The BIG cheat.
 

May not be cycling specific.. but sports in general:


If you have Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80168079

Russians doping? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhocker! p;

remember the eastern european women of the olympics in the 60's 70's, and 80's? lol

sports is more popular than ever and it's clear that many athletes are using "enhancements". Getting to the point that I don't think anyone cares anymore

This review indicates that it actually started out being completely cycling specific, and morphed into something else. Apparently the filmmaker is an amateur racer/cycling enthusiast, and wanted to document how easy it is to use PUDs in cycling.

Great documentary.

Starts off as a "Super Size Me" type documentary, and turns into a Clancy novel. This Fogel guy accidentally dropped right in the middle of the Russian doping scandal a couple of years ago. I wonder when he thought, "This is going to be a completely different movie now. "

Agree, it's a fascinating film. It confirmed exactly what everyone suspected about Russian doping/cheating, though it was still stunning to see it all laid out so clearly. Two thoughts:

1, the IOC is as corrupt as suspected. The way WADA recommended banning Russian athletes from Rio for the overwhelming state-sponsored cheating, and the IOC over-ruled them, says everything about their real commitment to clean sports.

2, the filmmaker, a very good enthusiast cyclist, did an aggressive doping program, and actually performed worse than before he doped. It's encouraging to know that, at least in this anecdotal case, aggressive doping didn't lead to magical improvements.

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.

Film Director, Bryan Fogel did an interview with WNYC, Interview podcast.. In which Bryan said that his PED usage had helped recovery and physical survival of the second race.. Everything he was taking was considered "anti-ageing.. fountain of youth"..

I guess it could also say something about those elite amateurs, but I'm sure he didn't want to go there.

And yet his performance wasn't better. There's no doubt a big part of doping is to help with recovery, but that should translate into continued high performance through all the stages. Instead, he looked physically destroyed after the second, PUD-enhanced, race. Who knows, maybe the PUDs led him to overtrain, but he certainly didn't do as well as he'd done just a year before.

BTW, I've known several doctors who specialize in "anti-ageing." Like the specialist in the film, they always look like hell.

Actually, I thought he did hint that those elite top-10 amateurs might be doping when he said something like "They're on another level" or something like that. And yet isn't Fogel an elite amateur? He finished 14th a year before, while riding clean. And yet doping with steroids and testosterone and EPO and a rigorous organized intensive training program didn't improve his performance. He still couldn't crack the top 10 during the first half of the race, before his battery died, and in the last two stages of the race he couldn't even hold his place at 26th or 27th.

I suspect that the film maker didn't quite get his PED regiment suited for his race..

What are the criteria to compare between previous year performance vs PED regiment performance?

Are the race course identical?

Similar weather conditions?

Racing against the same racers as previous year?

All those can affect race performance, not just the PED regiment.

Film maker did say that the recovery between day to day racing and post race with the PED regiment was significant... could that make a difference?

His PED regimen was administered and guided by experts. He, and his experts, knew what the race was about - 7 consecutive climbing stages of racing. When it was done, he said, as plainly as possible, that he had a better performance the year before, without the drugs.

He was clearly hoping PEDs would show that he could have been a pro racer if he'd have gone for it. He seemed to have believed that the main difference between him and the pros was that they used PEDs. He was almost in tears as he acknowledged the realization that even in his youth, and using PEDs, that he could never have been a great pro rider.

Put in academic terms, he started the film with a thesis, and he was unable to prove it. It's more complex and subtle than he realized. PEDs did not move him from being a very good rider to being a great rider. If he hadn't stumbled into a connection with Rodchenkov, I'm certain the film would never have been completed and released, just as scientists don't publish negative results when experiments fail.

Your probably right. Could you imagine the movie "Super Size Me" if Spurlock had lost weight. Lol.

Hah! Yeah, that pretty much would have been it.

This film does make me rethink PUDs in pro cycling a bit. Not that I think they're OK (they aren't), or that they don't give an advantage to some elite riders, but the degree of benefit is probably less than I've thought. Robert Millar has talked (convincingly to my ears) about winning grand tour stages early in his career while clean, at a time when EPO and other PEDs were common and widely used. I don't know if anyone was winning grand tours during this era while clean (I don't think so), but it appears that it was possible to be very near the top of the game, at least in stages and one-day races, by using talent and naturally great physiology and excellent training.

