There was no link to that in your question as it appeared on here.
While we're at it and asking questions, is this level of politeness the best you can muster? I'm sure you're capable of posting in a less nasty manner considering you were not provoked in any way.
I can be more polite, but posting Grok output in a discussion, especially unchecked, is not polite and totally provocation. Even if you've been literally living under a rock, surely everyone now realise that some people oppose these AI bots and their advice to do stuff like glue cheese onto pizzas.
You also seem to presume, that just because I linked a summery to answer phreak, that I have the obligation to read each and every study cited or link posted. While that may be the case in the fantasy land in your head, I have no such obligation.
Right, I'll try to remember that you feel no obligation not to repost misinformation.
I was trying to be helpful regarding phreak's question. The person asking the question can read the additional documentation to the level of his or her interest. While the goal shouldn't be to post misinformation, the original question was actually answered in my post. The subject is of moderate interest to me, so I am certainly not going to read every single study on the topic in entirety. If you are more of an expert you are more than welcome to chime in, but you didn't, did you? [...]
No, I was doing something else, then I wasted my time trying to look up the "proof" you claimed to have posted. If it's not of sufficient interest to you to check the answer, please don't fark the discussion for those who are. It's not really helpful to post a load of unchecked chatbot output into a discussion for others to check.
Edit: Also the Podlegar study referenced seems to be this one:
Podlogar T, Bokal Š, Cirnski S, Wallis GA. Increased exogenous but unaltered endogenous carbohydrate oxidation with combined fructose-maltodextrin ingested at 120 g h−1 versus 90 g h−1 at different ratios. Eur J Appl Physiol 122: 2393–2401, 2022. doi: 10.1007/s00421-022-05019-w
And not the one "Postexercise muscle glycogen synthesis with glucose, galactose, and combined galactose-glucose ingestion" you linked.
Oh right, so the citation was ambiguous and incomplete and might not be total madness... but I've no time to check a third citation just now because I'm off cycling to a gig. Have a nice weekend!
You haven't added anything meaningful at all to the actual question or discussion. Calling the use of a chatbot a provocation is laughable. I'm not right wing at all, the opposite actually. Fighting your self-rightous crusade against Elon Musk on the back of people who have 0 skin in the game and are entirely not involved is so nonsensical, that it astounds me that a seemingly otherwise smart person, can't see how ridiculously stupid it is.
You found the time to criticize in the harshest terms, but didn't have the time to check the validity of your claims, as when I did I was able to find your missing citations. So why even open your mouth?
This one, for instance, doesn't really see any noticeable improvement in performance since 2020. It's a similar thing if you look at the World Ironman results. Small improvements, but nothing like the gains we're seeing in cycling.
Similarly, in the proam ranks, you don't see huge surges in speed in the Marmotte or Maratona, which if it was simply a case of training your body to eat more, you'd think that would be within the scope of riders at the sharp end of these events.
The graphs of average speed shown so far have used a false origin, which can make molehills look like mountains.
This version superimposes the overall length of each tour. So that it can appear on the same scale, and to ensure that any correlation is positive, I have deducted the distance in km from 8000 and divided by 100. I'm sure there are technical reasons why this is unsound...
I'm perfectly happy with my use of a false origin, as I'm plotting just one series in isolation.
I'm a bit less happy with the above and I think I'd take a different approach if I was trying to establish a correlation between speed and distance. But I don't have much time right now and it's all just silliness so I'll leave it for now
I'm a bit less happy with the above (graph which I acknowledged is probably technically unsound) and I think I'd take a different approach if I was trying to establish a correlation between speed and distance. But I don't have much time right now and it's all just silliness so I'll leave it for now
This thread has been a mixture of the thought-provoking and downright silly. I think it might have been sounder had I treated 1960 as the base year and graphed % changes over the years.
I'm still mulling over the relevance of looking at the speed of all riders combined * instead of just the winner's. A graph of the lantern rouge's deficit alone might look quite interesting. I'm guessing that the science of avoiding unnecessary effort has advanced along with everything else
* I've just realised that the year I picked a few posts back (1980) is one of those where the last rider on GC was given his marching orders - probably later stages only?
OK. Are you ready for this? Maybe we can find the statistical smoking gun that proves that Pog is on the sauce, or riding an ebike. Let's see.
All the riders are getting faster, but the faster riders are getting faster faster. There's no smoking gun, no hockey stick.
