Doping megathread - I can't even think of a witty tagline

Doping megathread-who's pedalling drugs?

Frederic Grappe, FDJ’s performance director fired a fair few shots in Jumbo’s direction

"More than the gap between Vingegaard and Pogacar, what challenges is the delta between Vingegaard and the rest," says Frédéric Grappe. With an average speed of 41.3 km/h that day, the double winner of the Tour was 3.4 km/h faster than the third Wout van Aert.

"If I had an athlete who did this, I wouldn't be comfortable," comments Frédéric Grappe. I would ask myself big questions. Performance goes beyond the measurement error of developed power estimation models."

"I have more than respect for Jumbo-Visma's work and no doubt about the integrity of Mathieu Heijboer (his counterpart, editor's note) who has a scientific approach," he says. It's up to them to make their own analysis. They know the records of their athlete. If he beat them by 10%, they know it. And it's not possible to beat his records by 10% in a grand tour."

This is a great idea. It works excellently with 'the clinic' section of the cycling news forum. It allows discussion without cluttering up every race related thread. 👍

To quote Zimmerman “ everything not on the Wada list is legal”.

Cycling will always need to push boundaries with performance & enhancements so offenders will be found out when something is deemed illegal.

If they list caffeine you're bo11ixed anyway

I wonder if a mandatory Lie Detector Test could catch the majority of dopers?

Certainly cheaper than labs and the accuracy is claimed to be extremely high.

That’s me done as well, blood type caffeine currently.

I don’t think such a gap could be as a result of eeking out improvements unrelated to power.

I’d argue that Pogi did a decent TT and would have taken his finishing time if it was offered to him pre-stage.

Jonas smashed him by 98seconds over a relatively shot course. There’s a considerable delta in power there.

Jumbo’s setup is not that much quicker than UAE, if at all.

The performance definitely raises questions...

His descending was better, his position on bike was way better, his line through bends was better. Vinegaard was better prepared for TT and was in good form on day. Pogacar wasn't at his peak on day, didn't have TT work done and hadn't studied course as well.

They are all adding to the time gap as Pogacar was sloppier for all of those.

He gained time on climbing to but that wasn't what accounted for total gap.

Whatever questions you have of Vinegaard apply to Pogacar to given gap between them and field throughout the Tour.

I think they should be ahead of all the other GC/TT riders. No other GC rider has a TT as good as Jonas or Tadej. The Yates brothers aren't bad, but you'd never expect them to trouble the top 2. The course had too many climbing metres for WVA/Cavagna to expect to be up there also.

The bike change was the wrong call. A road bike would really only be preferred for a short steep section at the start of the climb. I can see that decision costing 30 seconds. You add in how much better prepared Jonas was than Tadej with his descending and his lines that is another chunk of time, and then Jonas was also stronger on the day.

I think Tadej's time trial was fine. It wasn't great similar to Primoz in 2020 or Geraint Thomas in this years Giro. Visibly suffering and not as smooth/powerful on the bike but still better than the rest of competition.

If Tadej was on his game and didn't change bikes the gap easily could have been sub 1 minute and then we are talking about 2 stand out performances above all other competitors which both riders were for the entire tour.