Watched Pantani: Accidental Death of a Cyclist last night, a couple questions

rekrunner wrote:

Aragon -- good posts.

Aragon wrote:

Thanks... Your contributions have also always been interesting to read.

Both of you are totally full of it.

I meant "Il Pirata" in Italian. Blasted spell checker!

Somehow it is lost on the American Lemond that his 1989 TT at the END of the Tour is still the fastest 20k+ TT in the history of the Tour. Yet, he maintains un-doped riders get weaker as the Tour progresses. Doesn't pass the smell test.

This has been explained over and over. You obviously aren't much of a former cyclismo if you don't realise that it was only a 24km time trial, slightly downhill with a following wind on which hung the result of the entire race.

You are not a very smart individual.

rekrunner wrote:

#2 If it's a hill, Pantani would not be anywhere near today's best -- he'd be way in front. Pantani was way more talented than Lance. I wouldn't be surprised if Lance was involved in framing Pantani.

Yes, Pantani with a hematocrit of 40 would still outclimbing everyone if he was racing today.

But no, he was not more talented than Lance. Nobody was or is.

here we go again wrote:

This has been explained over and over. You obviously aren't much of a former cyclismo if you don't realise that it was only a 24km time trial, slightly downhill with a following wind on which hung the result of the entire race.

You are not a very smart individual.

Of course, Americans are going to defend LeMond to the grave. It's all they have left after the other Americans have been disgraced.

former cyclisimo wrote:

Somehow it is lost on the American Lemond that his 1989 TT at the END of the Tour is still the fastest 20k+ TT in the history of the Tour. Yet, he maintains un-doped riders get weaker as the Tour progresses. Doesn't pass the smell test.

Right, but cyclists still believe in the drugs, because "everyone" is taking them.

rekrunner wrote:

And yet your evidence is a list of top-10 cyclists rather than runners.

The question is not about morality, or the prevalence of doping in runners, but about how EPO helps cyclists in the grand tours, and if these mechanisms helps runners in the same way.

This is a difficult question to answer because the drug testing in Africa (where your top 10 distance runners have come from) would have been basically non existent in the 1990s when compared to what was going on Europe in cycling in the late 1990s and early 2000s with police raiding riders' homes and carrying out interrogations. So of course you are not going to have picked up as many confirmed cases of EPO use compared with cycling (even if it was just as prevalent).

As a start you could look at confirmed cases of EPO doping in distance running and seeing how these compare, performance wise, to the era when EPO was not in use (say before 1990). This is not perfect because there are race conditions and densitity of competition which have changed as well as the use of blood doping which goes back to the 1960s/70s. You could look at guys like Boulami or Mourhit to get an idea.

As for the mecanisms of the usefulness of EPO in cycling over a 3-week tour, you would think that training intensely running 100 mile plus weeks with a lot of quality would take its toll on red cell counts. Use of EPO would help to combat this and reduce recovery time between intense work bouts. Over time overall fatigue would be reduced and the amount of quality training you could do would be increased.

edward teach wrote:

1. Does epo really kill cheating athletes if they don't get up in the middle of the night and raise their heart rates? Was it only because of the amount of epo Pantani and others were taking?

2. Why is a cheater like Pantani memorialized in Italy? Do people think he'd have been anywhere near today's best without the drugs?

Until the late 90's there was basically no testing for EPO, so they'd go really high with their dosage. Then the blood could get so thick that a drop in HR (over night) could be fatal. Then they introduced the 50% rule so cyclists would only dope to 49% which is more or less safe. This rule meant that athletes with naturally lower Hct like Armstrong could dope a lot more than naturally more talented athletes (like Ulrich).