Here is the overall average for all finishers, maximum (winner) and minimum (lanterne rouge) for all tours since 1965. With a proper zero origin. I have included times for riders like Armstrong, Landis, Contador who were subsequently DQd.
And here it is zoomed in so we can get a closer look.
Look at 2025. The winner's speed was very fast. But so was the average. And the lanterne rouge too. In fact Consonni, the Lanterne rouge, had an average speed of 40.3 km/h - faster than Pog's 39.9 km/h winning average speed of the 2020 tour. Faster that Thomas' winning speed of 40.2 in 1998. Let that sink in. That's how fast the lanterne rouge was in 2025.
So what does this tell us? The fast winning speeds of recent years are driven by the fast overall average speeds. We can't conclude anything about the winner from these speeds. A single rider putting in a blistering attack on a HC climb won't put a dent in the overall average speed. A single team can have only limited impact. What makes the overall average speeds so high is fast racing by everyone, all the time. It's those mornings where Hatch is saying "and already this stage is being raced at a blistering pace" and the peloton is zooming along at a seemingly pointless 50 km/h.
Why is this? Well, whatever is driving the average up is affecting all (or at least the majority) of the riders. I'm personally ok to accept that this increase in overall average speed is down to the state of the art in equipment, training and nutrition, plus maybe other factors affecting everyone such as all day TV coverage and trends in tactics.
Conclusion? Increasing winner's speeds of the TdF aren't a smoking gun indicating that Pog and Jonas are juiced and/or riding e-bikes. There is no "ski-slope" that kicked in when they arrived on the scene. If 2025 was so fast because of what Pog was on, then there must have been a hell of a lot of passive smoking going on.
So if that isn't our smoking gun is there something else? Well, I flattened the graph out to show how much faster or slower the winner and lanterne rouge are, expressed as a percentage of the overall average. I've thrown in the 10th and 20th placed riders as well.
We see that the winner is getting further from the average. This was a gradual drift but has been gathering pace as time goes on. And it's not restricted to the winner, the whole top 10 is following. The gap from winner to average is increasing, the gap from 10th to 20th is increasing. The gap from 20th to average is increasing too, but more sluggishly. We seem to have an elite who are getting ever more elite.
If your default answer to the question of "why?" is "because PEDs", then yeah, this could be an explanation. It certainly isn't ruled out, and I would be very surprised if some of them aren't at it. But "because PEDs" doesn't really cut it as an explanation unless it is widespread across many teams and riders for the past 15 years, meaning that PEDs are as widespread and systemic now as they were in the days of omerta, and personally I'd want some external evidence for that. But if you are dead set on believing it's all down to PEDs, then I can't stop you.
Personally I have a half-baked theory (with no statistical basis) that it's all down to money. The separate elite is down to a growing disparity in budget between the bigger teams and the smaller teams, and the rise of the super-domestiques. And maybe a sprinkling of PEDs here and there too, who knows.
I've also got graphs showing the changing shape of the distribution of riders across speeds over the years, but I think you're probably sick of graphs for now.
Caveat: This is the result of me messing around in Excel in my spare time. If it turns out to be all wrong, don't be at all surprised. One particularly sensitive bit of data is the total length of each tour, and sources often disagree. This could obviously mess up all the speed calculations.
OK. Are you ready for this? Maybe we can find the statistical smoking gun that proves that Pog is on the sauce, or riding an ebike. Let's see.
All the riders are getting faster, but the faster riders are getting faster faster. There's no smoking gun, no hockey stick.
Here is the overall average for all finishers, maximum (winner) and minimum (lanterne rouge) for all tours since 1965. With a proper zero origin. I have included times for riders like Armstrong, Landis, Contador who were subsequently DQd. View attachment 783320
And here it is zoomed in so we can get a closer look. View attachment 783321
Look at 2025. The winner's speed was very fast. But so was the average. And the lanterne rouge too. In fact Consonni, the Lanterne rouge, had an average speed of 40.3 km/h - faster than Pog's 39.9 km/h winning average speed of the 2020 tour. Faster that Thomas' winning speed of 40.2 in 1998. Let that sink in. That's how fast the lanterne rouge was in 2025.
So what does this tell us? The fast winning speeds of recent years are driven by the fast overall average speeds. We can't conclude anything about the winner from these speeds. A single rider putting in a blistering attack on a HC climb won't put a dent in the overall average speed. A single team can have only limited impact. What makes the overall average speeds so high is fast racing by everyone, all the time. It's those mornings where Hatch is saying "and already this stage is being raced at a blistering pace" and the peloton is zooming along at a seemingly pointless 50 km/h.
