If you’ve not watched the two-part Lance Armstrong 30 for 30, it is worth your time. The passing of years puts this whole era in a new light. I’m left wondering why anybody was authentically surprised or offended when Lance’s doping became public. To win any kind of race in any era of cycling, artificial performance enhancing was, is, and will be taking place. No offense to professional cyclists.
I say without any pessimism or judgment, it just is what it is. The chase for prestige and profit inevitably lead to what any outsider would call cheating, and avoiding detection is just part of the competitive equation. I’m not saying this is ok. I’m saying that it is as it is.
There’s a great moment in the 30 for 30, when Armstrong is reflecting on the jump in performance that took place from his routine early doping to the EPO era. It was like a light switch. In one season the entire landscape of endurance athletics was altered. He went from doped and World Champ to doped and non competitive as he hadn’t started using EPO yet.
All of that is a base for my point. We’ve now taken a dramatic jump in performance from the initial EPO era that is even more dramatic than the most dramatic jump in performances ever. Do we believe that nutrition, recovery techniques, double-threshold training, cooling vests, lactate monitoring and legal supplementation are the cause of the exponential improvements in endurance performances? That seems beyond naive.
I know we must recognize the dramatic impact of shoes, but do we believe they account for the jump from the pre-EPO era (say 1993) to today?
The Lance 30 for 30 was a good reality check for me on that. I think the percentage pie chart to explain the dramatic improvements of today’s endurance athletes goes something like this:
10%: Training, sleep, coaching, nutrition, talent identification, early professionalism, athlete supports, psychology, HRV tracking, lactate measurement, pacing, and all other legal supplementation, ergogenic aids and modalities
40%: EPO (not only did we not get rid of it; it’s more prevalent than ever but much more scientifically utilized and concealed)
20% Super Shoes and Super Track Surfaces
30%: New doping substances and mechanisms.
=100% of the endurance performance improvements since 1993