I’ve also been wondering if an elite can be “hatched”. I mean if a kid takes to endurance sports when he’s very young and then trains continuously through puberty. I wonder if there are endurance adaptations that can be baked in over those years.
I was always one of the fastest kids in PE but never the fastest. There was always one kid that could run like a gazelle. I swam competitively at 12 and improved decently year over year but it seemed like I was never going to catch the guys that started swimming at 5 years old. It could be that swimming is just a high technique sport and the extra years just put you a mile ahead.
Making a tenuous link to another controversial subject and then speculating more than a little here but…
One of the suggestions about transgender athletes is that going through puberty with male hormones makes huge differences to the developmental process that then isn’t simply reversed when someone is transitioned. I wonder if there are any parallels here whereby engaging in things during such a pivotal part of your development (ie cycling seriously during puberty) has potential to set you up well in later life.
Of course the other possibility is that people who started cycling as kids have simply been practising for longer than those of us who started as adults
There are plenty of heart breaking stories of female athletes that were put through DDR’s program - steroids and testosterone throughout puberty. These girls are permanently altered with deep voices. I’m not sure about their musculature.
I think practice only gets you so far in certain sports. Running or cycling is probably fairly easy to adapt to if you have the engine. Things like swimming, hockey, or baseball require a lot of technique that can take years to develop.
What constitutes bad? If you take Pogacar time away, then he’s right in the hunt - like I said above, he dropped 30s to Dumoulin, who is a GC winner and ex-world champion TTer.
This isn’t me suspicious of Pogacar, but I just don’t see Roglic’s performance as bad. More Pogacar was on a complete different level to every other rider on the day.
I think this is what happened. Rog was unbeatable for the first 2.5 weeks. He was faster than Dumoulin every day. Rog was off. He looked like he was flailing about and off his usual form. It could have been mental - he gets bad time checks and then performs worse and worse as the time checks don’t improve.
Also, Dumoulin was coming back from injury and a lot of time away from racing. Saying that Pog beat the former world TT champ is not saying a lot in this context.
I’m not saying your wrong or right. We just don’t know. Your post is very valid. But you have to admit that the other side of this argument is just as valid. We just don’t know without facts. And if the peleton is as clean as it says, you would think they would want data released to help their case.
Was he worn out physically or did he simply know that he had lost the yellow jersey? He did know, and he knew quite early on the hill, and that must have been devastating.
Cycling is a dirty sport. It has been and as far as I’m concerned always will be. Pogačar being dirty would be the norm not the anomaly.
List of doping cases in cycling - 1886 - 2019 (134 years and counting)
I love the TR podcast so not implying anything with respect to the crew. But just think of the list of marginal gains attempted by them; altitude tents, recovery boots, sweat analysis, tart cherry juice, beet juice, all the vitamins, creatine, caffeine, ceramic bearings, aero testing, shoe covers and the list goes on. “In the name of the podcast” can be attributed to many of those but still, if I hear a good one, I’m definitely going to try it too. This is all an attempt to find marginal improvements beyond our basic training for non-professional hobbyist athletes that choose to do this for fun.
Professional cyclists have all of the reasons to find an edge that we hobbyist have plus peer pressure, fortune and fame. All while participating in a sport where even the slightest metabolic performance enhancements can have huge impacts on placement. The temptation has been shown to be, up to this point, far too great.
I hope he’s clean and I definitely enjoyed the tour. If he isn’t, his name will be added to the list linked above and on we go to the next one.