Why is this? Well, whatever is driving the average up is affecting all (or at least the majority) of the riders. I'm personally ok to accept that this increase in overall average speed is down to the state of the art in equipment, training and nutrition, plus maybe other factors affecting everyone such as all day TV coverage and trends in tactics.
Conclusion? Increasing winner's speeds of the TdF aren't a smoking gun indicating that Pog and Jonas are juiced and/or riding e-bikes. There is no "ski-slope" that kicked in when they arrived on the scene. If 2025 was so fast because of what Pog was on, then there must have been a hell of a lot of passive smoking going on.
So if that isn't our smoking gun is there something else? Well, I flattened the graph out to show how much faster or slower the winner and lanterne rouge are, expressed as a percentage of the overall average. I've thrown in the 10th and 20th placed riders as well.
View attachment 783326
We see that the winner is getting further from the average. This was a gradual drift but has been gathering pace as time goes on. And it's not restricted to the winner, the whole top 10 is following. The gap from winner to average is increasing, the gap from 10th to 20th is increasing. The gap from 20th to average is increasing too, but more sluggishly. We seem to have an elite who are getting ever more elite.
If your default answer to the question of "why?" is "because PEDs", then yeah, this could be an explanation. It certainly isn't ruled out, and I would be very surprised if some of them aren't at it. But "because PEDs" doesn't really cut it as an explanation unless it is widespread across many teams and riders for the past 15 years, meaning that PEDs are as widespread and systemic now as they were in the days of omerta, and personally I'd want some external evidence for that. But if you are dead set on believing it's all down to PEDs, then I can't stop you.
Personally I have a half-baked theory (with no statistical basis) that it's all down to money. The separate elite is down to a growing disparity in budget between the bigger teams and the smaller teams, and the rise of the super-domestiques. And maybe a sprinkling of PEDs here and there too, who knows.
I've also got graphs showing the changing shape of the distribution of riders across speeds over the years, but I think you're probably sick of graphs for now.
Caveat: This is the result of me messing around in Excel in my spare time. If it turns out to be all wrong, don't be at all surprised. One particularly sensitive bit of data is the total length of each tour, and sources often disagree. This could obviously mess up all the speed calculations.
I think you should get a new hobby!
Have you tried watercolours?
Knitting?
I was going to suggest philately but that's duller than a Vuelta transition stage!
😄
As some of those studies looked at ultramarathons, I thought I'd look at ultramarathon results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Trail_du_Mont-Blanc#Participation_and_results
This one, for instance, doesn't really see any noticeable improvement in performance since 2020. It's a similar thing if you look at the World Ironman results. Small improvements, but nothing like the gains we're seeing in cycling.
I had a look at that page and because, y'know, I like graphs I thought I'd plot one.
Now I'm not advocating doing direct comparisons between two different sports. I don't think it's relevant, there are too many confounding factors, but the numbers are there, so here it is.
And if anything, the improvement in performance post 2020 are more striking for the ultra marathon.
I've also got graphs showing the changing shape of the distribution of riders across speeds over the years, but I think you're probably sick of graphs for now.
Between 1965 and 2025 the average winning speed rose by about 14%. To get a yardstick of sorts, over the same period the average speed for the 10,000 metres athletic men's world record rose by 8%, the equivalent increase for the 1,500 metres freestyle swimming being 17%. Both those events remain substantially the same; the Tour has become shorter, and the spikes in average speed observed for 1971, 1981 and 1998 coincide precisely with substantial length reductions compared to the previous year. This is not obviously so in 1998, but I here think there might be a data mismatch, the cancellation of stages or sections thereof (that did happen, didn't it?) being reflected in the winner's time but not the race distance (I haven't checked this in detail).
But such data discrepancies are not sufficient to cause this:
Conclusion? Increasing winner's speeds of the TdF aren't a smoking gun indicating that Pog and Jonas are juiced and/or riding e-bikes. There is no "ski-slope" that kicked in when they arrived on the scene. If 2025 was so fast because of what Pog was on, then there must have been a hell of a lot of passive smoking going on.
Isn't your data hinting at exactly this? The ski-slope, that is, not a causational relationship between PEDs and speed. Poggy has dominated with a radically different style of racing, just as Merckx's did in the early 70s, and Eddy's influence is clearly visible in some of your charts. Assuming Tadej is a one-off, the Pog period may look remarkably similar to the Merckx age when you update your charts in 15-20 years' time.
