Re: Tour De France
Fair enough, the history of cycling has not been kind to stand out performers and their cleanliness. I do think that the pro peloton is the cleanest right now that its been in decades, the bio passport protocols are very difficult to defeat.
And I think to collapse of cyclists in their early to mid 30s points to athletes that had chemical assistance early in their careers and now cant perform at that high level once weaned off.
Vingegaard was able to drop Pogacar, however briefly, a couple of times most notably on Ventoux, and Vengegaards time on Ventoux while fast was also assisted by a tailwind for roughly half of it. And it was still several minutes off the fastest doping times (all due respect to Il Pirata but that 1994 time was likely doped to the gills). Future doping controls will tell a more complete story, but for now it looks to me like a batch of young physio freaks that have been untainted by doping doing their thing. Pogacar effectively got his wining margin this year on one stage (the 8th) with a wild attack much further out than expected. Had Vingegaard not still been riding in support of Roglic it would be interesting to see how much time he would have lost. That 8th stage was all kinds of chaos, which is great and much more like cycling used to be. Prior to the juiced up mega teams riding a fast pace up front all day and sending thier GC favorite to take 20-30 seconds from 3-4km out.
Now mechanical doping....
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