I had a chance to think a little bit about the  CIRC report and the reactions from others.  Everyone seems to be sort of stuck on these hypothetical numbers.  One “respected” rider said that 90% of the Pro peloton is currently doping, another said “only” 20%.   Those guesses seem to perplex and bother a lot of folks, not just me.

I wrote a little yesterday about an article that Caley Fretz wrote for Velonews, where he says that the 90% number is a “travesty and the 20% is low enough that he’ll still wake up early to watch.

David Millar, recently retired from Garmin, and served his time-out for doping, did an article for the Guardian .  He felt that the CIRC investigation wasn’t fair since they probably didn’t talk to enough clean riders.  It’s hard to know exactly who that is, if the given number is somewhere between only 10% of the peloton clean, to maybe a maximum of 80%.

I ask David, how do you know who that is exactly?  Guys that have never tested positive?

Fabian Cancellara just said he doesn’t have time to read the report and might not get to it until the end of the season.  I can hardly comment on this asinine statement.   I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

Alberto Contador, another “convicted” rider of doping, (name removed from a Tour de France win), did read the report and said that he testified before the commission  His quote was-

Bjarne Riis, team manager of Alberto and Tinkoff-Saxo, and former doped Tour de France winner, said –

“I think everybody would ask if it’s realistic to say that (figure). I don’t think that is a right number and realistic to say that. I don’t know if it was quoted in the right way. I heard that it was said that the percentage was between 20-90%. What does that mean?”

I agree with Bjarne, what does it mean.

Here’ what I think it means.

It means that if these numbers are correct, this vast difference in opinions of how many riders are doping, the race results are the same.  And by the same, I mean totally screwed up.

Like I wrote yesterday, just one or two guys doping in a race can really change the race.  It changes the race in so many ways that it doesn’t fix it by just disqualifying the rider who doped and moving everyone up a place.  That is if they catch the rider, which they virtually never do.

The CIRC report said that the doping the riders are doing now might only give them a 5% increase, compared to 15% before.  Those are the high estimates.  I’m not sure what that means?  Can they produce 5% more power, or they recover 5% faster, or do they have 5% more endurance, maybe all of the above?  I don’t know.  I do know that 5% more power at 400 watts is 20 watts.  That is enormous when you are doing an hour climb in the Tour.

Even just being able to train 5% harder, or more, would be significant, while maybe recovering 5% faster?

But what it really means is that, if the numbers are correct, that in any given race of 200 riders, that a minimum of 40 riders are doped, to a maximum of 180 riders.  And it doesn’t matter which number is real.

40 doped riders in the race give us virtually the same results as 180 doped riders in the race.  The other 160 guys don’t even have a chance to race.

I’ve raced a ton of races with a ton of doped riders.  Guys that were “proven” to be doping in those very races.  I could give you a lot of example, both on road on off-road.

One guy, like Kyle LeoGrande, can completely destroy a race at Superweek.  He can single handily make it so hard that many riders just quit the race, thinking they were POS.  40 guys like Kyle would make the race fantasy bike racing and totally unrealistic.

The same off-road.  When all the Canadians and Euro guys came here to race juiced, the sport became a joke.  Here are these guys racing the whole 2 hours faster than I could go for a 5 minutes.  And just the year before I was competitive.  It really didn’t matter if it was 5 or 10 guys doping, with the rest of the field clean. The results were the same at the top of the page.

And the majority of the riders in these racers were clean.  But, they were getting smeared, and I mean smeared, by a few guys that were doping.

Why would it be any different in the Professional peloton?  The guys doping have to be better than the naturally aspirated riders. Always. Especially if there are 40 of them in any given race.  It only makes sense.

We all try to hope that a clean rider has a chance to beat a rider that is doping.  That is very rarely the case.  Unless all the riders I’ve personally known to have doped, were already the superior athletes, before they started doping, the drugs make them 10 times better.  So much better that competing against them isn’t possible.

So, in reality, it doesn’t matter if there are “only” 40 guys doped in the race or 180 of them.  The results, at the top, are the same.

So, when guys like Caley Fretz, , have lowered their standards enough to feel comfortable watching an athletic competition where 1 out of 5 of the athletes in the race are doping, thus cheating, I say we are in for a lot more of just exactly that.

Nano doping. Why not? As long as you just keep it down to under 20% of the field, it’s okay.

Maybe the title to this post is a little misleading.  I wasn’t necessarily cherry picking primes exclusively from Bernard Hinault, I was winning a bunch of primes in a row because of Bernard Hinault.

I guess I should backtrack a bit.  Back in 1986, I was riding for Levis/Isuzu.  The structure of professional racing was a lot different back then.  Back then, the United States was thought of as a developing country and we needed “assistance”, through special rules, to catch up with Europe and get up to speed.  Even though Greg LeMond won the Tour that year, with Andy Hampsten, 4th.

Anyway, we had a relationship with La Vie Claire, which was LeMond and Hinault’s team, where when we rode outside of the United States, we’d ride for La Vie Claire, and here in the US, we’d ride for Levis.

