As Lance Armstrong seems headed for an unprecedented sixth straight victory, seemingly everybody has jumped on the bash-Lance bandwagon, most recently former cyclist Greg LeMond, who renewed charges that Lance is cheating and just won’t own up to it.
Add to that list practically everyone in France (culminating into an attempted breaking and entering of his hotel room, to find incriminating evidence), a former trainer (claimed he used cosmetics to hide needle marks), and many current and former opponents on the Tour de France.
Night and day, this guy is being watched like a hawk. And while I’ve heard some performance-enhancing substances are undetectable, I’ve also got to believe that with so many urine and blood tests waiting for him, someone would find at least a hint that he is currently cheating. And blood doping is, IIRC, fairly easy to detect, or at least to infer.
It was my understanding that some forms of doping are hard to detect with absolute certainty. If you put back someone’s stored blood to give them more hemoglobin to give an advantage what do you use for irrefutable proof? It’s not like testing for a metabolyte that isn’t supposed to be in blood.
The guy’s about to possibly perform an absolutely unprecidented feat so it’s not surprising lots of people want to knock him off the top of the hill. I’m surprised LeMond is pointing the finger because no doubt people did the same to him. When Moser broke Merckx’s hour record people said unfair because he had equipment advantages and more advanced training records. Icons will fall and Eddy Merckx will always be a great cyclist but without a time machine we’ll never know if he, Lemond, Moser, Hinault, Fignon, Indurain, Armstrong, etc. is truly the greatest.
Are you looking for a generic “ways to cheat in cycling” or “how could he possibly conceal methods of cheating”?
But, it’s virtually impossible to detect blood doping (transfusion of blood components) or use of erythropoietin (EPO), a naturally-occurring hormone which stimulates the production of red blood cells in bone marrow. See: http://www.hhp.ufl.edu/keepingfit/ARTICLE/doping&EPO.HTM
For Armstrong to win so decisively, wouldn’t the number of artificially enhanced red blood cells–vis-a-vis the blood counts of the top finishers–itself strongly suggest cheating? I mean, Armstrong is just trashing people in the mountains. To get this advantage, wouldn’t he need much higher levels of red blood cells?
EPO Testing Makes Olympic Debut with IMMULITE Assay
For some banned substances, no approved test is currently available. Such was true for erythropoietin (EPO)—until this year. With the developement and approval of a new test for synthetic EPO using DPC’s IMMULITE® EPO assay, at least this drug is now straightforward to detect. Hopefully, the test has rendered EPO abuse impractical to would-be abusers.
Several years ago, Gareau from Canada demonstrated that the level of
soluble transferrin receptor in serum increased significantly following EPO administration. However, this marker was not, in itself, sufficient to prove EPO abuse by an athlete. A breakthrough in the search for a detection method came in 1999, when an EPO administration trial conducted by the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) and the Australian Sports Drug Testing Laboratory (ASDTL) demonstrated that recom-binant EPO leads to the production of reticulocytes larger and more numerous than those arising from endogenous EPO secretion. Aided by grants from the Australian government and the IOC, the Australians developed a promising blood test.
A concurrent effort by a team of French researchers resulted in a direct test for recombinant EPO in urine.
Let’s say that you did find large quantities of red blood cells in his system, and you even conclude that that’s the reason he’s kicking butt. Can you prove he’s not some sort of genetic freak and produces unnaturally high amounts of red blood cells?
More worrisome is the use of “custom” steroids that nobody’s seen before, so we don’t have a test for it yet.
A friend of mine who is a doctor and I were talking about blood doping a while back. IIRC he said there was a limit on how many red blood cells you could stick back in. If you get too many your blood becomes hard to pump, some sort of clogging in the capillaries takes place, and you start losing oxygen carrying capibilities. You can also stop your heart, something of bummer in race.
Athletes who train hard at high altitude are generally getting pretty close to the upper limit in any case.
Maybe someone will come along who can expand/correct this.
Could it be that Lance is winning for the simple reason that he has a genetic advantage, and he trains harder than anyone else?
In his first book he mentions that at one training center, he posted the highest VO2max reading they had ever recorded. No drug is going to improve this.
The other part of it is that Lance trains like a fiend. Preping for the 2000 tour he rode the mountain assent to Hautacam twice in the same day in snow, sleet and driving rain. :eek: During the off months, Lance rides his bike, Ulrich parties. Is it any wonder that Lance drops him like a bad habit in the mountains?
:dubious:
I was thinking along the lines that he was some kind of genetic freak as well. Freak I mean in the nicest way of course Maybe he’s like Secretariat where they found out his heart was like twice the size of normal horses or something. Could it also be possible that technology is also giving him an advantage? Isn’t he riding some specially designed bike that only he can use and none of his other teammates can?
All riders are limited to bikes that fit UCI guidelines. The rules have changed slightly over the years and technology such as aerodynamicsa has too so modern bikes may give a slight edge compared to what Merckx rode in '69 but no one is at an advantage to other competitors. If any super duper bike gave Armstrong an advantage it would take about five minutes for everyone else to have one.
All bikes are custom fitted so someone else could certainly ride his bike but it may not be optimal for them. Support vehicles often provide replacement bikes after crashes and no one takes the time to make sure everthing is adjusted “just so.”
