Garmin vs Sky (non-doping related)

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Comments

  • sjmclean wrote:
    Funny how when some people try and give logical arguments they both run away.

    Also I'd like to nominate ATC for post of the week for the milk comment.

    You believe clean riders can climb faster than dopers.
  • ddraver
    ddraver Posts: 26,348
    Do you believe a rider at 100% will go slower than a tired rider going at 80%?
    We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
    - @ddraver
  • The Truth wrote:
    sjmclean wrote:
    Funny how when some people try and give logical arguments they both run away.

    Also I'd like to nominate ATC for post of the week for the milk comment.

    You believe clean riders can climb faster than dopers.

    So, the only conclusion to be drawn, via your arguement is you think that Andrew Talansky is a doper.
    "Science is a tool for cheaters". An anonymous French PE teacher.
  • FJS
    FJS Posts: 4,820
    Coming home, checking out what's happened to find 2 days of exciting racing in Qatar barely managing 3 pages, and this thread to 7 pages in a single afternoon. This kind of rubbish is sucking the life out of this forum. I don't understand why good people keep biting the bait
  • RichN95.
    RichN95. Posts: 27,137
    The Truth wrote:
    sjmclean wrote:
    Funny how when some people try and give logical arguments they both run away.

    Also I'd like to nominate ATC for post of the week for the milk comment.

    You believe clean riders can climb faster than dopers.
    I thought that this was a non-doping thread about why Sky have better results than Garmin? Or was that just a little ruse?
    Twitter: @RichN95
  • iainf72
    iainf72 Posts: 15,784
    FJS wrote:
    Coming home, checking out what's happened to find 2 days of exciting racing in Qatar barely managing 3 pages, and this thread to 7 pages in a single afternoon. This kind of rubbish is sucking the life out of this forum. I don't understand why good people keep biting the bait

    +1
    Fckin' Quintana … that creep can roll, man.
  • thomthom
    thomthom Posts: 3,574
    edited February 2014
    Why do you lot keep replying him? He's not reading your posts.
  • rayjay
    rayjay Posts: 1,384
    ddraver wrote:
    Do you believe a rider at 100% will go slower than a tired rider going at 80%?


    But Froome has better times up some cols than known dopers and very close to the fastest times set by dopers.

    I just don't think he his clean ,my reason, no one else except dopers are getting those sort of times.

    If Horner or Contador had done Froome's times I doubt many of you would say they were clean.

    Sky seem to have a hold on you......look in to my eyes :lol:
  • RichN95.
    RichN95. Posts: 27,137
    rayjay wrote:
    But Froome has better times up some cols than known dopers and very close to the fastest times set by dopers.
    He's nowhere near their best performances.
    Twitter: @RichN95
  • Ok, the Froome beating Talansky by a margin thing drove me to this. You are all to blame.

    I took 10 random Tours from 1950 to the present day including 2013 and measured the deviation from the winner of the top ten. I assigned 100 points to the winner, based on their time and an appropriate amount of points for the rest (eg if a rider took 10% longer than the leader he would get 90 pts.). Points are expressed as a % of the whole number given to the winner. DQ'd times are still included as we're arguing about what doped cycling looks like compared to clean cycling. Here we are...

    12442874164_abd865521f_o.jpg

    As we can see the spread between the winner and 10th place is pretty consistent. The Average spread we see is 0.0343 or less than 1 10th of 1% between 1st and 10th. As it happens, 2013 is bang in the middle of the selection my RNG came up with. For interests sake, the biggest spread is 0.005012 and the smallest 0.00098

    Take that!
    "In many ways, my story was that of a raging, Christ-like figure who hauled himself off the cross, looked up at the Romans with blood in his eyes and said 'My turn, sock cookers'"

    @gietvangent
  • rayjay
    rayjay Posts: 1,384
    RichN95 wrote:
    The Truth wrote:
    sjmclean wrote:
    Funny how when some people try and give logical arguments they both run away.

    Also I'd like to nominate ATC for post of the week for the milk comment.

    You believe clean riders can climb faster than dopers.
    I thought that this was a non-doping thread about why Sky have better results than Garmin? Or was that just a little ruse?


    Well it had the word Sky in the title and the word non doping .....let battle commence :lol:

    Come on ,,,you love it

    Bring on the WBT
  • Can you do it again, but only for Kenyan riders who have been diagnosed with bilharzia?
  • The Truth wrote:
    Can you do it again, but only for Kenyan riders who have been diagnosed with bilharzia?


