Has clamping down on drugs made the Tour de France slower? (WS)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, the show that punctures the over-inflated numerical tyres of the news peloton.
How has recent doping controversy shaped the Tour de France narrative?
The Tour de France reaches its climax this week. 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. So we were fascinated by this question from loyal listener Paul Nicholson.
If the tour's 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. Let's think about how we would compare this year's tour with previous tours.
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. 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.
Can we prove the Tour is slower today by comparing climb times like Alpe d'Huez?
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.
Yeah, 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.
Why is power-to-weight (watts per kilogram) a better measure than raw speed?
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. Now it's different because what they are doing now is physiologically plausible.
When he talks about what's physiologically possible, that suggests there's some limit to how high the power-to-weight ratio can rise, to how well a rider can actually perform.
Yes, he's reluctant to put a marker in the sand, but he thinks it's around 6.4 to 6.5 watts per kilo, with a lot of caveats to do with conditions and technology, times of rides, etc. But not everyone agrees, though. Dr. Aureole Forrester is a sports scientist who works for SRM. Now, they're the company that supply the data tracking equipment to most of the teams in the Tour de France. And she thinks that variability of a cyclist's performance is more important. Now, she's taken some data from Vincenzo Nibali, who's one of the top riders this year.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:22
2
How has recent doping controversy shaped the Tour de France narrative?
0:22–1:42
3
Can we prove the Tour is slower today by comparing climb times like Alpe d'Huez?
1:42–3:02
4
Why is power-to-weight (watts per kilogram) a better measure than raw speed?
3:02–3:58
5
What does historical power-to-weight data suggest about 1990s vs today’s riders?
3:58–5:33
6
How do team data and Vincenzo Nibali’s power files challenge the idea of extraordinary performances?
5:33–6:58
7
Could reduced drug use explain fewer dramatic late-stage attacks in modern Tours?
6:58–8:05
8
Is the claim ‘people die soon after retirement’ supported by evidence or statistical traps?
8:05–9:36