There's good research that, at least for young elite male athletes, testosterone and HGH give at best very tiny benefits, if any at all. Cortisone and other glucocorticoids definitely decrease inflammation and can help a rider keep riding when their body is overtaxed, but they will cause significant problems when used chronically. They don't seem to make one faster, just allow someone who should be calling it quits to keep going in the late stages of a grand tour. Anabolic steroids would seem to not be anything road cyclists would want to mess with - bulky muscles aren't the goal.

It's really blood doping (transfusing blood) and Epo, when used very aggressively, that seems to give a truly unfair advantage. With current testing of hematocrit, living/training at altitude seems to give as much benefit as one could get with EPO. The biggest cheat I can see happening now, in pro cycling, would be to use a transfusion for a rider whose blood count has dropped during the later stages of a grand tour. Extreme chronic exercise can drop the blood count significantly, and bumping an elite rider's hematocrit from say 38 to 48 overnight would be the difference between being shot out the back of the peloton on the last big climb to being able to hang with the group.

It's interesting that when you read some of the personal accounts of pro riders crossing over to using PUDs, that in all the accounts I've read they were generally taking a one-size-fits-all dosing regimen, and that regimen wasn't studied in relation to their performance and training. They just started to get a bag of pills to take, and later they'd start getting injections on a schedule with the rest of the team. My sense is that a lot of what they were taking was providing very marginal gains, and in some cases no real gains at all, since it was done in a completely scattershot fashion. It reminds me of doctors prescribing antibiotics when there's no definite evidence of a bacterial infection, "just in case it'll help."

Watched it last night, very interesting if a bit disjointed story, the P&R aspects are much more informative than the PED 'experiment' and its results.
Given the sample size is 1, anyone who concludes PEDs [work/don't work] based on this result needs to learn some basic science.

Here's an interesting interview with Mr. Fogel.

I'm not sure if that comment was directed at me, but just in case, I've done medicine and basic research, and I understand science well. The subject of PUDs, especially in cycling, is pretty much a black hole scientifically. Since PUDs are illegal, and even those that aren't/weren't illegal have been deeply frowned upon, no one has done or is going to do the science in a rigorous way, with elite athletes, and publish it. In some events the effects of various PUDs are easy to measure. We know PUDs give significant gains in strength events, and androgenic steroids dramatically improve performance in women in many events. In bike racing it's a trickier subject, and much much harder to show real benefits.

I saw a recent study where amateur cyclists were given EPO and tested, and the results showed negligible benefits. They also reported no side-effects in the subject group, which tells us that they weren't using dosing at a level that it was used in pro cycling, where riders were experiencing blood clots and having a wide variety of dangerous side effects (to the point where some were setting alarms to get up several times a night to move around and break up the blood clots that were forming). The only way to really establish how much of an edge riders like LA and the other elite riders of his era were getting from EPO, blood doping, testosterone, HGH, glucocorticoids, etc. would be to do a multi-year study of the top UCI riders, with appropriate placebo controls. Obviously that's out, as is doing a short-term study on young high-performing volunteers.

So we're left with anecdotal evidence. We're left with stories of top riders talking about the benefits they got, or didn't get, when they went from riding clean to dirty, and back to clean. We're left with studies like this one, with n=1. We're left with assessments by people like LA saying that all the PUDs gave very marginal gains, like 1% or less (i.e., less than you'd get from switching to tires that roll better), except for EPO, which when used at dangerous levels was a more substantial benefit.

There has always been "lore" that has been passed around among coaches/trainers/athletes that is often debunked when rigorously tested. When I was in high school, the baseball coach forbade the baseball team from using the weight room, because it would "tighten up" their muscles and reduce their flexibility. The football coach didn't allow water breaks because that's what his college coaches did, since drinking water when you were hot would "make you sick."

