Doping was so common in the sport from the mid 90's to the introduction of the EPO test, and later the blood passport, that it's impossible to declare a deserving winner of those races.
I think that no matter what they say, the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty is a conditio-sine-qua-non of civilization.
At 21, Armstrong had a distinctly average 21 percent muscle-efficiency rate. Seven years later that rate had increased to 23 percent, a huge leap.
"We don't know exactly what accounted for Armstrong's muscular-efficiency change," Coyle said. But he suspects that Armstrong was able to convert fast-twitch muscle fibers to slow-twitch muscle fibers.
I wonder about this too, if drug abuse was rife within the sport it seems a little harsh to single him out.
Sorry if off topic. I don't care to know if he was or wasn't clean. I am only scared by a system that judges on a probability base. It goes against all my principles and against all that I've studied for years.
Let's simplify it into the obvious metrics - power and time. The difference between the current era and previous eras is startling. In the last four years, none of the Tour's decisive HC climbs have been done at greater than 6 W/kg. Even the Contador-Schleck showdown on the Tormalet, with the Tour title at stake, was ridden at 5.9 W/kg. The graph below was put together by Alex Simmons, and it shows the time on the famous Alp d'Huez climb as a function of power output. There's a lot of data there but slide your finger across from a time of 38:30. That's the kind of performance (or faster) we saw in the previous generation. Then consider the more recent times - Frank Schleck did 40:46 in 2006, the first time in 12 years they didn't break 40. The best performances in the last 3 years are all slower than 41 minutes. That fits well with what I've added to the graph in blue and yellow - those are the equivalent performances to two climbs in the 2010 Tour, where riders simply don't get above 6W/kg anymore. Not even once, let alone repeatedly during the race, as they once did.
all three regularly completed HC climbs in this Tour have been over three minutes slower in this Tour than were seen the 1990s and 2000s. And not a single HC climb in the last two Tours have been done at anything close to 6.2 W/kg, let alone the 6.4 W/kg seen in years gone by.And so the combination of performance times decreasing, the physiological implications of those performances and the bio-passport data suggest progress in the anti-doping fight
