Bad guess, I am not sure what OP really intends (perhaps you don’t consume whilst you sleep?!) because as you probably are starting to remember from primary school your body maintains homeostasis by continually respiring. It doesn’t suddenly decide to take a dump.
Ok, it does, but even when it does that, in order to do that it has been continually maintaining homeostasis
Regarding drugs, yes it´s most likely still happening, but nowhere near the levels it used to be.
Riders are tested a lot and have to provide year-round whereabouts for random testing. They also have a frequently updated blood passport to detect sudden changes in values caused by PEDs. It can never be fully waterproof, but at least serious efforts are made.
>> Riders are tested a lot and have to provide year-round whereabouts for random testing.
If I remember correctly, these rules were changed after the Armstrong scandal where he would be scheduled for testing, he would say he was at his house in Texas. The testing folks would show up and he just wouldn't answer the door and wait until they left so they couldn't test him. It was one of the ways he was able to dope on a set schedule, all the while being able to maintain he was being tested more than any other athlete - when in reality, he was just avoiding being tested.
It seems like a lot has changed since his scandal and several others that followed and they've really clamped down on what you're saying, changes in blood values and getting suspended if you cannot be reached for testing.
Cyclist need to log virtually everything they consume (food, water, medications), on top of declaring their whereabouts and biological passports, in case they return a positive test. I'm not disagreeing with the "price of admission" for competing in the world tour shouldn't be high, but I can imagine it's stressful that something as simple as drinking water from a tap could, effectively, end your career.
Lizzy Banks goes into great detail about her experince with doping control and trying to overturn a positive result due to a contamination. It's a long read, but if you're a fan of the sport it's super interesting.
https://lizzybanks.co.uk/
There is an app where you have to give your whereabouts for one hour every day. If you don't fill it in or are unavailable at the location for that hour, you get a strike. Three strikes in a set period and you will get a ban as if you had been doping.
One problem with the system is that it relies on countries being strict with their athletes, which they aren't incentivized to do. Also, it's easy to "be available" but not get tested by going somewhere remote for a height camp for a few weeks.
No, you have to give your location for an hour each day where you know you'll be. Like "on monday you can find me at the gym 12-13", or "Tuesday I'll be at the hotel room 18-19". And then you have to be at those locations.
Afaik that was already the rule 25-30 years ago when Armstrong was cycling.
I can remember track and field athletes being banned when they didn‘t show up for surprise tests.
So either cycling was more lenient or he got a bonus treatment because he was famous.
On a side note: much harder today to not be available/found than it was 30 odd years ago.
At the Track and Field qualifiers for the 2024 Olympics they kept talking about how one of the runners was disqualified from Tokyo because she violated the whereabouts rules. They didn't say how.
Is that like parole where they check in, or is it like house arrest where you have an ankle monitor?
It's a bit of both. If you're an athlete being tested at that level, you have to keep your country's antidoping agency informed of your whereabouts at all times. They will randomly send testers to wherever you are and you have a short time window, like 1-3 hours to show up. If you no-show 3 times (I think) it counts as a positive test and you're banned. I really don't know how someone could run in the trials with too many missed tests and not be allowed to race the olympics... I'm pretty sure the rules are the same.
The athlete may have had a third failed test, but still had time to protest that. There have been examples where athletes filed changes to their schedule, but doping authorities missed those and ended up at the wrong place for a random test, for example.
Miss a plane? Plane delayed? You may have to inform your doping agency. A loved one suddenly ends up in hospital? Before you rush to go there, report where you’ll be.
The simplest would be dead battery on a solo run. I've killed mine on a workout before. I've also delayed a workout to charge and ended up regretting it.
More likely you're young, mad fit, and have some energy you want to burn off with a friend. You've heard about the Olympic Village.
No way do I want to tell some official whose apartment I'm visiting.
If you missed 2 before the trials and another after? I could see someone being on final notice before the trials and then fucking up again.
