Originally Posted by
brianmcg123
As for your second point. Wasn't the main reason because of his mechanical he had. He had to go over 100k with only one gear. Obviously there is more to racing that just being able to produce more power.
No, I don't think it was the main reason at all, though the film seemed happy to use that as a bit of sleight of hand. At the point where he had the mechanical (stage 4), he was in roughly the same place in the standings as he was the year before without PUDs - just outside the top 10. After the mechanical, he failed to move up, and actually lost a place over the last 2 stages. It's a 7 stage race, so if his performance was really amped compared to the year before, he should have been doing better at the point where the battery died, and once fixed he should have been able to move up on some of the the riders who jumped ahead. As he admitted in the film, he performance was better the year before, without PUDs.
Also, I don't know what electronic shifting system he was using (Shimano was listed in the credits, but I didn't look closely at the bike), but my understanding is that there are warning lights so you can shift into a usable gear, then the FD shuts down first, and then, later, the RD shuts down. And he had a car on the route. Did he do all this prep, and no have a backup battery, and forget to charge the battery on a regular basis?
The doc really glossed over the effect of PUDs on his performance in the race, which was the entire original point of the film. My sense is that Fogel was really disappointed that all his very hard work and this organized cheating program didn't put him into contention for the win, and he was happy to use the battery failure as an excuse, and not properly finish off that part of the story line. He seemed shattered to lose the illusion that if he had had access to the drugs that Armstrong had, he could have been a great rider.
tl;dr: The film originated with a dual premise - (1) PUD cheating is easy to do in elite cycling, and (2) PUDs turn very good riders into great riders. They chose an amateur race to prove this, which means they had nothing to say about cheating in pro cycling. And his own performance didn't come close to establishing the second premise - PUDs administered by a world-class doping specialist and a couple of other doctors didn't improve his racing. I think that's remarkable.