So, Andy was riding the Tour for La Vie Claire in July and then in August, was racing for “our” team, Levis.

I’d travelled to Colombia to do the RCN with Hinault and La Vie Claire in May.  That wouldn’t have been my first choice of a race to do.  We got massacred, like totally massacred, other than Hinault did win the final 40 km time trial in Bogotá . You can see by our faces in the photo below, we weren’t happy campers.  And we were dropped there.

Anyway, jump ahead a couple months and we are at the Coor’s Classic in August.  Bernard, Greg and Andy had just finished the Tour a couple weeks earlier.  That was the Tour the 30/30,  Slaying the Badger was based upon.  Anyway, there was a lot of infighting within the La Vie Claire team, them trying to figure out who was going to win, Bernard or Greg.

Andy was a little shell-shocked, and beat, after the whole ordeal and was happy to be back racing with us.  The Coor’s race was the biggest race in the United States, maybe ever.  It started in California and made its way through Northern California, Nevada, then we transferred to Grand Junction Colorado and did another week in Colorado.  It was a super event.

It was the main focus for all US based teams, the biggest race of the season, by miles.  Our team usually stayed at high altitude, Mammoth Lakes, CA, Breckenridege, CO or somewhere like that to prepare for the event.

The race was a mixture of European type road racing, point to point, along with hard circuit races, plus criteriums.  The criteriums are what differentiated the race from European stage races.  Most the European pros had not really done too many criteriums before.  We, as domestic riders, had done 100’s.

Bernard did not like criteriums.  The officials and Bernard talked long and hard before almost each and every one.  He got unlucky because it did rain a couple times during the race, during criterium days, which made it much worse.

Anyway, we were doing a criterium in Reno, Nevada.  We’d already done a long road race in the morning, Tahoe to Reno, and we were doing the Reno Criterium, at dusk, through the streets of downtown.   It was super cool.  Well, I thought it was super cool, but Bernard wasn’t so thrilled.

Since we’d raced 4 hours already that day, everyone was ready to start out pretty casually.  I’d heard from very reliable sources, that there was going to be an enormous amount of cash money given out in primes during the race.  And it was going to start early, like instantly.

So, I lined up at the front, ready to race hard from the start.  Little did I know that Bernard Hinault planned to race hard from the start too.  Like super hard.  When the race started, everyone was casually tightening down their toestraps as Hinault motored from the gun.

I was on Hinault and he was going super hard, like time trial hard.  I looked back and the field was single file, with gaps opening everywhere.  I was very content right on Bernard’s wheel.

Coming across the line for lap one, they rang the bell.  I couldn’t tell you for how much, but good money, probably $250, maybe $500, I’m not sure.

Hinault never missed a beat and just kept pulling.  The final corner was maybe 250 meters from the line.  I looked back and there wasn’t anyone that could sprint anywhere near.  It was so easy to win the money, I hardly had to sprint.  I won the prime and just went back and resumed my position on Bernard’s wheel.  And he kept going.

This went on lap after lap.  They rang the bell nearly every lap and I won the prime and then dropped back and sat on for another lap.

Bernard didn’t seem to even notice.  He was more concerned about staying upright than winning money.

We, by that I mean, our team, and most US riders, were first concerned with results, but a close 2nd was winning money.  Prize money was good and a big proportion of our yearly income.  It wasn’t unusual to win 20-30 thousand dollars a year in prize money, depending on the schedule.

I couldn’t really tell you how much money I won the first 10 laps of the race.  It was in the 1000’s.  Roy Knickman, my teammate, eventually made his way up to the front too and he won a couple primes also.

Hinault went on and won the Coor’s Classic overall.  LeMond finished 2nd, so they flip-flopped their Tour results.  Phil Anderson, who was guest riding on our team, finished 3rd overall and completed the podium.  We won the team competition, which was nice.

There was so much money to be won at the Coor’s race, you sort of had to be really shitty or really unlucky not to take home some.  They’d sometime give a lapped rider a prime for just riding the next lap. I got a prime in Vail once for being the first rider from Kansas to cross the line.  I was the only rider from Kansas in the race.   It was always interesting.

Anyway, Bernard never said a word to me.  I did feel a little weird after winning the first couple primes,  probably because Hinault was a 5 time Tour de France winner, but got over it pretty quickly.  I could tell he was riding scared, while I was in my environment. .  We had different agendas, so it was all good.

This is a picture of the Reno Criterium, probably 6-8 laps in. Hinault had pulled the whole time, close to 30 mph. I’m looking back, with Roy on my wheel. It was pretty fun.

The remains of the La Vie Claire team riding to the start of a stage of the RCN. I’m behind Hinault. Thurlow Rogers is behind him and behind Thurlow is Greg Demgen.

I’m not sure what jersey Bernard is wearing here. Obviously, we’re climbing and not riding with the field. I think this is the stage that climbed up to Bogota, the next to last day.