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You Don’t Have the Power

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A superlative performance reignites the doping subject with a modern twist

By Joe Lindsey

After the, uh, late unpleasantness around the USADA report, pro cycling was always going to face a credibility challenge this season. What’s alternately encouraging and frustrating to me is how the sport has responded to that challenge, sometimes within the same team.

Sky is the perfect example of this ambivalence: a team consciously formed with the ethos of clean racing, disciplined and dominant on the road, and a fractious, inconsistent puzzle off of it.

Probably no team in the sport is under as intense scrutiny about doping as Sky. That’s not because they have a particular history with it; it’s because they’re so good. The debate flares to life every July and this year is no different, with the spark being the team’s near-total demolition of the competition on the first day in the mountains, and more or less in 23 minutes on a single climb.

Chris Froome’s display on the ascent of Ax 3 Domaines last Saturday was of a type not seen since Michael Rasmussen blew up the field on the ascent to Tignes in 2007. Another uncomfortable parallel: It was the third-fastest ascent of the Ax climb in the race’s history, beaten only by Roberto Laiseka and Lance Armstrong in 2001.

Some riders always have a bad day the first day in the mountains because it’s a different kind of effort. Flat and rolling stages are physiologically typified by steady, somewhat lower-watt outputs, often at slightly higher cadences. Riders may make several high-watt efforts, but they are short, lasting a few minutes or even seconds.

In the mountains, riders have to make a sustained, high-watt output, and not everyone makes the transition well. And for reasons physiologists don’t really understand, the effect is like altitude sickness: Just because you did fine once doesn’t mean you always will.

On Saturday, however, it wasn’t a handful of riders on a bad day; everyone was hugely distanced by Froome. In a little over five kilometers on the attack, he put 1:08 into Alejandro Valverde, his closest real challenger (teammate Richie Porte finished closest, at :51). That’s gaining 13 seconds a kilometer, not on an exhausted, out-gunned breakaway, but on a world-class rider; he gained 21 seconds a kilometer on Alberto Contador. With exceptions (Cadel Evans, for example), riders didn’t really have bad days so much as Froome had a superlative one.

Naturally, the questions came. When they did, Sky’s response was all over the map. Froome himself—as polite and soft-spoken as the 2012 champion, Brad Wiggins, is volatile and brash—allowed that he understood that his performance would spark such questions but vowed that he was clean and that his results wouldn’t be taken away from him this year, or in 10 years.

In contrast, Sky manager Dave Brailsford seemed dismissive, particularly on the issue of what could be derived from statistical analysis of Froome’s ride. Speaking to VeloNews’s Andrew Hood, Brailsford said that the team declined a pre-race request for Froome’s power figures because of what he called “pseudo science.”

“There are very few people who can properly interpret and understand that data,” he said. And once it’s out there, it creates “a lot of noise for people who are pseudo-scientists. You can even write magazines about it.”

Brailsford was not alluding to Hood’s publication, but an online-only publication called “Not Normal: An Insight into Doping & the Biggest 21 Riders.” The 148-page dossier outlines historical climbing performances, categorizing them in part by color (yellow is suspicious, orange “miraculous” and red is “mutant”).

You could call it pseudo-science, sure. Except that the primary creative force behind it is Antoine Vayer, a cycling coach with 30 years’ experience, including with the Festina team. And, as Vayer explains in detail at the end of the report, what we’re dealing with here isn’t pseudo-science at all: it’s physics.

If you know the mass of an object and the height it ascends, you know how much energy that takes. Factor in time, and you get an average output of power required to do that much work. Vayer further standardizes outputs to a hypothetical 78kg (rider with bike) metric.

It’s not perfect, not by far. In particular I don’t agree with Vayer’s tendency to draw red-line conclusions from estimated data. But it is a modeling tool and, like all such tools, it grows more exact with more data. Vayer isn’t the only one modeling performances.

Ross Tucker, an exercise physiologist in South Africa and one half of the team behind the respected Science of Sport blog, also analyzes climbs based on time and rate of ascent (VAM). Tucker’s Ph.D thesis? How the brain regulates exercise intensity (i.e. power output) to limit potential self damage. He’s an expert in elite physiology, not some crackpot on a forum.

Brailsford’s wisecrack is unfortunate and unnecessary. What he disagrees with Vayer about is the interpretation of the data, not necessarily the data itself. Worse, Brailsford’s argument seems to be that people aren’t expert enough to correctly interpret the data, and we aren’t going to release data, thus ensuring that you can’t become expert enough to correctly interpret it.

The Team Sky boss isn’t on Twitter but, if he was, he’d be directly confronted with a reality of the internet age. Put loosely, haters gonna hate.

Whether Sky released data from one climb or four seasons; whether the data showed Froome put out 5.7 watts per kilogram or a “mutant” 8 w/kg, people are going to use the data to argue both sides. You can’t stop that by withholding data (see Tucker’s excellent post on that point).

The common argument against publishing data is that it’s a competitive advantage (a phrase Brailsford used verbatim). And that has some validity, although Brailsford didn’t elaborate, and some riders already do release some data. But data could also support the contention Sky is clean (ironically, the larger direction of data in the Vayer report that Brailsford dismisses points to cycling becoming cleaner in the last few years).

The common refrain is that Sky trains harder, with better tools. That adds up to a kind of highbrow “Dude, you have no IDEA how hard I ride” sentiment, which is (without data) totally unquantifiable. Pro cycling is a mature sport; performance advances are typically going to be incremental.

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