I thought it was fairly well-accepted common knowledge that he is, in fact, a genetic freak (inthenicestway). There was a dense article on it in the New Yorker, what? Last year? Two years ago? IIRC, the gist of it was that he came to the sport with the lung capacity of several Hoovers, and then developed it from there. That and the training Rick mentions would certainly place him ahead of the pack, so to speak, without cheating.
Of course, most all world-class athletic events are essentially competitions among “genetic freaks” who have optimized their performance through psychological compulsion and dawn-to-dusk workout. Armstrong has an amazing VO2 max, but I’m guessing so do many other Tour de France competitors.
From what I have read, Lance is a genetic freak, among genetic freaks.
Also you can’t ignore the fact that he stared death straight in the eye, spit in it, and came back. This has had two effects. First off it tore his body down to nothing, and he got to rebuild it the way it should be to be a champion bike racer. Lance himself admits in his first book that before cancer, he carried too much upper body strength / weight from his triathlon days to be a TDF winner. That extra weight is now gone. In addition he is not the same guy mentally that he was before cancer. This guy has a dedication that no one else can match.
Just my $.02 but I am sure he is clean.
From a message board, on Indurain. (Damn the metric system):
Some of you may be interested in Miguel Indurains “unusual” physiology.
His resting heart rate is 28bpm. During max effort his heart circulates 50L blood per minute (twice that of a normal male). His VO2 max is one of the highest in the world (94). His lung capacity is 8L per min (a normal males is 3L).
Indurain won the 1992 Tour De France. During the Tour, fellow cyclist Gianni Bugno said of the field: “It’s 180 humans and 1 alien”
But, I’ll try to keep all of this factual. First off, is it possible that Lance is doped? Absolutely. Well, we learned just this summer that one of the world’s foremost time trialist, Welshman David Millar of Cofidis (scheduled to start the Tour right along with Lance) was doped up the ass. The French police began a doping probe sometime last year, caught several of his team mates, and eventually brought it around to Millar, who eventually copped to EPO, catablic steroids, and several other performance enhancing drugs, all without ever facing any type of serious suspicion before about drug use.
There is a fair amount of the cycling community that believes that the entire peletor is heavily doped and UCI/WADA attempts to control this have been virtually entirely ineffective. This is not an entirely unreasonable view. I will come back and post more when I have time from www.velonews.com that details a lot of this.
Maybe this should go into the pit, but in case we’re unclear here, Lance has still not executed any type of solo attack in this tour. Basso has pretty well matched him pedal for pedal so far.
Beyond that, yes, the UCI uses a measure called hematocrit levels to try to decipher the gross effects of doping on your blood. Hematocrit simply measures the percent of your blood that is made up of red blood cells, although this is obstinately a safety check rather than a doping check. There are individuals such as Johnathan Vaughters that naturally have hematocrit levels even higher than what Lance has now. He’s not as super-human as is being suggested here and there is a lot more to winning the tour than VO2 max. Recovery ability, mental strength, team work, pedaling effeciency, and equipment all play a significant role, perhaps even more than just flat out aerobic capabilities. A recent study of elite cyclists by an Italian exercise phisiologist found that VO2 max scores aren’t correlated as strongly with overall performance than once thought.
In short, winning the Tour is a hell of a lot more complex than just one number. Personally, I think he’s probably on stimulants for certain stages. If he is doped (as he likely is, IMHO), Chris Carmichael, the Postal Team’s management, etc.'s sophisticated use of doping may be a large part of his performance.
If you read Lance’s book, it’s obvious he was born with many genetic advantages. He was winning triathalons when he was in his teens against experienced competitiors bfore he decided to focus on biking.
On the other hand, under the totally unsubstantiated rumor category that I feel compelled to share: I live in Austin and I used to date a competitive cyclist who trained with Lance in his younger days. He used to always claim that Lance was using, everyone who rode with him knows it, and that he had seen that stuff in his fridge. He mentioned the substance, but I don’t remember what it was.
Who knows? Even if Lance is using something, it’s probably something known and available to others elite cyclists. If it’s that undetectable, I’d bet other competitors use it as well. And he’s still beating everyone. Whatever it might be, it doesn’t give such an amazing advantage that it can enable other cyclists to overcome Lance’s natural ability and rigorous training.
This is a reasonable arguent; that everyone is using illegal substances to the hardest working and most naturally talented still rise to the top. I’d tend to agree with that, but it is still unfortanate that doping is so wide in the peleton, as it probably is.
First off, it puts into the closet the means used to win. If Lance has a new bike, his comeptitors can see that. If he has a strong team, competitors can see that. If he has a winning tactic, competitors can see that. But dope? It’s like an arms race, and the current stand outs are the ones that get the most resources to dope even further. This enforces current winners unfairly, and most importantly, it jeopordizes the safety of the peleton. What if suddenly there was a test that could detect any synthetic anabolic steroid, but only Lance had the money and resources to find someone to provide him with a masking agent? That would be a huge, and grossly unfair, advantage.
As a collegiate racer, it would really be nice to think that we could advance on work and natural ability alone, and I pray that more advanced anti-doping techniques will be developed to that in the future that will be true.
Maybe he’s like Secretariat where they found out his heart was like twice the size of normal horses or something. Could it also be possible that technology is also giving him an advantage? Isn’t he riding some specially designed bike that only he can use and none of his other teammates can?
His is the record Armstrong is looking to break this year.