But they didn't actually say how and when she was DQed, just that she missed the Tokyo Olympics due to breaking the whereabouts clause. There are clearly favorites at the trials and if someone 'should' have gone I could see announcers making the speculative leap.
They have moved on from pharmaceutical doping due to the extensive testing to what is referred to as "mechanical doping". Motors are hidden in hubs/frames and the organisation is busy doing everything they can to pretend that it isn't a problem.
They do systematic checks for the winner, whoever has suspicious performance jumps one day, as well as random racers. They do take it very seriously and what you are saying is a bit far from the truth.
Some people will try, and some scandals will happen, sure. But it is not a widespread problem and is unlikely to become one.
Through axels have become a very convenient excuse for bike changes. Watching Cavendish have his wheels changed in one of the early stages this year was so slow. It took a guy with a drill like a minute plus to do front and rear wheels.
We've had a handful of cases at the lower levels of the sport, but I think the scrutineering is just too strict for anyone to get away with it at the ProTour level. The UCI have got mobile x-ray facilities which they're starting to use much more rigorously.
Mechanical doping, a problem so wide-spread that only one person at the elite level has ever been found to have been doing it. To date, no one has ever provided hard evidence of another rider using a motor. I am not saying that this doesn't happen at the amateur level (it certainly does) but to imply that this is a pervasive problem in elite cycling is little more than a baseless conspiracy theory until someone shows up with some actual evidence of motors being used in major events.
Ghost in the Machine [1] is a great podcast on this topic.
Only one person has been caught. It's been a long time since I bothered to look into this, but LeMond suspected at least half a dozen people, with video evidence of varying degrees of plausibility. The thermal imaging and the fallen rider with the spinning wheels were especially damning.
But if you're analyzing old races how do you get a conviction? You can't.
And if this is the Toms Skujins case, it spins for like 3 seconds on video after the video cuts to him. It's obvious that he just had lifted his bike up and spun the pedals to see if everything was in order before biking on. And when an alternate video later was released, this was proven to be true.
the long history of cheating at the highest levels of every sport indicates that if there is not mechanical doping in cycling, it's because the mechanical technology is not as good at hiding yet as it needs to be. We are talking about human beings here.
To my eyes, that bike obviously has a battery in the downtube. But I'm not the average person where bikes are concerned so perhaps I should have said, "a bike that would fool other bicyclists."
Assuming the pros are cheating, the professional assistance is unlikely to be of use to a regular human. At the professional level, a 1% gain could be huge, whereas a normal rider could gain far more than that by better techniques/breathing/equipment/whatever.
I found that podcast terrible. At the time I knew nothing about road cycling and that podcast left me with the impression that it's a pervasive problem and a grand conspiracy. It wasn't until I spoke about this with some real road cycling enthusiasts that I realised I had been taken in by a bullshit conspiracy theory.
Impossible to use mechanical doping now with the current inspections.
Has it been used before these inspections were implemented? Very likely. An hungarian engineer developed a motor with spools in the rims and the stator in the forks. For sure at some point this offered a better risk/reward than PEDs.
Greg LeMond was one of the people calling for more scrutiny of bikes for mechanical tampering. One of the best pieces of evidence he provided were thermal cameras pointed at bikes while they were in motion. Lots of thermal blooming in places no professional bike mechanic generate a tenths that much friction.
One of the problems is that bikes can be made so light with unobtainium that there are rules in place requiring a minimum weight so that poorer teams can compete. So if you make a bike that's 10 lbs you have to stick weights into it to bring it up to spec. What else could you put in that bike besides chunks of iron pipe?
Bikes being too light and needing weight added to rich 6.8kg minimum is a tale of the past. With aero frames, disc brakes, deeper wheels and bigger cassettes most TdF bikes are way over the minimum, sometimes more than 1kg heavier.
