2013 World Senior Games, may contain spoilers
 

There, that should do it for all you spoiler averse.

I'll start, i hope today's break stays away, but i doubt it. Would be nice to see DeGendt win, but he may need to wait for a more difficult stage.

They certainly deserve it. They have been putting in quite an effort

ouch. so close! just 30 seconds now

blah..in other news to bad king didn't start.

who do you guys have for winning tomorrow's stage?

i'm going

Nieve/Anton from a break

Quintana
Contador
Froome
Evans

all ST

Bob. He's got the Enzyte advantage.

You mean Gesink? ;)

Poor Robert. He's like 9m down already. On the other hand that means he gets a lot of rope...

~6.3 w/kg from froome...hmm

where did you get the data from?

with the elevation and the heat, this is not normal territory

http://forum.slowtwitch.com/forum/Sl...tage_P4648485/

not sure I have the energy to chase all the origins of the data, but it seems in line.

it's almost like they are trying to say "hey look at us, we just did what postal did while doped to the max".

That's pretty much what they've done. I don't think last year's version of Wiggo (forget about this year's version) would have been able to stay with the top two today.

I've always thought it would be fun to go to a professional race and run a car that was clearly and unapologetically illegal. I'm talking about 50-100% HP more than what you're supposed to have and then after you win just laugh off tech. Don't even try to roll through it. Just stick the car in the rig and go home knowing you're booted. I'd only do it if I hated the sanctioning body and wanted to ruin one of their races.

That's kind of what these guys are doing on the world's biggest stage. In some ways, you have to be impressed. Mostly, though, it just sucks.

this tour could just be very boring if froome puts in a massive effort, kills eveyrone, and wins without any competition.

One thing to point out (after getting pissed off about the stage and calming down a bit), Sky did manage VAM of 1850 on Planches des Belle Filles last year; it's a climb that took 16 minutes to climb and was at 8.5%, so comparable to AX-3-Domaine. Except on that stage, they didn't have to climb a HC mountain beforehand, and 10 riders were within 1 minutes of Froome's time. So this year, with a HC climb, Froome simply went faster.

alternatively, perhaps the black jersey of Sky has some special particles that cools you down while other teams were sweating it up like in a sauna. You know, marginal gains ;).

I got the info from joe friel's tweet

I remember watching Ricco blow everyone off his wheel except his teammate on a climb a few years back. I remember thinking that I hadn't seen anything like that since Pantani. Then I paused for my brain to catch up. When it did I kinda figured things were ah skew.

Ah skew. I say poo poo.

On the other hand it looks like the Dutch have a similar program. In their honor:

Too many parallels between this and the Armstrong era..."accidentally" hiring doping doctors, saying you want to be transparent then refusing to release data because "people won't understand it", falling back on the testing to prove you're clean, blaming the journalists for doing their job, and denigrating anyone who raises an eyebrow.

We've been here before and it didn't end well.

i don't trust Brailford. I don't trust Sky; people forget that before this whole government spy thing, Sky's tabloids did some shady stuff.

it also puts a shadow over Cookson's run for UCI president as Cookson is the head of British Cycling, something heavily subsidized by Sky. Say hi to the new guy, same as the old guys (Heinous Verbruggen and Fat Pat).

This whole thing is just troubling. Good thing is that i can lay off of the TdF and tune in for the Vuelta, the Worlds, and Lombardia. For the latter, at least the skybots haven't gotten good enough to pull off a Gewiss-styled attack, yet

Doping in pro cycling?

No way!

But ... But ... But, he never tested positive.

So we just need a lot of stages with 5 mountains to make this interesting.

Is it possible for team-wide doping to go undetected for an extend period of time, given the current state of testing and "information insecurity"? Would it need to be something new?

This Tour has taken a big turn for the boring. The bully is going to win, with or without his doped-up team.

AC sans whatever he was on a few years ago can't do jack about it. None of the "big guns" can. Echoes of Postal.

The green jersey is locked up.

So it's back to waiting for sprint stages. At least those don't require dope.

since the postal doping "program" required complicity by the UCI in order to succeed, then whatever the new "program" is could also be done with a similar handshake agreement.

alas my point about Cookson and Sky.
what's the bet that Porte is told to "sandbag it" after yesterday's effort? losing 10+ minutes on a stage when every other GC rider makes it...

also, i hope Vaughters post Martin's SRM file to show just what it took today. My bet is that they probably went along at 5.7-5.8w/kg on the climbs. Martin is one of my more "favored" riders, and i do hope that he's at least clean.

Vaughters>Brailsford.

I've met and talked to a lot of people in and around Garmin. If someone was doping on that team I'd be really surprised and would put it down to a case of someone being a dumbass as opposed to some systematic thing.

Garmin IS transparent...one of my teammates wrote the recent book on them and pretty much said he never ran into a closed door. Sky on the other hand played a lot of "today isn't good for us" with journalists.