Between Eddy and Pog we've had decades where the eking out of small advantages has usually been enough. I'm almost starting to miss those days...
I'm reading Dog's most lovely graphs as saying that nothing much happened until two supreme atheletes emerged at the same time and pushed each other to new heights, assisted by exceptionally strong teams. And, in the the spirit of the thread, maybe other stuff that leaves no trace.
OK. Are you ready for this? Maybe we can find the statistical smoking gun that proves that Pog is on the sauce, or riding an ebike. Let's see.
All the riders are getting faster, but the faster riders are getting faster faster. There's no smoking gun, no hockey stick.
Here is the overall average for all finishers, maximum (winner) and minimum (lanterne rouge) for all tours since 1965. With a proper zero origin. I have included times for riders like Armstrong, Landis, Contador who were subsequently DQd. View attachment 783320
And here it is zoomed in so we can get a closer look. View attachment 783321
Look at 2025. The winner's speed was very fast. But so was the average. And the lanterne rouge too. In fact Consonni, the Lanterne rouge, had an average speed of 40.3 km/h - faster than Pog's 39.9 km/h winning average speed of the 2020 tour. Faster that Thomas' winning speed of 40.2 in 1998. Let that sink in. That's how fast the lanterne rouge was in 2025.
So what does this tell us? The fast winning speeds of recent years are driven by the fast overall average speeds. We can't conclude anything about the winner from these speeds. A single rider putting in a blistering attack on a HC climb won't put a dent in the overall average speed. A single team can have only limited impact. What makes the overall average speeds so high is fast racing by everyone, all the time. It's those mornings where Hatch is saying "and already this stage is being raced at a blistering pace" and the peloton is zooming along at a seemingly pointless 50 km/h.
Why is this? Well, whatever is driving the average up is affecting all (or at least the majority) of the riders. I'm personally ok to accept that this increase in overall average speed is down to the state of the art in equipment, training and nutrition, plus maybe other factors affecting everyone such as all day TV coverage and trends in tactics.
Conclusion? Increasing winner's speeds of the TdF aren't a smoking gun indicating that Pog and Jonas are juiced and/or riding e-bikes. There is no "ski-slope" that kicked in when they arrived on the scene. If 2025 was so fast because of what Pog was on, then there must have been a hell of a lot of passive smoking going on.
So if that isn't our smoking gun is there something else? Well, I flattened the graph out to show how much faster or slower the winner and lanterne rouge are, expressed as a percentage of the overall average. I've thrown in the 10th and 20th placed riders as well.
View attachment 783326
We see that the winner is getting further from the average. This was a gradual drift but has been gathering pace as time goes on. And it's not restricted to the winner, the whole top 10 is following. The gap from winner to average is increasing, the gap from 10th to 20th is increasing. The gap from 20th to average is increasing too, but more sluggishly. We seem to have an elite who are getting ever more elite.
If your default answer to the question of "why?" is "because PEDs", then yeah, this could be an explanation. It certainly isn't ruled out, and I would be very surprised if some of them aren't at it. But "because PEDs" doesn't really cut it as an explanation unless it is widespread across many teams and riders for the past 15 years, meaning that PEDs are as widespread and systemic now as they were in the days of omerta, and personally I'd want some external evidence for that. But if you are dead set on believing it's all down to PEDs, then I can't stop you.
Personally I have a half-baked theory (with no statistical basis) that it's all down to money. The separate elite is down to a growing disparity in budget between the bigger teams and the smaller teams, and the rise of the super-domestiques. And maybe a sprinkling of PEDs here and there too, who knows.
I've also got graphs showing the changing shape of the distribution of riders across speeds over the years, but I think you're probably sick of graphs for now.
Caveat: This is the result of me messing around in Excel in my spare time. If it turns out to be all wrong, don't be at all surprised. One particularly sensitive bit of data is the total length of each tour, and sources often disagree. This could obviously mess up all the speed calculations.
I had a look at that page and because, y'know, I like graphs I thought I'd plot one. View attachment 783342
Now I'm not advocating doing direct comparisons between two different sports. I don't think it's relevant, there are too many confounding factors, but the numbers are there, so here it is.
And if anything, the improvement in performance post 2020 are more striking for the ultra marathon.
If we're going to get into data discrepancies, your picture shows G in the (short lived) 2019 Sky jersey, which was only worn from January to April 2019, before Ineos took over
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