their brain activity. They are fed a lie, they buy it.
Take for example a guy who got rosted a few pages back by you and others. Got very upset in a PM with me. Said that he knew riders on Sky. That our words hurt them. Blatant and utter lies on the riders behalf. They care about public perception in as much as it is painting them as heroes. The beacons of clean cycling. They forget that image has a shelf life if you are doping. Armstrong is a key case. You're disposable, you go and the system carries on and someone else takes the torch. This person also said 'legal action' had been discussed. Was quite funny. Never gonna happen. Why? Same reason LA said he'd sue non stop. Anytime an opening occurred where scrutiny would occur beyond the pathetic levels the UCI adheres to, the tough talk is nothing more than veiled threats. If scrutiny occurred in detail, they'd have something to lose. Everything goes in circles. There is nothing new under the sun. It's all about recognising the patterns and discerning what that pattern marks something as.
With Sky. That pattern is dirty and rotten to the core. Also exceedingly hostile and volatile about it in a socially linked digital age. They're behind the times. You simply do not respond to that talk. Their PR manager is useless. Couldn't train a monkey to play with poo.
- Aug 13, 2010
- 3,317
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One thing I have learnt from the clinic is that an outburst like Hoggys can mean only one thing. Doping... most likely roid rage.Wallace and Gromit said:
The Hitch said:
Let's get back on topic guys and discuss Brad 'I don't like talking about doping because its negative but I used to think talking about doping was positive' Wiggins.
*Casts out bait*
In six days, Bradley Wiggins begins a challenge that could turn out to be even greater than that of last year, when the "Kid from Kilburn" won the Tour de France and added Olympic gold 10 days later. The Giro d'Italia, which starts on Saturday in Naples, is cycling's biggest stage race after the Tour; Wiggins is making his first attempt at winning it, and – depending on the form of Sky's designated Tour leader Chris Froome – he may then go on to attempt the legendary "double" of Giro followed by Tour de France.
The turnaround in Wiggins' fortunes since 2010, when he joined Team Sky and had a disappointing year – albeit one in which he won the prologue time trial of the Giro and wore the legendary maglia rosa – has been masterminded by Tim Kerrison. The former rowing coach and sport scientist with the Australian and British swimming teams was brought to Sky from British Swimming when the team was formed. In 2010, recalled Wiggins, "Tim started asking all kinds of questions ... stuff an outsider to cycling might ask. He wrote down all the demands of the Tour and we went from there."
In characteristic style, Kerrison breaks down the big challenge into two parts. "We aren't looking much past the Giro at the moment. The biggest challenge with the Giro is that we know what it took to get it right for the Tour – we had six or seven months from November but you have to do it in two months less for the Giro. I feel we've ticked all the boxes. The difference this year is that Brad is trying to focus on skills he needed to develop for the Giro – limiting his time loss on climbs, being responsive to the punchier climbers on climbs, being in contention without a long flat time trial." That change of focus explains why Wiggins will go into the Giro without a solo win, whereas he hit the Tour last year with three major stage race titles under his belt.
As for Wiggins riding the Giro and Tour with his eyes on high overall placings in both events, Kerrison says he is "not interested in anyone saying something can't be done. There are a lot of myths and assumptions. A Grand Tour is very demanding but a month is a long time to recover. The transition from Giro to Tour is very achievable. [Brad] can recon the stages, recover, and focus on doing his job in the Tour, whatever it is."
If Dave Brailsford is the high-profile front of Team Sky, Kerrison is the quiet man in the background, the one who tends not to get noticed although Wiggins has referred to him as "the guru". He started out competing as a rower in the late 1980s – "not a particularly good one" – then moved into coaching, "because I realised I didn't have the talent to be the best as an athlete," working at the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS). His biggest success story as a rowing coach was Marguerite Houston, who won a world title in record time at lightweight women's quad scull in 2002.
Initially, Kerrison was holding down full-time jobs coaching, rowing and swimming, but in the run-up to the Athens Olympics he moved to swimming, still with the Queensland Academy of Sport. There is a misconception, he says, that he worked with Ian Thorpe, but that is not the case. At the QAS, he and a fellow coach, Shannon Rollason, decided to work on the women's sprint, a weak area for the squad, which had a strong record in distance swimming.
"We began a little project changing the way the women's freestyle sprinters trained, stripping it back to first principles, and came up with the concept of reverse periodisation." This inverts the traditional precept that intense work is brought into training on top of an endurance base; instead, intensity is included from the start and is seen as part of the foundation. Their two-year project culminated at the Athens Olympics in 2004, where Jodie Henry won three gold medals in three world record times, in the 100m freestyle, the 4x100m freestyle relay, and the medley relay, becoming Australian Swimmer of the Year.
