Lance was winning races as a kid, so maybe he’s just geneticaly faster?
Well, Lance could well be yes. In fact he has to be doesn’t he if he always has won all those dirty-years Tours AND been clean and, there’s no doubt he’s exceptional as an athelete, I’d never argue that. He might well be ‘genetically faster’.
Another point on….
EPO test is something to do with haemoglobin levels in the blood, over 50 and your out, so if all you had to do is train for one race then peaking your cardio fitness for that race wouln’t be that hard, so as long as he gets his training tight why use EPO.
…well, haemocrit 50% levels are fine to talk about (and the higher the red blood cell count in simplicity the more efficient the blood at carrying oxygen, which is carried by the Haemoglobin in them), but you don’t find that the more you train the higher your levels get and if you train right then you’ll ‘bring them up to near 50%’, it doesn’t work like that. The problem comes that a lot of pros, even tour winners might have natural race-fit levels even below 40%. Now, take a guy with 40% who gets away with EPO doping to get up to 49% and that is going to make one hell of a difference to his performance. In that case thats a 25% increase in oxygen carrying capacity. This simplistic overview should go someway to explain why EPO was absolutely rife, and that’s in a lot of endurance sports, not just cycling.
So, all you have to do is be comfortable that a lot of top, elite atheletes who were doping, and not just with EPO, were still not good enough no matter what they did to beat Lance. Remember these are dedicated professionals too, the best cyclists in the world under monitored, structured, completely analysed training regimes, not people who just think they’re a bit fast in a club.
In Lance’s favour, history does show that Tour winners have to be good time-trialists, good in the mountains, or even better BOTH, which he was. So, in my mind, lance could still quite possibly have won lots of ‘everyone clean’ Tours, particularly after not riding the other ones back-to-back BUT, we’ll never know.
My favourite little bit of logic is that he now believes the tour is a much cleaner tour and wants to come back to prove ‘he can win it clean’ but, if he was clean all-along and loads of others were doping then surely this time, when they drop their advantage, he’ll waltz into paris with his easiest win ever won’t he? …we’ll see, perhaps he will too, I’d like to see it as well, particularly if he rides the Giro too.
I’m not a lance hater either, I’m just a sceptic because of what I see and what I read and that’s all I have to go on.
