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...

In the Vuelta this year, Joaquin Rodriguez has been untouchable. Not only is he able to outclimb Chris Froome, arguably the dominant climber of the Tour de France, but he's able to respond to every one of Alberto Contador's attacks. Sure, Contador is a convicted doper, and without the good stuff he's simply not going to be at the same level he was before, but it's almost unprecedented in cycling history before the EPO era that riders were able to so dominate stage races they they never once lost time to a rival. Not only is Rodriguez able to mark his rivals, but he's able to finish these climbs with absolutely ferocious attacks which put 5 seconds or more on everyone else (excepting perhaps Valverde when he's still with him) within the last 500 meters. I've never before seen a rider who was able to do that, nor am I aware of any rider in cycling history who could combine such searing intensity with the ability to excel on extended climbs. And that he...

I was a bit shocked to see Valverde (Valv-Piti) and his seeming best friend Rodriguez out-climb both Contador and Froome in stage 8 of the Vuelta. Was it that Valverde has raised his game to become a world class sustained climber, but only when racing in the safe confines of Spain? Or was it more that Froome and Contador weren't up to their best, allowing Valverde and Rodriguez to keep up? The obvious check is the VAM: the rate at which they were able to gain altitude. It's roughly correlated to power/mass ratio. In the Armstrong era, it was typical during the Tour for Lance to be significantly over 1700 meters/hour for beyond-category climbs gaining over 1000 vertical meters. On short, punchy climbs riders were over 1800, even 1900. For profile data, all I really used was the official route data from the organizers. These show the climb gains 580 meters in 7.2 km, an average grade of 8.1%. That's fairly steep and fairly short by Tour de France standards, well-sui...

A few posts ago I posted a plot of VAM numbers for Cobo in the Vuelta stage up the horrific Angliru climb. Of course, Cobo went on to win the race. VAMs are difficult to assess. More relevant is power: in particular, watts/kg. Making liberal assumptions, I tried to come up with a W/kg estimate of Cobo on the climb (or in the early bit, the leader of the group containing Cobo). Here's the result (power at the crank, not hub, assuming 2.5% drivetrain losses): Impressive for sure, but still generally below the Armstrong-era "6.7 W/kg" attributed by Coyle to Ferrari.

Arguably the most epic stage of this year's Vuelta was Sunday's race to the mighty Alta d'Angliru , arguably the toughest steep climbs in professional bike racing. Here's a profile of the climb, from Climb by Bike : In the stage, Geox's Juan José Cobo climbed away from the group of favorites, including Team Sky's 1-2 in overall GC, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome. Some argued that it was a sign Cobo was dipping into the special sauce, a result too good to be true. While I realize VAM is subject to many sources of variability and is hardly a valid test of doping, I can't resist running the numbers here. Fortunately I managed to take time splits for each of the final 10 km for Cabo or the group containing Cabo, although I had to guess a bit at 6 km to go, where Cabo was trailing Anton. I guessed that Cabo was around 5 seconds behind here, although I didn't see this explicitly on the Eurosport coverage which I was watching on the web. These time...

After I'd reached Madonna del Ghisallo and visited the absolutely incredible church and museum, I saw some riders emerging from another building. Ah, that must be the bar and cafe, I realized, which was soon confirmed. What a difference between the US and Italy, that in any local snack bar you can get something as sublime as a delicious panini made with fresh bread, formaggio, lattuga, pomodori, and with Gazzetta dello Sport as a side: Let's take a closer look at what Gazzetta highlighted in that article, on Mosquera's dramatic stage win at Bola Del Mundo in stage 19 of the Vuelta a España : Wow -- a VAM of 1800 meters/hour for the final 3 km of a brutal climb three weeks into a stage race. But the roundness of that number immediately rang suspicious... Consider first the quoted stats: 12% average for 3 km. That's 360 meters. So how long does it take to climb 360 meters at a VAM of 1800? Simple: 1/5 of an hour = 12 minutes. But it says it took 12:53...