    You said Froome shouldn't beat Talansky by the amount he did, I demonstrated he beat him by a wholly unexceptional amount. In fact 5th out of the random 10 I selected.
    "In many ways, my story was that of a raging, Christ-like figure who hauled himself off the cross, looked up at the Romans with blood in his eyes and said 'My turn, sock cookers'"

    @gietvangent
  • mike6
    mike6 Posts: 1,199
    The Truth wrote:
    Can you do it again, but only for Kenyan riders who have been diagnosed with bilharzia?

    Oh, for goodness sake, please go away you tedious troll.
  • rayjay
    rayjay Posts: 1,384
    RichN95 wrote:
    rayjay wrote:
    But Froome has better times up some cols than known dopers and very close to the fastest times set by dopers.
    He's nowhere near their best performances.

    t 23 minutes 14 seconds, Team Sky rider Chris Froome set the all-time 3rd fastest mark up Bonascre AX3 Domaines on Stage 8 of the 2013 Tour de France. His time was fast enough to beat Lance Armstrong's times in 2003 and 2005, but fell short of Armstrong's personal record set in 2001.

    The day before the climb up AX3, Team Sky Director David Brailsford told VeloNews, "At some point in time, clean performances will surpass the doped performances in the past." After the stage Froome stated that he is "100 percent" clean and that there's "absolutely no way I'd be able to get these results if the sport hadn't changed."

    But should you believe them? While that decision is ultimately up to you, this article looks at objective performance data and analysis methods to help you figure it all out.

    The simplest place to start the analysis is with Froome's time itself. He took 23:14 to cover the 8.9 km distance at an average gradient of 7.46 percent. AX3 has been included in the Tour five times, three times during the doping era (2001, 2003, and 2005) and twice in the “new generation” (2010 and 2013). With this context in mind, we pulled the top 10 times from cycling archivist @ammattipyoraily's AX3 Domaines All-Time Top 100 List:

    1. Laiseka 22:57, 2001

    2. Armstrong 22:59, 2001
    3. Froome 23:14, 2013
    4. Ulrich 23:17, 2003
    5. Zubeldia 23:19, 2003
    6. Ulrich 23:22, 2001

    7. Armstrong 23:24, 2003
    8. Vinokourov 23:34, 2003

    9. Basso 23:36, 2003

    10. Armstrong 23:40, 2005
    -
    22. Porte 24:05, 2013
    34. Valverde 24:22, 2013

    Aside for Froome's time, every single performance in the top 10 has come from a rider during cycling's known doping era. With the 3rd fastest ever, his time beat the top efforts from Jan Ulrich and Ivan Basso, and even beat two of three times for Armstrong. In contrast, the all-time list put Richie Porte and Alejandro Valverde, 2nd and 3rd on the day, just outside of the top 20 and top 30, respectively. The historical analysis of Froome's time puts his performance into territory dominated by top doping era cyclists and is not reassuring. Porte and Valverde's times are well off the highest marks and don't stand out otherwise. 





    But the record times alone don’t tell the whole story. The next step is to run a DpVAM analysis, a complicated name for a method that allows us to compare results across different climbs and eras for more meaningful results. It's a simple analysis to interpret. Two bars up for a rider flags the performance as suspicious, while two bars down indicates the performance was at least plausible. 




    With one quick glance (see the sidebar) you can see why Froome's performance (the first 2 bars) set off alarm bells across the Internet. 



    For the analysis, we use equations derived by Scott Richards, who pioneered the method in A Different Approach to Comparing Climbing Performances on Cyclismas.com. The equations use data from the supposedly clean years of 2008-2013 (pVAM), and at my request, data from the doping years of 2002-2007 (DpVAM), to predict the climbing speeds (VAM) expected from these baselines. The final step is to calculate the difference between the actual VAM measured and the pVAM/DpVAM baselines in percentage terms. The sidebar figure is the final result of the top 10 finishers on AX3.

    Looking at the figure again, Froome has two bars up. The bars indicate that he not only went faster than the clean predicted climbing speed, or pVAM, by 4.5 percent (blue bar), but that he also went faster than the “doping” climbing speed, or DpVAM, by 1.88 percent as well (red bar). The DpVAM analysis corroborates Froome’s non-reassuring placement on the all-time list behind Armstrong.

    (The DpVAM effectively expands the comparison beyond the limited AX3 data set. It confirms that Froome's performance was equally strong compared to the performances across the variety of climbs included in the baseline data sets.)



