Wesley Stevenson

speaker

1,470 appearances 54 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2010 last heard May 2015

Wesley Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Has clamping down on drugs made the Tour de France slower? · 20 Jul 2012 podcast

I mean, some are saying that this is a really boring Tour, kind of because of that, because Sky are dominating, but we don't care, do we? voice-verified

But this may also be down to the race being cleaner than it was in the past. voice-verified

Well, let's hope so. voice-verified

Let's think about how we would compare this year's tour with previous tours. voice-verified

Well, yeah, we could look at speed. voice-verified

So if we were to look at the speed for climbing Alpe d'Huez, one of the toughest climbs on the tour, you can see that in the late 1990s, this was being climbed in less than 38 minutes. voice-verified

In 2006, Frank Schleck did it in 40 minutes and 46 seconds. voice-verified

In 2008, it was 39 minutes and 30 seconds. voice-verified

And last year, it was climbed in 41 minutes and 21 seconds. voice-verified

So it's getting slower. voice-verified

But one of the problems we have is it doesn't feature in this year's race. voice-verified

Yes, so there's another measure which might make a better comparison. voice-verified

According to Dr Ross Tucker, who's with the Sports Science Institute at the University of Cape Town, what you need to do is you need to take into account the weight of the rider and figure out the power-to-weight ratio. voice-verified

So you're getting watts per kilogram of rider, right? voice-verified

watts per kilogram. voice-verified

That's right. voice-verified

So using this figure, Dr. Tucker says you could see a marked difference between today and the bad old days when there were no tests for blood doping or drugs such as EPO. voice-verified

It's probably worth adding the caveat at this stage that we don't have a lot of data for this Tour de France. voice-verified

Only some riders will release their data and certainly not the top riders. voice-verified

So figures for riders such as Wiggins and Froome are based on extrapolations from riders that Dr Tucker does have the data for. voice-verified

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