Froome actually WON!!???? That has to be the comeback of all times!
Now I wish I had followed the Giro more closely.
Not to take away from Froome’s win, but Sky is a dominant team and is super strong in the classics as a result.
I wish the expense of classic teams could be capped to balance out the talent. Classics have almost become dull to me, due to such one team dominance.
Time for the doper to be investigated by the USADA..............They'll find reason to bust him if the Europeans don't........
Oh wait, he's British.......
Sky is the new Big Blue Train. And they have more in common with Pharmstrong's old team than just the indomitability.
If the sport ever actually made a serious effort to eradicate the doping, you'd see massive numbers of riders getting busted because nobody is going to quit so long as they think their competitors might still be getting away with it. It's just like Barry Bonds and the Bash Brothers and the home run derby. It was great for the sport, and it brought MLB back from the disaster of the strike-shortened season. Or at least it was great until they found out it was steroid-fueled. Until somebody makes them, the UCI and the ASO are content to let the sport be unnaturally spectacular.
There's no question that the sport of cycling is a more entertaining spectacle when they're all running on microdoses of EPO, peptides and "the clear," it's just that it's not a fair competition because popular myth notwithstanding, doping DOES NOT level the playing field. Some people are "high responders" and get more benefit from the PEDs, particularly EPO. Ironically, if some of the elements of your physiology (like hematocrit) were mediocre, you were a candidate to be a "high responder," and Pharmstrong was a textbook case.
Pharmstong's natural hematocrit (which goes to VO2max) was 37-38, which is pretty mediocre for a competitive endurance athlete. The thing about Hct is that you can only take EPO enough to raise it to 49.9 or you risk a doping violation. Someone with a natural Hct of 38 can take a lot more EPO before running afoul of the 50 hematocrit rule. So Pharmstrong benefited more from the EPO than someone like Tyler Hamilton, whose natural Hct was 43. Because Hamilton could only dope another 6.? points-worth of Hct.
Pharmstrong's former physician Ed Coyle accidentally leaked that His Lanceness had had a VO2Max test done BC (before cancer) and he scored a 78. Greg Lemond, whose VO2Max was 93 (one of the highest ever recorded to that point) often mocked Pharmstrong over his low score, calling him "Mister 78," because he knew it was impossible for someone with such a low VO2Max to dominate in a Grand Tour. Yet Pharmstrong was indeed dominating.
Another way to tell they're still doped is the outputs from their PowerTaps. Every rider has a torque-meter built into their rear hub (called a PowerTap) that continuously transmits the amount of power that the rider is applying to the rear wheel. The UCI records this information and makes some of it available to the public.
Sports physiologists tested riders in the days before blood vector doping (AKA EPO) and determined that all any human was good for was a max of 6 Watts of sustained output per each kilogram of body weight (6W/k). Now that everybody's on EPO, riders routinely get dropped from the peloton despite their PowerTaps showing they were producing 6.5W/k. They got dropped while producing 8% more power than should be humanly possible. So how much do you reckon the guys in the front were producing? Froome (rhymes with 'zoom') has flirted with 7W/k on a number of occasions, even 7.1W/k.
Pro cyclists always have doped. The earliest I can find of a rider being disqualified for doping was back in the 1860s (which obviously was before the TdF). But for close to a century, the doping didn't really make the rider faster or more powerful, they just made it easier for him to endure the pain of the exertion.
At first it was just cocaine and chloroform. Then they tried strychnine (yes, rat poison) which taken in small doses causes the muscles to respond to ever weaker electrical signals. So you can keep turning over the pedals after you've bonked.
Then came amphetamines, which was what killed Tom Simpson on Mt Ventoux in 1967 (ironically, the year after the UCI first began testing for drugs). The amphetamines did exactly what they were meant to, prevent him from hearing his body trying to tell him it was overtaxed. But he didn't let up until his heart exploded.
Next was steroids, usually testosterone, which they only took in small doses to aid in recovery, not in big enough doses to cause "body-builder" muscles. Because rider weight is too much at a premium. Pharmstrong's dope doctor, Michele Ferrari, always preached that it was better to lose weight than to gain power.
But none of those made a rider any faster, able to climb l'Alpe d'Huez in 38 minutes. They just slowed the rate of decay as the race wore on.
Nobody (who's telling) knows exactly when but EPO probably arrived at the TdF in 1987 or 88. By 1991 it took control of the sport and remains so. Miguel Indurain probably was the first All EPO, All The Time TdF champ (GC, 1991-1995).
In 1997, Marco Pantani climbed l'Alpe d'Huez in 37:35, a number that rings with cycling tifosi like 714 does with baseball fans. No one knows his Hct number on that day but around that time he had a number of non-race related medical tests due to bicycle crashes and automobile accidents, and his Hct almost without exception was well in excess of 50. In one case it was more than 60. But there was no direct test for EPO then and you could thwart the 50 Hct rule if you were warned the doping men were coming by taking an IV of a liter of normal saline.
No one from the era before EPO ever climbed l'Alpe in less than 42 minutes.
Greg Lemond was the last TdF champion about whom there are zero credible accusations of doping, and his best time on l'Alpe was 42:23. Ironically, that came in 1991. He had won the 1990 Tour but only managed 7th the following year, 13 minutes off the pace. Because EPO had arrived.
In 1986, you could win the TdF with 6W/k. Now all 6W/k gets you is the Lanterne Rouge.