No, not really. These motors exist, but it’s not really a thing on the Tour de France. And I only mention this race because I am not much of a devotee and don’t really follow the others, but I would expect quite a lot of noise if it were a thing in the other big races.
That is indeed why you don´t see them collapsing and also why the finals are much longer nowadays. Riders train their guts to be able to eat up to 120g of carbs per hour, for the whole duration of the race.
I am far FAR from the tour de france but I do train for and run ultramarathons.
When I started the general guidance seemed to be about 200 calories (50g of carbs) per hour during training and races. I followed that or a little above for a long time, and constantly had problems both physically and cognitively near the end of races.
It took about a year to get used to fueling heavier (for me...about 400 calories per hour or 100g). Lots of figuring out digestion and timing and sources and other factors. But once I got there it was transformative...I could push much harder for much longer without a deep bonk and recovery was faster. More importantly, my ability to think/plan/make decisions at the end of races was orders of magnitude better.
I'd bet if you went to an aid station around 80 miles on a 100mile ultra marathon you could pretty reliably identify who had been on the 200cal end of the spectrum and who had been on the 400 + end.
At 250w average during a 5 hour ride I'm burning like 1000 calories per hour or something mething close. Glycogen reserves are 2000 calories from a quick Google search, so that's 3k calories I need to make up for or 600 per hour. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I'm missing but 400 definitely makes more sense than 200
What you're missing is fat metabolism. If you're metabolically healthy (which you must be if you can hold 250W for hours) then you can make up the difference by converting stored fat into glycogen.
Since my first ultra, Ive been fascinated by the idea of adapting to increased fueling and have tried to apply periodization principles to how I eat. 23 miles into a 33 race, I completely stopped being able to process food at around 150-250 cals/hr (mostly carbs and some fats)
speaking from experience - I puked during a fair number of runs in the process of getting there. I mix calories in my hydration with gels just to try and get the balance right. Its not stable but its better after about 4 years of work. I have ound that if I don't do a good job of eating, what you describe happens about 6-10 miles AFTER I stopped caloric intake.
Yeah, some of the modern nutrition stuff like gels work really well. I did a 115 mile road bike ride on Sunday and kept eating gels and... I'm not going to say I was super fresh or anything by the end of that, but I was still feeling pretty good.
Yeah, I bought a huge bulk pack online, and then it was okay. But when you need a couple a week it quickly adds up in cost. Same with bars, which I sometimes prefer over gels for longer rides to not just have gels in my stomach. I've tried to bake some bars myself, or make some rice cakes from Velochef ( https://www.rouleur.cc/blogs/desire-journal/velochef-henrik-... ) instead.
Thanks for the recipe! Reminds me... A friend of mine made a megagel that was some kind of chocolate concoction that he carried in a 300ml soft flask. It had sugar, salts, caffeine, actually tasted great, and I believe was pretty cheap to make. I have to get the recipe from him.
Edit: I did the math on that risotto cake recipe and it comes out to about 2500kcal for the batch, for me that comes out to calories for ~5-6 hours of riding.
Regarding stability, this physical inertia is also present in rotating wind turbines. But I guess exploiting this at a meaningful scale would recquire a level of interconnectivity which boils down to the same issue of cost.
I am however optimistic about grid-scale storage. There is a long term trend of rapidly dropping battery prices, and with recent developments in sodium ion batteries there is no fundamental reason this won´t continue. Another enabler could be advancements in lifespan. This could allow storage being installed inside or near wind and PV, cutting down on space and installation costs. Even then however, grid improvements would be needed.
Some problems still need to be solved indeed, but in my (mostly uneducated) opinion, they seem easier than achieving economically viable fusion. But they do still require large investments in R&D and manufacturing capability.
They do not spin at 50/60hz, they are deployed with frequency converters to match optimum generation to the grid and spin at whatever speed they can achieve.
Dichalcogenides in a 2D layer like WS2 or MoS2 for example. These can already be grown on silicon wafers but are hard to integrate with other materials.
