Can You Win The Tour de France By Doping?

Taking performance enhancing drugs may elevate an athlete’s ability to perform, but if a cyclist doped would it be enough to take him or her from an average rider to one who dominates a major pro cycling race? Or better put, can a cyclist win the Tour de France just by doping?

This is a question that never really gets examined in the mainstream media — or at least isn’t often analyzed. The answer is complicated by the fact that a race like the Tour is unlike most athletic events that most American sports fans are familiar with. Football, basketball, baseball, the result is clear: The team with the higher score wins. Golf, the opposite: The golfer with the lowest number of strokes wins.

In track and in swimming, it’s also pretty clear: The athlete to the finish line first wins. But a major stage race like the Tour de France is totally unlike any of these events. While strategy may play a part in other sports, it is perhaps one of the most important keys to winning a stage race. There’s no substitute for fitness, but one thing most average sports fans don’t understand about bike racing in general, and stage races in particular, is that it isn’t necessarily the strongest rider who wins. It’s the smartest.

And in stage racing, it isn’t always the first rider across the line on the last day who wins. Similar to how golf works, it’s the person with the shortest elapsed time who wins. And it’s even possible for the winner to never win a stage.

Bike racing is very much like a chess game on wheels. It’s how you use your resources and what risks you’re willing to take on the bike that determines how well you’ll do in the race. It’s the strategy and tactics you and your team choose to employ and how smartly you respond to other teams’ tactical moves that play a large part in your result. And then there’s luck. Do you get a flat tire or experience a mechanical problem (like a broken chain) at an inopportune moment?

For each team there is a leader, for whom the other riders work. So if there are 20 equal teams at the Tour, you have a field of 20 contenders for victory. Often, the number of real contenders is smaller than that, as some of the teams aren’t as strong and capable as the others. Tactics are always an integral part of stage races. And the 2006 Tour is certainly a good reference for how well (or poorly) tactics can play out for a team. For a good exposition of the tactics on Stage 17 see Peloton Jim’s article at Endless Cycle. He also offers some additional interpretation of the day’s events in this article.

So in thinking about whether doping would be enough to win a stage race, the short answer is: No. Certainly, the performance boost from blood doping or taking EPO could help improve a rider’s endurance and ability to transport oxygen to the muscles, but without a strong team, and without good strategy and tactics, the rider can’t get to the top of the podium.

While attending the Floyd Fairness Fund event at the Wilmette Theatre on Saturday, I had an interesting (though short) conversation with a reporter from the Associated Press. One thing he told me was that within days of the Landis scandal breaking, he got a phone call from a highly placed source in one of the anti-doping agencies who was able to cite the numbers chapter and verse in the Landis case. Numbers which weren’t released publicly for quite some time afterward.

He also told me his source spoke about how athletes like cyclists use testosterone to speed recovery. He had a very interesting take on the matter and what his source was telling him, but that’s for another day.

Floyd Landis is accused of taking testosterone prior to Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour. All of his other tests during the Tour (that’s another 7 tests, I believe) came up negative. So what would have been the point of using testosterone after Stage 16 and before the start of Stage 17?

To a casual observer, the answer might be: To boost recovery so he could wake up the next day, get on his bike and ride it “like he was on a goddamn Harley.” And one could easily believe it’s possible.

In the days just after the Operacion Puerto scandal broke, Dr. Kurt Moosburger told CyclingNews how an athlete might use testosterone to speed his recovery:

You put a standard testosterone patch that is used for male hormone replacement therapy on your scrotum and leave it there for about six hours. The small dose is not sufficient to produce a positive urine result in the doping test, but the body actually recovers faster.

This comment, often unattributed, has appeared many times in many places regarding how Landis might have doped. But would it really have had an effect? I spent some time looking at PubMed for articles that might confirm whether or not the use of testosterone could speed recovery after a hard training or racing effort.

One article (whose authors include scientists who work at the anti-doping lab in Lausanne, Switzerland) from the November 2006 issue of the European Journal of Applied Physiology had this conclusion in its abstract:

In the present study, no effect of multiple oral doses of AAS [anabolic androgenic steroids, such as testosterone] on endurance performance or bioserum recovery markers was found.

While the study was looking at oral drugs, rather than the patch Dr. Moosburger cites, the conclusion is what’s interesting: No effect on recovery. But that wasn’t the only article I found. Another article from Sports Medicine has this to say in its abstract:

Little data about the effects of AAS on metabolic responses during exercise training and recovery are available and, therefore, do not allow firm conclusions.

So at best, there’s no firm data one way or another. Perhaps using the patch has a placebo effect, leading an athlete to believe he or she has recovered better, and is then able to go out and perform better. Perhaps it has a real effect. The point is, no one knows for sure.

But why float such a story to the AP reporter (and most likely other reporters, too)? Because someone high up in the anti-doping world wanted to spin a reason why Landis might have broken the rules. By offering an explanation to the press as to why an athlete might use such a drug on a one-time basis, the anti-doping official was trying to spin the story that they’d caught a big fish in the act of cheating. Perhaps even that Landis was one of the bad guys ruining the sport of cycling.

Now, it turns out, the data is more than a little suspect. Certainly, if different labs would interpret the same result differently, then one has to wonder if it’s really a positive test at all. And if the lab where the test was originally developed (UCLA) uses a different set of criteria to determine a positive result, one has to wonder about how the science of the test backs up the different approach at LNDD.

But in the early days, before any data was available to the public, the only source of information were the anti-doping agencies themselves. And in the wake of Operacion Puerto, they certainly had incentive to show how they were winning the fight against doping. There would be no bigger way than catching the winner of the Tour de France.

And to a casual observer, all the facts added up. As Michael Henson observed on Saturday, in a situation like Floyd was in at the time, what comes out in the first 72 hours is what people (including some commentators in the media) use to form their opinions. So leaking the information guaranteed a speedy trial by media, even though Landis has had anything but a speedy process in any other sense.

For those who haven’t followed the case closely, that’s all the information they know about the case. And that’s where their questions come from. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that it’s not so unusual to go from having a bad ride one day to having a good ride the next. Most competitive cyclists have had exactly this kind of experience at one time or another in their career. I know I have. Perhaps not the riding away from the pack and staying away for hours due to the peloton’s unwillingness to chase, but a bad ride where you’re hanging on for dear life followed by a ride where you’re absolutely raging. But that’s hard to explain to folks who don’t have a great understanding of the sport.

So far the best explanation for Floyd’s bad day on Stage 16 and his good day on Stage 17 that I’ve heard was this: If your car’s engine runs out of gas, when you fill the gas tank, shouldn’t it be able to work just as well as it did before? (I think it was Floyd who said it on Saturday when talking to the press, but it could have been Arnie Baker, Michael Henson or Robbie Ventura who said it — my notes are a bit unclear.) Bonking on Stage 16 and coming back to ride well on Stage 17 are analogous to a car running out of fuel and then being refueled.

Good tactics played a part, and refueling certainly played a part. And it didn’t hurt that the main contenders miscalculated and didn’t choose to chase Floyd until it was too late. (Can you say, “Oops.”?) But the data — both from the lab documentation pack and from studies relating to the use of testosterone to enhance recovery — suggest that one thing didn’t play a part, and that would be artificial testosterone. So to answer the question in relation to the current champion: Did Floyd Landis win the Tour by doping? No, not at all. He won the old fashioned way — through hard work, determination, the miscalculations of others, and a bit of luck.