    In contrast to Froome, all the other 2013 riders were slower than the doping DpVAM baseline (red bars down). Other than Porte, the other riders were also slower than the clean pVAM as well, (blue bars down). For the rest of the peloton then, the doping DpVAM analysis is reassuring. The remaining performances on AX3 were at or below the 2008-2013 baseline and well below the doped 2002-2007 baseline.



    The last approach to assess Froome's performance is to consider the expected limits of human physiology. Ross Tucker and @ammattipyoraily have been working on calculating power in watts/kg using various simulators [editors note: power for cyclists can be thought of like horsepower is for cars].

    (Pilot data from 20 SRM power files has shown that the simulator available on Cycling Power Lab has produced the best calculated power estimates (r^2=0.893, r=0.94, average error 0.4% and most samples falling within +/-3).)

    Using this simulator @ammattipyoraily calculated Froome's power output at 6.5 w/kg for 21:41 over the 7.85 km climbing portion, and 6.37 w/kg for 23:14 over the full 8.9 km. (The second power figure includes the flat section at the top of the climb which is more wind error affected. A head wind was suspected at the top of the climb based on race video raising the possibility of power underestimates.)

    Based on the proposed power curve in Not Normal?, the work of Antoine Vayer, a French journalist and former trainer for the infamous Festina cycling team, 6.37 w/kg for the 23 minute effort puts Froome well into the "miraculous" level of human physiology. This is a level of performance not seen in the Tour de France before the introduction of EPO. It is a level of performance that has all but disappeared following Operation Puerto and the introduction of the Athlete Biological Passport.

    At this point, it's important to stop and acknowledge some limitations. This analysis is based on just one climb. It is the shortest of the critical climbs in this year's Tour de France and it came in the race’s first week, meaning riders were comparatively well-rested for the effort. The historical times only include two years of "new generation" data, and the DpVAM and Cycling Power Lab models have not yet been truly validated. Each method is derived from climbing times. Factors besides performance that affect time could have skewed the analysis although no such factors were evident in the remaining 2013 rider data.

    Also, the analysis will only pick up the effect of doping on top riders. Lesser riders who dope may achieve performances no better than top clean riders. Lastly, the field of cycling performance estimates and monitoring is basically in its infancy. It will likely still evolve significantly.



    Overall, the data suggests that the performances on AX3 fell within a range that could be expected for a relatively clean peloton with the exception of Froome. His performance on AX3 is clearly flagged as an outlier and warrants healthy rationale skepticism. Going forward, the progression of his performance should be closely followed over the rest of the Tour. 


  • The Truth wrote:
    Can you do it again, but only for Kenyan riders who have been diagnosed with bilharzia?


    You said Froome shouldn't beat Talansky by the amount he did, I demonstrated he beat him by a wholly unexceptional amount. In fact 5th out of the random 10 I selected.

    You demonstrated that the 1st placed rider didn't beat the 10th placed rider by an unexceptional amount. Well done.

    The point is that Froome has no buisness being a grand tour winner, or anywhere close. Talansky is a legitimate talent. Froome used to carry bottles and his biggest wins came in obscure races no one has heard of.
  • tailwindhome
    tailwindhome Posts: 18,878
    The Truth wrote:
    The point is that Froome has no buisness being a grand tour winner, or anywhere close. Talansky is a legitimate talent. Froome used to carry bottles and his biggest wins came in obscure races no one has heard of.


    Is there any reason we can just leave it at that until anything new arises?
    “New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!
  • FJS wrote:
    Coming home, checking out what's happened to find 2 days of exciting racing in Qatar barely managing 3 pages, and this thread to 7 pages in a single afternoon. This kind of rubbish is sucking the life out of this forum. I don't understand why good people keep biting the bait

    Well, in fairness, the Qatar coverage is pants this year.
    Now, only the last half hour or so live, long after the echelons had formed.
    Lots of picture breakup, too, never mind not televised on any of Al Jazeera's (Bein Sports) 15 HD
    sports channels.
    "Science is a tool for cheaters". An anonymous French PE teacher.
  • RichN95.
    RichN95. Posts: 27,137
    edited February 2014
    rayjay wrote:
    t 23 minutes 14 seconds, Team Sky rider Chris Froome set the all-time 3rd fastest mark up Bonascre AX3 Domaines on Stage 8 of the 2013 Tour de France. His time was fast enough to beat Lance Armstrong's times in 2003 and 2005, but fell short of Armstrong's personal record set in 2001.

    <Snip> 



    All this focus on Ax 3. Why not any of the many other climbs Froome has done?

    And here's another question - why was Armstrong or anyone else not faster than Roberto Laiseka - a journeyman climber who never finished in the top 20 of the Tour?

