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Was wondering about this, this morning. Is the reason we're seeing lots of amazingly talented cyclists winning top races younger and younger, and seemingly getting better and better because they came through at the age when the sport as a whole turned away from doping and started paying attention to these other factors?
Older riders, Thomas etc, would have been coming through the ranks at a time when doping was still around and maybe training, nutrition etc was still pretty rudimentary compared to now. If you're 18-26 you'd have been riding as a 10 year old around 2011/2012 onwards when teams started paying more attention to sport science and would have benefitted from these advances that might have trickled down to junior and feeder teams. Those advantages then add up and mean that nowadays younger riders are crushing it and seem to get better and better.
jupiz-
All of us, including juniors, have access to training, recovery, nutrition and aero insights that were for the privileged few or didn’t even exist. Imagine a 13yo following Xavier Disley and Stephen Seiler. It’s a different world of knowledge to your local club legend spouting off a load of hunches.
The speeds and power is increasing at the lower end, too. Cat 3 races are getting faster, etc, etc.
It doesn’t prove that doping isn’t present, but I think it does explain a lot of the progress.
snoops
I think the thing a lot of people miss about the peak EPO years is that the dope gave so much of a performance improvement that there was absolutely no need to worry about anything else.
Teams weren’t allocating any of their resources to nutrition and recovery, and barely gave aerodynamics a thought.
I think there’s been huge successes in looking at those properly and thus the performance levels are inching closer to what was possible when everyone was up to the eyeballs in EPO.