His core principle, across all three sports, is that of tabula rasa – you move away from the past and begin again from new. "I've always resisted looking at how people have done things in the past. I prefer going in and looking at a sport, the demands of the event, the competition, the psychology, the physiology, biomechanics, and then what is the best way to develop a human being to achieve that. When you look at the past, it biases things going forward. Over time you pick up snippets from the past, but I've never liked looking back. That's why some of the things I've come up with are so fundamentally different."
Kerrison believes that swimming coaches are obliged to think outside the box. "They are by far the most creative of all coaches, because it is a pretty boring sport. In swimming you can die of boredom; in cycling the terrain creates variety and there is a social element as you ride. In swimming you are stimulated by variety within the coaching." He came to cycling knowing nothing about the sport, but says: "That naivety was a strength. I could ask a lot of stupid questions; luckily people were patient and generous."
The lack of structure in professional cycling coaching meant that, when properly coached, Sky's riders had a considerable margin for improvement. "It was quite amazing how much scope there was to work with these guys. The British and Australian guys were much more coachable because they'd come through a system, but it can take a long time for someone who has never been coached, who isn't used to structured training efforts, to work with a coach, to get their heads round the level of prescription they are given." If Wiggins has responded best of all, that's not surprising: "He's so coachable, because he's already been coached all through his life; other guys are learning to be coached for the first time."
Kerrison believes professional cycling teams have had a tendency to spend their money on buying riders rather than on getting the best out of them, and again that has created a gap for Sky to exploit as they have developed a coaching network that has expanded from one coach in year one, to four this season. "Other teams have spent on recruiting riders but it doesn't make sense buying in the best then hoping. You can see from this team how much you can get by investing relatively small amounts in coaching. The gains are disproportionate. It's so obvious that it's a shock other teams aren't doing it."
The bare bones of Kerrison's approach is that he has looked at every area of the Giro, broken it down, and then created graphs in which one line shows the riders' performance in a given area, another the required performance. Training is tailored to make the lines converge. Wiggins credits Kerrison, variously, with getting him to him race less, making him use races as practice for leading the Tour de France, working on his core strength – an area he had ignored – working on his fitness for climbing steep hills and making him time trial at lower pedal revs and larger gears.
Kerrison, however, is keen to refute the notion that Sky are "all about numbers". Critics have said the team simply ride to the power outputs on the computers on their handlebars in a rather soulless way, but he says: "We use numbers for training but race on feel. We use the numbers for feedback, but if you are over-reliant on it you would be lost when the numbers aren't there. All this about us racing to numbers isn't what happens. We train the guys to race without SRMs [the computers that cyclists use to measure power] – sometimes they cover them up because it's important that they can ride on feel."
As well as the accusation of robotic training and racing, Sky have been hit by the fact that in the post-Lance Armstrong era, success for riders and coaches comes at a price: suspicion that it is being achieved through illicit means. "People will question me," Kerrison acknowledges. "The better the job you do, the more people question it. If it's done fairly, they have the right to have suspicions because there have been plenty of riders and teams who have insisted they were clean and have turned out to be far from the case. Initially, for anyone faced with that, the reaction is very similar – it's anger, you don't know how to respond to it. I went through that adjustment last year, Brad's been through it, Froomie has and Richie Porte [Sky's Australian rider who this year won the Paris-Nice race] will go through it. Last year with everything we learned about the US Anti-Doping Agency, Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong, that helped us understand that the public are at a point where they don't know who they can trust. We have to earn everyone's trust again."
*waits for for the piranhas*
In six days, Bradley Wiggins begins a challenge that could turn out to be even greater than that of last year, when the "Kid from Kilburn" won the Tour de France and added Olympic gold 10 days later. The Giro d'Italia, which starts on Saturday in Naples, is cycling's biggest stage race after the Tour; Wiggins is making his first attempt at winning it, and – depending on the form of Sky's designated Tour leader Chris Froome – he may then go on to attempt the legendary "double" of Giro followed by Tour de France.
The turnaround in Wiggins' fortunes since 2010, when he joined Team Sky and had a disappointing year – albeit one in which he won the prologue time trial of the Giro and wore the legendary maglia rosa – has been masterminded by Tim Kerrison. The former rowing coach and sport scientist with the Australian and British swimming teams was brought to Sky from British Swimming when the team was formed. In 2010, recalled Wiggins, "Tim started asking all kinds of questions ... stuff an outsider to cycling might ask. He wrote down all the demands of the Tour and we went from there."
