Tour de France 2015

Saxo Tinkoff reminds me of these guys

nibbikayeahmotherfucka

What's happened to Contador?

[Watching on my iPad on mute]

He's still in the front group, which is down to about 15 riders.

Thanks. Must have missed him. So all the favourites together taking it easy until the final climb.

They don't look like they are taking it very easily.

With all the rocket fuel that is supposed to be coursing through their veins, it is a wonder that the motorcycles can keep pace

More shots of Richie's grin please.

Time gaps to Majka have got to be off, right? He didn't appear to gain any time after going over the top.

So has anyone been noticing the HP advertising on Eurosport?

Thats not how time gaps work

Cows on the course:

Mooooooooooo

Oh. I was expecting him to gain time after he summited.

If you speed up because you are going downhill then it is still going to take the same amount of time to get to where you are on the road because the chasers will also be going downhill by that point.

You have to go faster than the chasers go on the same part of the road.

This is harder for me to explain than i thought it was

Time and space. Different concepts

That makes perfect sense. The other thing is gaps are measured "backwards." So you don't get a time between A and B until B reaches a point A had been. So you won't have an idea of the gap between Majka and the chasers, taking the descent into consideration, until the chasers reach the descent (and start descending). The gap is the time it took them to get to the top of the climb, so Majka's descent doesn't have an impact on the time gap until the chasers are also descending.

I think.

Oh nibs

Chapeau le winker. Didn't even need to hang onto the moto.

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Re' Froomes HR.

He's talked openly about his freakish Max HR for years. In 2013 the BBC reported it was 165bpm.

This is unusual, but he's not normal. None of these pros are anywhere near normal.

I respectfully disagree, the genetic probability of having any one of these perfect factors is extremely low, let alone having the holy trinity of lung, heart and metabolic perfection.

Not near perfection - just the best right now riding his bike up French hills. Someone has to be.

Thanks for the time gap lesson! It all makes sense now.

Exactly

Not near perfection

Dr Hutch discusses the genetic side of things in his book Faster. From memory there are something like 21 different key parts of the human genome most related to increased performance (at the biochemical level). The average pro is likely to have the 'right' genes in something like 3 or 4 of these at once, so not expressing any of the other 17 or 18. If someone is lucky enough to have 6 or 7 of them they'll blow the existing pros away completely (proper training will still be required to make the most of it of course).

Examples are these genes might be:-

• the body produces right mixtures of muscle fibres (slow/fast/medium)
  
• the body can process lactic acid faster than 'average' which leads to a higher LA threshold
  
• etc
  
  

The reason Dr Hutch can push out 300W+ with little or no training is down to his naturally huge VO2max, but the underlying reason he has such a high natural VO2max is due to expressing a few more of these special performance genes than the average person.

I'd expect the next level of bio-passport will include some form of genetic testing to see just how well each athlete is expected to perform based on a theoretical max given the number of performance genes they express.

Genetic manipulation will be the next huge thing in doping, and it has the potential to make the sport way more inaccessible for amateurs...

How will genetic manipulation work then?

Magnets.