How successful would Pantani've been if nobody had doped?Pantani-biographer Matt Rendell tells that we can not know for sure how well he would've performed in relative to other in absense of the doping culture in Peloton. One could look at performances of people with similar PED programs and think that they have a event playing field, but because people respond for genetical reasons differently to products such as HGH and steroids, it is impossible to know for sure.Similarly it is impossible to know who had more natural talent, Lance or Ullrich. Lance is of particularly great interest. While many people (Greg LeMond in particular) have been very willing to to downplay Lance's natural talent, three things should still be kept in mind when discussing him:1) Lance has had a very high absolute Vo2MAX since his teen years (~6 l/min). Many people such as blood doping specialist Michael Ashenden and Greg LeMond have pointed to the fact that his relative Vo2MAX was strikingly low (81.2 ml/kg/min), a phenomenom that can be explained by the fact that he was quite heavy for a cyclist. But on many circumstances, body weight as an independent factor has very little to do with cycling performance, the more important factor being body frontal area. And Lance could've had a very good edge in this regard. For instance, it has alwast struck me as odd that while Lance was noticeable heavier (75-77 kg vs. 68 kg) than Floyd Landis (similar height), he looks slightly smaller:http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1270881!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/lanceweb23s-3-web.jpg2) 21-year old Lance won the 1993 Road World Championship beating rivals such as Indurain with only "low-octane" doping products. He also won a flat stage in the same year Tour, when - according to LeMond - most of his opponents were already taking EPO.3) Doping program of US Postal/Discovery team was very conservative. As far as I know, nobody has ever proved that the team had access to any methods that werent' available to other teams, on the contrary, many other teams were using methods that weren't used by Lance. Even CIRC 2015- report states the following:

Dr Michele Ferrari was reported to be conservative in terms of how he recommended and administered doping programmes. In comparison, a number of riders characterised Dr Eufemiano Fuentes as the “go-to” doctor if you wanted to try new, sometimes “experimental”, ideas in doping.

Aragon wrote:

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1270881

!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/lanceweb23s-3-web.jpg

That photo apparently doesn't want to work, as the auto-linking feature f***s it up every time. Take a look instead to this photo:

Aragon wrote:

3) Doping program of US Postal/Discovery team was very conservative. As far as I know, nobody has ever proved that the team had access to any methods that werent' available to other teams, on the contrary, many other teams were using methods that weren't used by Lance. Even CIRC 2015- report states the following:

Don't forget that (according to USADA) Saugy gave Armstrong "the keys to beating EPO tests", but not to Armstrong's competitors. In addition, Armstrong was caught four times in 1999 alone with corticosteroid, but let off the hook. And he is the only one known to have bribed UCI.

Also, it is far from the truth that all TdF guys used EPO. Remember that from the 90ish 1999 samples, "only" 13 were positive, with 6 of them from Armstrong.

As for Ullrich. He spent the 80s in a certain elite sport school in East Berlin (because he was talented) and may thus be viewed as a successful pharma experiment. In conclusion, neither of the two deserves to be viewed as an all-time great.

EPO and other banned substances CAN kill but if taken under medical supervision they don't! Of course, someone going online, buying EPO, HGH, steroids whatever and swallowing/injecting the stuff with no real knowledge of what they re doing is taking a very big risk but the elites in any sport don't do that. They are on carefully managed programmes designed to improve performance, avoid detection and at no risk to long term health.

In the 1970s when steroid use first became a known problem in athletics there were all sorts of scare stories put around by the governing bodies in an attempt to stop usage of the drugs; these stories had absolutely zero impact because everyone knew athletes who were using the stuff with absolutely no harmful effects at all.

Is there anyone who thinks Greg Lemond didn't take PEDs?

There's a lot of revisionist history surrounding these supposed EPO deaths. It's certainly true that the claims are mostly speculative, but the idea that EPO wasn't used or known at the time, or that it couldn't have been connected to some or even most of the deaths, simply isn't true.

Here's a contemporary article, from the New York Times in 1991:

Here's a passage from the 1991 NYT article:

"In the United States, Amgen limits distribution of the drug to kidney dialysis treatment centers. Sports physicians say the drug is not readily obtainable here but add that it not hard to get in Mexico or Europe.

Physicians say they believe athletes began using the drug almost with the beginning of clinical trials in 1986. Then the deaths began. In 1987 five Dutch racers died suddenly. In 1988 a Belgian and two more Dutch riders died. In 1989 five more Dutch riders died, and last year three Belgians and two Dutch riders died.

One of them was Johannes Draaijer, a 27-year-old racer from the Netherlands who finished 20th in the 1989 Tour de France. In February 1990 he died in his sleep of a heart blockage a few days after completing a race in Italy. A doctor had pronounced him fit to ride in that race, and an autopsy did not specify the cause of death. But in a television interview afterward, his widow said she hoped the death would serve as a warning to other athletes who take the drug.