In characteristic style, Kerrison breaks down the big challenge into two parts. "We aren't looking much past the Giro at the moment. The biggest challenge with the Giro is that we know what it took to get it right for the Tour – we had six or seven months from November but you have to do it in two months less for the Giro. I feel we've ticked all the boxes. The difference this year is that Brad is trying to focus on skills he needed to develop for the Giro – limiting his time loss on climbs, being responsive to the punchier climbers on climbs, being in contention without a long flat time trial." That change of focus explains why Wiggins will go into the Giro without a solo win, whereas he hit the Tour last year with three major stage race titles under his belt.
As for Wiggins riding the Giro and Tour with his eyes on high overall placings in both events, Kerrison says he is "not interested in anyone saying something can't be done. There are a lot of myths and assumptions. A Grand Tour is very demanding but a month is a long time to recover. The transition from Giro to Tour is very achievable. [Brad] can recon the stages, recover, and focus on doing his job in the Tour, whatever it is."
If Dave Brailsford is the high-profile front of Team Sky, Kerrison is the quiet man in the background, the one who tends not to get noticed although Wiggins has referred to him as "the guru". He started out competing as a rower in the late 1980s – "not a particularly good one" – then moved into coaching, "because I realised I didn't have the talent to be the best as an athlete," working at the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS). His biggest success story as a rowing coach was Marguerite Houston, who won a world title in record time at lightweight women's quad scull in 2002.
Initially, Kerrison was holding down full-time jobs coaching, rowing and swimming, but in the run-up to the Athens Olympics he moved to swimming, still with the Queensland Academy of Sport. There is a misconception, he says, that he worked with Ian Thorpe, but that is not the case. At the QAS, he and a fellow coach, Shannon Rollason, decided to work on the women's sprint, a weak area for the squad, which had a strong record in distance swimming.
"We began a little project changing the way the women's freestyle sprinters trained, stripping it back to first principles, and came up with the concept of reverse periodisation." This inverts the traditional precept that intense work is brought into training on top of an endurance base; instead, intensity is included from the start and is seen as part of the foundation. Their two-year project culminated at the Athens Olympics in 2004, where Jodie Henry won three gold medals in three world record times, in the 100m freestyle, the 4x100m freestyle relay, and the medley relay, becoming Australian Swimmer of the Year.
His core principle, across all three sports, is that of tabula rasa – you move away from the past and begin again from new. "I've always resisted looking at how people have done things in the past. I prefer going in and looking at a sport, the demands of the event, the competition, the psychology, the physiology, biomechanics, and then what is the best way to develop a human being to achieve that. When you look at the past, it biases things going forward. Over time you pick up snippets from the past, but I've never liked looking back. That's why some of the things I've come up with are so fundamentally different."
Kerrison believes that swimming coaches are obliged to think outside the box. "They are by far the most creative of all coaches, because it is a pretty boring sport. In swimming you can die of boredom; in cycling the terrain creates variety and there is a social element as you ride. In swimming you are stimulated by variety within the coaching." He came to cycling knowing nothing about the sport, but says: "That naivety was a strength. I could ask a lot of stupid questions; luckily people were patient and generous."
The lack of structure in professional cycling coaching meant that, when properly coached, Sky's riders had a considerable margin for improvement. "It was quite amazing how much scope there was to work with these guys. The British and Australian guys were much more coachable because they'd come through a system, but it can take a long time for someone who has never been coached, who isn't used to structured training efforts, to work with a coach, to get their heads round the level of prescription they are given." If Wiggins has responded best of all, that's not surprising: "He's so coachable, because he's already been coached all through his life; other guys are learning to be coached for the first time."
Kerrison believes professional cycling teams have had a tendency to spend their money on buying riders rather than on getting the best out of them, and again that has created a gap for Sky to exploit as they have developed a coaching network that has expanded from one coach in year one, to four this season. "Other teams have spent on recruiting riders but it doesn't make sense buying in the best then hoping. You can see from this team how much you can get by investing relatively small amounts in coaching. The gains are disproportionate. It's so obvious that it's a shock other teams aren't doing it."
The bare bones of Kerrison's approach is that he has looked at every area of the Giro, broken it down, and then created graphs in which one line shows the riders' performance in a given area, another the required performance. Training is tailored to make the lines converge. Wiggins credits Kerrison, variously, with getting him to him race less, making him use races as practice for leading the Tour de France, working on his core strength – an area he had ignored – working on his fitness for climbing steep hills and making him time trial at lower pedal revs and larger gears.
