Tour de France 2009

Excellent article in the Guardian today - and a good piece on doping here with comments from LeMond - essentially a 'Contador - j'accuse':

And today Greg LeMond, the Tour champion of 1986, 1989 and 1990 and a noted critic of doping, used his French newspaper column to examine the implications of the statistics of the climb in which Contador soared away from his rivals, covering 8.5km of road with an average slope of 7.5% in 20min 55sec, averaging just over 30kph up a series of steep ramps linked by hairpins.

"No one in the Tour has ever climbed as fast as that," LeMond wrote, going on to talk about the findings published recently in Libération, in which Antoine Vayer, a performance expert and former trainer with the defunct Festina team, estimated that, judging by his results, Contador must have a VO2 max figure – the measurement of a body's ability to take in and use oxygen – so high that, in LeMond's view, it would have to be superior to that of any athlete who ever lived.

If one accepted Vayer's figures,LeMond continued: "Contador must be asked to prove that he is physically capable of achieving these feats without the use of performance-enhancing substances."

The sport's recent history, he said, makes doubt obligatory and forces us to question every remarkable performance. "That's why the sceptic I've become wants to ask Alberto Contador to convince us. I'd like to know the real figure in relation to his VO2 max. If we knew that, we might be able to explain the result that has made him the fastest climber in the Tour's history." LeMond was writing before Contador's victory in yesterday's time-trial, when he passed the 18km check-point in a time a staggering 18sec below that of Wiggins, the next fastest, only to settle back and secure victory by a mere 3sec. In the subsequent press conference someone asked: "What's your VO2 max?" There was no answer.