Doping

I find that whole Vayer thing fishy. They ignored rider's weights and instead used a mean weight for all of them, then extrapolated a rather simplistic set of numerical data into a fairly simplistic paradigm. The simple fact that they arrived at LeMond's performance as the only plausibly clean performance of the last however many years is also a bit Luddite: how can you compare times from thirty years ago against the modern day? So much has changed in that time.

What, like the advent of blood vector doping?

You only need to have watched racing over the past 30 years to notice changes. Climbing speeds went off the scale in the early 1990s, and previously unheralded riders, hello Claudio, Greuzie Tony, suddenly became world beaters.

In recent years, speeds have definitely slowed. Vayer is trying to quantify that but his methods, which he doesn't publish, which makes it unscientific in my book, are a bit suspect. But his ratings are in line with anecdotal evidence.