Has clamping down on drugs made the Tour de France slower?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to More or Less, puncturing the over-inflated numerical tyres of the news peloton. This week we'll ask whether 90% of the UK population will be obese by 2050. The government would like us to be jolly impressed that the deficit is down by a quarter. Is it? And should we be? And does when we retire have a bearing on when we die? But first, the Tour de France reaches its climax this week. Or if you're listening to our Sunday repeat, it reached its climax this afternoon. In the background, the US anti-doping agency charged the retired seven-time winner Lance Armstrong with using performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong denies the allegations, but Bjarne Riis has admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs when he won the Tour in 1996.
And Alberto Contador was stripped of his 2010 Tour win after failing a drug test. But cycling, we're told, has finally cleaned up its act. Britain's Bradley Wiggins, wearer of the yellow jersey for most of this year's tour, has been infuriated by the assumption that as tour leader he must be taking drugs. Here's loyal listener Paul Nicholson to continue the tale.
If the Tour is being cleaned up, can that be proved statistically by showing that riders are on average slower than before?
Wesley Stephenson's here, fresh from sitting for hours on end watching other people do all the hard work. No change there then, Wes.
Yeah, thanks, Tim. But hey, aren't the Brits doing well? 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? But this may also be down to the race being cleaner than it was in the past. Well, let's hope so. Let's think about how we would compare this year's tour with previous tours.
Has the Tour de France cleaned up its act and why does that matter?
Well, yeah, we could look at speed. 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. In 2006, Frank Schleck did it in 40 minutes and 46 seconds. In 2008, it was 39 minutes and 30 seconds. And last year, it was climbed in 41 minutes and 21 seconds. So it's getting slower. But one of the problems we have is it doesn't feature in this year's race.
But there's another problem, which is that a lot of things must impact the speed, the wind in particular, but also whether you're riding in someone's slipstream and the kind of riders you're trying to beat.
Yes, so there's another measure which might make a better comparison. 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. So you're getting watts per kilogram of rider, right? watts per kilogram. That's right. 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.
In the late 90s and the early 2000s, if you were going to be competitive and win the Tour de France, you had to be able to cycle at between 6.4 and 6.7 watts per kilogram at the end of a day stage. What we are seeing now in the last three or four years is that the speed of the front of the peloton, the front of the race, men like Wiggins and Froome and Nibali who are winning this year's Tour. is about 10% down compared to that generation. So now the power output at the front is about six watts per kilogram. And that's a significant because if anything, they should be getting faster because technology and bikes and training, everything's getting more scientific, but they're not, they're going slower.
And secondly, the, The physiological implications of riding 6.5 watts per kilogram are just, for me as a physiologist, beyond belief. I remember watching the Tour de France and these men going up these climbs 10 years ago and just thinking, there is no human being alive who's ever been measured capable of doing this in a lab. Now it's different because what they are doing now is physiologically plausible.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:40
2
Has the Tour de France cleaned up its act and why does that matter?
1:40–9:20
3
Can average climbing speeds show whether the Tour is slower than in the drug era?
9:20–12:51
4
How does power-to-weight (watts/kg) help compare modern and past Tour performances?
12:51–23:31
5
What do blood markers like haemoglobin tell us about doping trends in cycling?
23:31–27:36