There are drug regimens that will increase lean body mass, for example, but do nothing for physical performance. Caffeine was seen as a substantial performance enhancer, to the point it was briefly banned, but testing shows it's a very minor effect. In most sports, the people in charge are VERY dogmatic about following the their lore, their regimen, their diets. Conconi helped Moser break Merckx record, so he must know the secrets. Let's do what he's doing. I think it's clear that a lot of this stuff was pretty much placebo, or as part of an organized regimen led to more intense training (the benefits of which would accrue even if the PUDs had been skipped). A lot of PUDs were apparently used by riders/teams because they wanted to keep up with this drug arms race and were afraid others might be stealing a march if they didn't.

We know the doctors and scientists who ran the Italian sports doping program (Conconi, Ferrari, et al.) and the Russian program and some of the other long-standing, very organized and well funded programs were working with a lot of elite athletes in a variety of sports, and I'm sure they kept some really good records. It would be interesting if one day all this material were published. It's probably mostly been destroyed, and much of it would likely be of little scientific value (that would require having control groups, and I don't see much evidence that they did that). I suspect this data would show dramatic effects in some sports, and very subtle effects in sports like cycling.

At the end of the day, this self-directed study proves nothing, but it is a negative result. There's a long history of scientists using themselves as a test subject, and only going further when they saw an effect on themselves. In this case, a high-quality doping regimen didn't turn a very good amateur rider into a "monster" rider. If he had doped, and finished on the podium, we would all be saying "Gee, that really seemed to make a huge difference. This seems to be real evidence that it's all about the drugs." Sadly, in both real life and in science, negative studies are easy to ignore. That's why come winter lots of people will be downing vitamin C and Zn instead of chicken soup.

And regarding that interview, Fogel would be more compelling if he actually knew the facts. Here's a quote:

Fogel: [Icarus] really came from me trying to reinvent myself and go back to something I knew, which was cycling. It was my lifelong passion, and I’d had this curiosity for years about what these drugs did, like, If I did these drugs at 17, 18, 19, could I have been a professional athlete?

So this just fell in your lap.

Fogel: Until it was right there in front of me, I never knew where this film was going to go. I set out with an idea that the anti-doping system in sports didn’t work. That idea was purely based on how my hero, Lance Armstrong — the most tested athlete in the history of sports, like 500 times during his career — had never been caught.

Here's a quote from an old Velonews article:

USADA officials on Wednesday confirmed it had tested Armstrong less than 60 times. UCI president Pat McQuaid said during a press conference at the world championship last month in the Netherlands that it had tested Armstrong 215 times during his career.

And he did test positive. Four times in 1999 (for steroids), which he was able to explain away (saddle sores). In 2005 his samples from 1999 were retested and found positive for EPO (those tests didn't exist in 1999), but Armstrong was able to make the case that the samples may have been mishandled and might have been spiked. This defense was able to call into question ALL samples that had been stored from previous TdFs, so in one fell swoop all cyclists who were doping up till then were off the hook from retesting with modern tests.

If you read the stories of many of the drug tests during this era, it's clear that it was often the doping experts, who were charged with designing the tests to catch dopers, were actually the ones administering the drugs. And it's clear that bodies like the IOC didn't want to find drug cheats, since it spoiled their image. Some of the cycling bodies also have shown themselves willing to accept easy explanations for positive tests. The bottom line is the statement that LA was tested 500 times is nonsense, and the statement that he never tested positive is false.

As for Fogel's fantasy of being a pro racer if he'd drugged at ages 17-19, the answer is an emphatic and easy no. The guys who went on to be drug cheats weren't doing it at that age. They'd already proven themselves the best of the best in their age group, riding in races no one really cared about except the experts. They wouldn't have had access even if they'd have thought of it. In the 1990s, EPO was a fabulously expensive drug, and very very hard to get.

Perhaps the thing that bugs me the most about Fogel's approach, though, is that he has repeatedly stated that one goal was to prove that anti-doping measures don’t work (that's a direct quote from the interview). To do this, he used drugs in an unsanctioned amateur race, in which the only anti-doping measure was . . . the honor system! How idiotic is that? Unfortunately, someone who doesn't really know pro cycling might think that, because Fogel used drugs in this race, and wasn't caught, that he did indeed show that anti-doping measures in pro cycling are inadequate. That's just fundamentally dishonest of him not to make this point clear. What he showed was that if I want to use PUDs and ride in the local metric century, I'm gonna get away with it! Woo hoo! I likely won't be even 5 minutes faster, but by god I'll get away with it.