I don't know what it is about cycling that seems to concentrate some of the most insane physiological manipulation (not sure if that's the right phrase tbh).
Other sports like baseball/tennis/etc seem to have some issues with like general steroids. But the level that cyclists go to always seems to exceed them by orders of magnitude.
I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that some cyclists had/have to set alarms throughout the night so they wake up to do jumping jacks to get their heart rates back up above the "artificial" 15bpm that their training + cocktail of drugs has caused.
I think because there's less "skill" required, in the sense of hand-eye coordination, than ball sports. The predominant factor seems to be how hard and how long you can push yourself. Once you reach the human body's natural physical limits, chemical advantage seems like the only way to break through those.
As a cyclist (albeit never raced), I want to get offended by this but I feel is largely correct. There is a lot of real time strategizing happening in road races however the marginal gains of simply having more Watts per kg for more hours trumps everything else.
Bicycles are the most efficient form of transport... at moderate speeds. At elite level speeds you are so far down the exponental well of wind resistance that you need meticulous attention to aero savings and sustained power output. All of the possible aero gains permitted under the rules are already accounted for. That leaves power output as the only avenue for gaining a competitive advantage. No other sport has the same combination of antagonizing factors at play.
This is an interesting thought, it makes sense intuitively.. I could see it being adjacent to why steroids are prevalent amongst body builders. After you've hit your "genetic wall" for size/strength, chemical advantage could seem like the only way to keep progressing.
It's interesting to see it play out in an "official" sport, rather than just individual workout/ "aesthetic" tournaments. Maybe they should add some more skill elements to major cycling races.. perhaps a slalom through the orange cones of a construction site every few miles? lol
This is very wrong. These guys go downhill on small country roads very fast – sometimes over 100 kmh. You need deep riding skills to handle these speeds without getting injured.
For what it's worth, I don't think people are trying to say it's a zero skill sport. It's not an indictment of you or the sport.
I see the "argument" as: in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology. This is compared to the skill of descending a mountain at speed, which is dictated by how fast you can actually make yourself go, which is a matter of physiology.
It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.
So basically, could I cycle down a hill at 50-70mph? Absolutely not. But among the people who can, then the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.
Only someone who’s never cycled quickly could say there’s less skill involved. Try riding down the side of a mountain at 50mph and follow up your post.
The other sports you listed provide much more strain on the muscoskeletal system and the cardio impact is bursty. But with cycling you have this amazingly efficient machine relieving that type of stress so it becomes more of an exercise of how efficiently the body can process oxygen and pump blood under constant duress.
> I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that some cyclists had/have to set alarms throughout the night so they wake up to do jumping jacks to get their heart rates back up above the "artificial" 15bpm that their training + cocktail of drugs has caused.
Even as a casual runner (top 20% in a marathon, def not competitive), I have had to silence low heart rate alarms on my apple watch because my heart rate regularly drops below 40bpm at night. When I’m in peak condition for a race, I’ve seen it drop as low as 30.
Professional cyclists have the highest VO2max of any athlete. Even without drugs I would be completely unsurprised if their heart rate gets to 20bpm in deep sleep.
Definitely some amount of it is natural, I'm even less competitive with running than you, but seeing my resting heart rate go down as you ramp up distances is a satisfying thing when you realize the hard work is paying off in a "tangible" way :)
I did a little more googling after the above comment, and it seems like another factor that (in theory) plays into the issue for the anecdote is that their blood can get thicker from doping. So it's a recipe of very low heart rate + extra viscous blood to pump that = danger.
Regardless, it's some pretty interesting/freaky stuff!
I had heard that in the context of absurdly high hematocrit, where they would get their heart rate up to move the (very viscous) blood around their body. No source, but doesn’t sound impossible when everyone was on EPO.
That was the early EPO era.. there were some riders that died in their sleep their blood was so thick from massive amounts of EPO. Their red blood cell counts were excessively high.
If someone is well-informed (the key point here - but I assume professional athletes are well aware of what they're doing) and still wants to do something weird and/or dangerous to their body, without harming others in the process - who is to deny them their bodily autonomy, and on what basis?
> and that people would do it in the first place
Two words: professional sports. Those folks willingly (I hope, or that'd be insane) risk their health for money, fame, and advances of medical science. Although the entertainment industry really tries the weirdest thing that I really don't understand - trying their best to shift the focus away from the science advancement as much as possible, even though this is the only actually valuable thing in professional sports.
I meant legal in the allowed by the sport’s governing body sense, not the will the cops show up at my door sense.
If this is what athletes do to get to the top of the sport, then it soon becomes a pseudo requirement. If the sport regulators don’t clamp down on it then they’re basically forcing people to do something insanely risky if they want to compete.
Plenty of professional sports have banned things for simply being too dangerous even if they do give an edge.
It is almost certainly just something that hasn't been banned yet. There's a very long list of similar things which the UCI has banned, but they generally don't ban things which people might hypothetically do but haven't actually started doing yet, so each time someone comes up with a new idea there's a window of time to do it while it's still legal.
I expect you’re right. It has to get on the radar to be banned.
To make matters worse unlike PEDs this may be very hard to catch.
It just floors me that someone who knew about the similarity between high altitude and partial CO poisoning not only decided to try it but got others to go along.
Injecting spider venom isn’t dangerous as long as you get the dosage right.
If doing this makes it possible to perform better, people are going to push the edge of the amount that’s “safe“. Right up to the limit. Tip toeing over the limit.
People will get seriously hurt/die if they do it wrong.
It’s CO. there’s a reason the government is always telling people to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors. It’s not because they might get too good at sports.
> Injecting spider venom isn’t dangerous as long as you get the dosage right.
Venom actively damages your cells, CO just restricts oxygen access.
> If doing this makes it possible to perform better, people are going to push the edge of the amount that’s “safe“. Right up to the limit. Tip toeing over the limit.
Not necessarily. It’s not like EPO where more is better, the benefits likely cap out long before you reach a dangerous level of CO, so going to “the limit” isn’t something that’s likely to happen.
> It’s CO. there’s a reason the government is always telling people to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors.
Yes because your boiler might leak an uncontrolled amount of CO and, because it’s odorless, you don’t know if you’re breathing too much before you pass out and, subsequently, die. That’s a different situation than being in a controlled environment where you can set the dosage quite easily.
Other sports like baseball/tennis/etc seem to have some issues with like general steroids. But the level that cyclists go to always seems to exceed them by orders of magnitude.
I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that some cyclists had/have to set alarms throughout the night so they wake up to do jumping jacks to get their heart rates back up above the "artificial" 15bpm that their training + cocktail of drugs has caused.