Kerrison, however, is keen to refute the notion that Sky are "all about numbers". Critics have said the team simply ride to the power outputs on the computers on their handlebars in a rather soulless way, but he says: "We use numbers for training but race on feel. We use the numbers for feedback, but if you are over-reliant on it you would be lost when the numbers aren't there. All this about us racing to numbers isn't what happens. We train the guys to race without SRMs [the computers that cyclists use to measure power] – sometimes they cover them up because it's important that they can ride on feel."
As well as the accusation of robotic training and racing, Sky have been hit by the fact that in the post-Lance Armstrong era, success for riders and coaches comes at a price: suspicion that it is being achieved through illicit means. "People will question me," Kerrison acknowledges. "The better the job you do, the more people question it. If it's done fairly, they have the right to have suspicions because there have been plenty of riders and teams who have insisted they were clean and have turned out to be far from the case. Initially, for anyone faced with that, the reaction is very similar – it's anger, you don't know how to respond to it. I went through that adjustment last year, Brad's been through it, Froomie has and Richie Porte [Sky's Australian rider who this year won the Paris-Nice race] will go through it. Last year with everything we learned about the US Anti-Doping Agency, Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong, that helped us understand that the public are at a point where they don't know who they can trust. We have to earn everyone's trust again."
*waits for for the piranhas*
Tim Kerrison, the Australian coach behind Bradley Wiggins's Tour de France and Olympic triumphs of 2012, has speculated that one reason for Team Sky's success may be that they have been able to jump into a "knowledge gap" that has been left in cycling as teams focused on the expertise and logistics of doping at the expense of coaching and rider development.
"I believe that we know a lot more than we did even 12 months ago," Kerrison said, referring to the revelations about Lance Armstrong and US Postal Service in the USADA report of last October. "In the previous era of cycling, I guess the teams did a cost-benefit analysis and the best way to invest their limited amount of resource for some teams was to invest in doctors and doping programmes, and coaching suffered. That's left a window of opportunity for us. Quite uniquely, in this sport the development of coaching systems has been *** by the effects of the last decade."
In his three years in cycling, Kerrison, a former swimming coach at the Queensland Academy of Sport, said he has been "massively" surprised by what he has found in terms of coaching, or the lack of it.
"It's still a shock how unstructured a lot of other riders and teams are. Swimmers very rarely do anything without a coach, rowing a bit more, but in cycling a huge amount of training is done without a coach. The concept of coaching seems to be hit and miss: some teams have a coach; some teams leave their riders to their own devices; in some the directeurs sportifs oversee what they do between races but we know it's hard for them."
Kerrison says he believes Sky are the only professional team that offers dedicated one-to-one coaching to all its riders – they have four full-time coaches at present – and notes that other teams are looking to the British squad, whether it be warming down after stages, or sending whole detachments to train at altitude in Tenerife. "Everyone is now following our lead in things like warm-downs; more and more teams have coaching staff. I genuinely hope it's the start of a new era in cycling."
"I believe that we know a lot more than we did even 12 months ago," Kerrison said, referring to the revelations about Lance Armstrong and US Postal Service in the USADA report of last October. "In the previous era of cycling, I guess the teams did a cost-benefit analysis and the best way to invest their limited amount of resource for some teams was to invest in doctors and doping programmes, and coaching suffered. That's left a window of opportunity for us. Quite uniquely, in this sport the development of coaching systems has been *** by the effects of the last decade."
In his three years in cycling, Kerrison, a former swimming coach at the Queensland Academy of Sport, said he has been "massively" surprised by what he has found in terms of coaching, or the lack of it.
"It's still a shock how unstructured a lot of other riders and teams are. Swimmers very rarely do anything without a coach, rowing a bit more, but in cycling a huge amount of training is done without a coach. The concept of coaching seems to be hit and miss: some teams have a coach; some teams leave their riders to their own devices; in some the directeurs sportifs oversee what they do between races but we know it's hard for them."
Kerrison says he believes Sky are the only professional team that offers dedicated one-to-one coaching to all its riders – they have four full-time coaches at present – and notes that other teams are looking to the British squad, whether it be warming down after stages, or sending whole detachments to train at altitude in Tenerife. "Everyone is now following our lead in things like warm-downs; more and more teams have coaching staff. I genuinely hope it's the start of a new era in cycling."
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