Because several companies were simultaneously pursuing approval of EPO in Europe, "the drug was available for clinical trials in large quantities," said Dr. John Adamson, president of the New York Blood Center who is leading the United States trial of Amgen's drug. "

In terms of your quotes from Peter Janssen:

That's not what people were saying in 1991, as shown above. From the same article:

" "I began hearing about EPO two to three years ago through the grapevine in running circles," said John Treacy, a silver medalist in the 1984 Olympic marathon. "The story was there was this new drug that would take over from blood doping, and that it was much better."

Len Pettyjohn, coach of the Coors Light cycling team, which is competing in the 11-day Tour Du Pont in the Middle Atlantic States this week, said: "We've all heard about EPO..." "

Janssen again:

That doesn't necessarily follow. As the 1991 NYT article indicates, people were very aware of EPO at that time, as well as of the (supposed) dangers. The deaths occurred during the initial years when the dangers weren't yet understood. By 1991, even though EPO was still undetectable, athletes and doctors had reason to use it more conservatively (relatively speaking).

I agree that linking those deaths to EPO has become a convenient political argument used to bolster anti-drug arguments, and that the facts have often been overstated as a result. But I think it's just as erroneous to understate the strength of the circumstantial evidence.

Many US Postal riders left the team during Lance's career, so the method of micro-dosing was widely available from 2000-2001 onward and there is no reason why someone couldn't invented it independently or simply moved to autotransfusions (as many did). The flaw in the USADA report is this - if USADA folks want to find evil in only one place, they will find it only there.

Apparently US Postal was one of the few teams that used EPO during 1999 TDF during the race. It a little mystery why Lance produced over third (6/15) of the positives as according to Tyler Hamilton, he Lance and Kevin Livingstone alone used EPO "every third or fourth day" until the third week. On the other hand, to avoid the risk of false positives, the threshold of positive was so high that it could catch only those who had injected EPO in large doses or only a short time earlier. But I'll still admit that you do have a point regarding the year 1999.

You could also reframe the first sentence this way: "Lance Armstrong forget to fill his TUE application". CIRC-report indeed concludes that "[a]ccording to data provided by UCI during the 1999 Tour, Lance Armstrong was one of 26 riders who tested positive for corticosteroids". All but three had provided therapeutic use exemption (TUE) and UCI decided to leave every three - not only Lance - without sanctions, most likely because the test was brand new. (p. 172)

If in the latter sentence you are here referring to the 2001 alleged EPO positive during Tour de Suisse on which both Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton have vouched for, here is what CIRC concluded after reviewing the material:

george oscar bluth wrote:

I get that they all cheat and that sucks, but I still can enjoy some good cycling races. I don't dislike Lance for cheating, I dislike him for being an ahole. Pantani was one of those "I don't know when I'll see something like this again" guys on the climbs. Truly incredible. The most comparable thing that I've seen in TdF since is the way that doped Contador could accelerate in mid-climb attacks. Just unreal. Well, because it isn't real I suppose, but still.

Yes Pantani was the climber and made that his spot to afford the TT discipline. The Athlete in Armstrong though catered his cycles (doping cocktail) to be good for all disciplines(TT, Mountain, Sprint)

Armstrong had a background of HS Cross Country Runner and then as a Sprint/Olympic Distance triathlete then turned to all year round training for cycling an ideal background for success coupled with a worker attitude and ideal doctors it was the perfect storm for unprecedented greatness. In the context of running and athlete, take the top 100 at a Major marathon and have them compete in a Classic. Take the top 100 at a Classic and have them compete in a Marathon...yes you guessed it runner would have the best performance grade. Running Economy requires more endurance Cycling economy requires more power. My point combine the two (and dope) and have Superpower.

tourmalet syndrome wrote:But no, he was not more talented than Lance. Nobody was or is.

C'mon Lance, you know this is not true. Clean you were national level good. Without drugs, you were not a grand tour rider at all.

Lance was never even close to someone like Lemond, or Hinault, or Fignon. Not even close.

No point asking Greg how good Lance was, for he beareth a grudge.

Ask Eddy, ask Bernard, ask Miguel. They will put you straight on who was the TdF GOAT.