nslckevin said:I listened to a really interesting podcast with Michael Hutchinson the other day. It's called "Cycling Time Trial Podcast" and he was a guest.
During the course of the interview he talked about what team GB was doing to prepare for the 2012 Olympic team pursuit. First they assumed that it was take a world record time of 3:50 to win the gold medal. They they back calculated all of the power/speed requirements for EACH PERSON on the team. i.e., the first guy was going to take these pulls at these speeds at these power level's. Same for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th guys. Each person had a different set of requirements to fit and each person was on a similar but different training schedule.
That I think is an example of just how seriously they took winning their home Olympics. Take a ginormous budget, home olympic motivation, quality riders who are freed by their teams to focus on team pursuit and that level of detail and it's not terribly surprising that they won the gold medal is it?
Could they all have been doped to the gills? Who knows. But I hate this culture of assuming that any good performance is practically proof of "obvious doping" without anybody really knowing what is going on behind the scenes (non-doping).
I don't think that we should just assume that everybody is telling the truth about not doping, but that is no better than just assuming that they ARE doping. Both are just lazy thought processes.
Wait, you are offering that as an argument for why they wouldn't dope
It's exactly the opposite. If there is so much pressure to perform that explains why people would dope not why they would go clean.
You are going by the old long discredited approach of - doping is for lazy people.
It's precisely the opposite. All the biggest gym rats who trained the hardest like Armstrong 6 hours on the bike - doped. Because they had the mentality that they will go to -ALL lengths. Tim Montgommery said he didn't care if he died the second he crossed the finish line.
The whole idea that those who boast about how much science they use, wouldn't dope, has been put to bed anyway, by quotes, bennoti often posts them here, of cyclists ans teams from the 90's talking about all these scientific developments that were responsible for their performances. It meant squat.