    You copy and paste other people's arguments rather than use your own words, which implies that you don't actually understand it. Until you do you will not realise how you are being conned.
    Twitter: @RichN95
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    The Truth wrote:
    The Truth wrote:
    Can you do it again, but only for Kenyan riders who have been diagnosed with bilharzia?


    You said Froome shouldn't beat Talansky by the amount he did, I demonstrated he beat him by a wholly unexceptional amount. In fact 5th out of the random 10 I selected.

    You demonstrated that the 1st placed rider didn't beat the 10th placed rider by an unexceptional amount. Well done.

    The point is that Froome has no buisness being a grand tour winner, or anywhere close. Talansky is a legitimate talent. Froome used to carry bottles and his biggest wins came in obscure races no one has heard of.

    Talansky has only won the Tour de l'Ain hardly the big time is it?
  • I should have known all that would be a waste of time.
    "In many ways, my story was that of a raging, Christ-like figure who hauled himself off the cross, looked up at the Romans with blood in his eyes and said 'My turn, sock cookers'"

    @gietvangent
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    He also remarkably went from 79th in the Veulta to 7th the next year. That is only ten places less than Froome's jump from 81st to 2nd. Hmm...
  • sjmclean wrote:
    The Truth wrote:
    The Truth wrote:
    Can you do it again, but only for Kenyan riders who have been diagnosed with bilharzia?


    You said Froome shouldn't beat Talansky by the amount he did, I demonstrated he beat him by a wholly unexceptional amount. In fact 5th out of the random 10 I selected.

    You demonstrated that the 1st placed rider didn't beat the 10th placed rider by an unexceptional amount. Well done.

    The point is that Froome has no buisness being a grand tour winner, or anywhere close. Talansky is a legitimate talent. Froome used to carry bottles and his biggest wins came in obscure races no one has heard of.

    Talansky has only won the Tour de l'Ain hardly the big time is it?

    True, good point. However he also has good results from stage races and grand tours.
  • ocdupalais
    ocdupalais Posts: 4,224
    Interesting analysis, rayjay: but I can't help feeling that with the lack of (non-acronym) capital letters and smiley faces, that this wasn't your own creation. I hope you're not pilfering other people's work without crediting the source...? Were it so, there's a danger some might not take you seriously...
  • OCDuPalais wrote:
    Interesting analysis, rayjay: but I can't help feeling that with the lack of (non-acronym) capital letters and smiley faces, that this wasn't your own creation. I hope you're not pilfering other people's work without crediting the source...? Were it so, there's a danger some might not take you seriously...

    It's a cut and paste of the Outside Magazine link The Truth put up before... Minus the qualifying bit at the end saying it wasn't validated and expressing it's limitations.
    "In many ways, my story was that of a raging, Christ-like figure who hauled himself off the cross, looked up at the Romans with blood in his eyes and said 'My turn, sock cookers'"

    @gietvangent
  • tailwindhome
    tailwindhome Posts: 18,878
    I can make a graph to show anything you want. Especially a screenshot of one where you can't see the data, or even the units of measure. All that tells me is Froome was faster than the guys behind him on one day.

    Evidence please.

    Mildly interesting diversion
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26084167
    “New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!
  • OCDuPalais wrote:
    Interesting analysis, rayjay: but I can't help feeling that with the lack of (non-acronym) capital letters and smiley faces, that this wasn't your own creation. I hope you're not pilfering other people's work without crediting the source...? Were it so, there's a danger some might not take you seriously...

    Like you would believe it anyway. You're too deep in the fantasy world to listen to any sane arguments.
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    since the start of the 2012 season

    Talansky has 5 top tens and one win.

    Froome has 4 top tens and 5 wins.

    So in the exact same timescale Froome has shown to be a far superior stage racer/
  • The Truth wrote:
    OCDuPalais wrote:
    Interesting analysis, rayjay: but I can't help feeling that with the lack of (non-acronym) capital letters and smiley faces, that this wasn't your own creation. I hope you're not pilfering other people's work without crediting the source...? Were it so, there's a danger some might not take you seriously...

    Like you would believe it anyway. You're too deep in the fantasy world to listen to any sane arguments.

    Read: You don't agree with me.
    "In many ways, my story was that of a raging, Christ-like figure who hauled himself off the cross, looked up at the Romans with blood in his eyes and said 'My turn, sock cookers'"

    @gietvangent
  • inseine
    inseine Posts: 5,786
    So Talansky was better than Froome when he was 22, for example, but Lance was better still.
    This proves what exactly?
This discussion has been closed.