On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

Chris Horner published his blood values on his web site . I didn't have much interest in this. Indeed, I was much more interested in the America's Cup then in the Vuelta. It's not because I'm not interested in bike racing. Rather it was because it all seemed so unreal, so "not normal", that I just wasn't interested. Horner won. Curious. The data were published in raster form, and would require transcription (or OCR) to do anything interesting with. I didn't have the interest + time to do this. But then I saw this blog post which links to a spreadsheet with the transcribed data. Back in 2009 I made the following plot, which I posted to my blog the following year, showing the reticulocyte percentage in Lance Armstrong's blood, which he published online, plotted versus his hematocrit. It's generally considered a sign of transfusion when the hematocrit increases with a low reticulocyte percentage. Reticulocytes are the young blood ce...

There's recently been a big story about how Lance Armstrong's biological passport blood values from 2009 were "consistent with doping". My response was "this is news?" It was news back in 2009, when Lance was boldly publishing his blood values on-line to prove his cleanliness, perhaps thinking people would pay attention only to that his hematocrit was well under the 50% limit, until it was pointed out by Jakob Mørkeberg, a Danish researcher, that the blood values he was posting appeared consistent with doping. His response: "What do you call a guy who graduates last in the class in medical school? Doctor." Funny, dude, but it did nothing to address the analysis. You don't need to be a medical expert to see something was amiss. Here's a plot I made at the time: Lance came out of the second rest day that Tour raging. A year later, out of contention, he came out of the second rest day fatigued and uncompetitive. Lance skipped hi...

A year ago, Troy Davis was executed for murders he is claimed to have committed, in Georgia. From an article in Time : In the 48 hours leading up to Davis' execution, the nation heard that the case against Davis was built entirely on eyewitnesses who said they saw Davis gun down off-duty cop Mark McPhail. But of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis in his original trial, seven would go on to change their mind and recant. So nine people, who didn't know him, claimed to have seen Troy commit the crime. Seven later recanted, and yet he was still killed by the state. In contrast, there are reportedly ten independent people, each of whom knew him, including teammates, an ex-wife, and an ex-fiancee, testifying that they observed Lance Armstrong either self-administering illegal drugs, or describing his method and practice of doing so. Additionally, Lance is reported to have encouraged others to use these drugs. He left behind blood samples which have been tested by ...

A lot has been said and written about Voeckler's remarkable climb to Plateau de Beille in stage 14 of this year's Tour. Voeckler had an advantage of 1:49 over second-place Fränk Schleck, 2:06 over Cadel Evans, and 2:18 over Fränk's brother and teammate Andy Schleck. Due to time and fitness lost in a crash, race favorite Alberto Contador was 4 minutes down. Any of these riders were considered a threat to overtake Voeckler, although the consensus most likely scenario was Voeckler would limit his time losses and hold onto the yellow jersey by maybe 30 seconds. Strava KOM: around a half-hour slower than Voeckler's time. Yet it's safe to say it was a shock to almost everyone when Voeckler not only held on to his lead over all other contendors for the yellow, but was a primary activist in chasing down attacks. I'd have expected Voeckler, by any reasonable measure outmatched in that group, to take a very conservative approach to the climb, following the smooth...

Note: I had to revise the numbers on this page because mapmyride does a relatively poor job with distance, as I determined by considering its profile of Old La Honda Road. Since I did the original calculation, an official km-by-km climb profile was posted to The Science of Sport . The Tour today ended with a relatively steep, short climb on a stage on which riders had relatively fresh legs: a perfect opportunity for some truly impressive rates of climbing to be demonstrated. And sure enough, they didn't disappoint. Various numbers have been tossed about for the stats on Verbier. Originally I used elevation data from MapMyRide's map of the stage : 630 meters climbed over 7.576 kilometers starting from the sharp left from Route de Verbier at km 199.1 in the stage, an average gradient of 8.32%. However, since then official data were posted in comments to The Science of Sport : 638 meters gained over 8.8 km, an average grade of 7.25%. They also reported reports that Contador d...