Here you go
https://lanternerouge.com/2023/07/1...r-in-week-3-tour-de-france-2023-stages-16-17/
After the second rest day, this year’s sole time-trial ended with a climb up Côte de Domancy (6.05 km, 6.84%) after a rolling course beforehand. Jonas Vingegaard did a historic performance, beating Pogačar on the 22.4 km course by 1:38 min and everyone else by at least 2:51 min. According to our calculations, Vingegaard did 7.60 ᵉW/Kg for 13:21 min. This performance would put it as one of the greatest of all time.
The comparables...Patani and Ulrich. They are also underestimating his w/kg. If you watch him pedal quite frequently his leg would swing out wide.
Jonas did 7.46 w/kg for 11:17 in Itzulia Basque Country race in April. That was the highest w/kg since since Alberto Contador (2009 Verbier.) 6th and final stage, attacked with 2 km left on the penultimate climb (4.1Km @ 9%, thought the section where he launched was 14.4% - ended up soloing the final 28.4 km to win the stage by 47 seconds and the race by 2:24.
Jonas Vingegaard Pushes All-Time Great Watts
Big fan of the author you linked (my article Is from the same blog); he's a good Twitter follow.
https://twitter.com/CyclingGraphs
That said, he works for Lanterne Rouge Cycling Podcast. They're propellor heads who have done consulting work for Jumbo-Visma. The brains behind all that w/kg stuff is Patrick Broe, an Australian lawyer who lives in Andorra. I think their content is fantastic but you do you have to keep in mind they've taken fees from TJV and they're not going to say or write anything that endangers that relationship.
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I'm not keen on the presumption of guilt based solely on performance. I like Vingegaard, have read a lot about his humble background and think it's kind of crazy a semi-pro cyclist went from setting Strava records on training runs to the UCI World Tour.
FTR, I like Tadej Pogačar a ton as well - what he has done by age 25 is below only Merckx. The tribalism of their respective fans is baffling to me. They both seem like good dudes.
The sport has always been dirty, the first champion was DQ'ed for hopping on trains & riding in cars instead of riding the course. Cocaine in the 1920s, amphetamines in the postwar, and a plethora of methods (EPO, growth hormones, insulin, testosterone, DHEA, IGF-1, Oxyglobin, cortisone and blood doping) in Armstrong-Ulrich-Landis-Rassmussen-Contador era.
There have 7 mountain stages in this TDF. In 6 of them, either Pogačar or Vingegaard have set new climbing records. Does that alone mean they are dirty? It's definitely up for discussion.
I prefer to just appreciate the competition. Clean or dirty, getting on the bike for 6 hours a day and riding 2,100 miles whilst climbing 188,000 vertical feet is an amazing achievement.
Jonas gave four blood samples in the last 48 hours. Those will be stored for years; if the testing hasn't caught up to whatever they might be doing, eventually they will. But until then I'm not going to presume he is guilty.
If he and/or Tadej are dirty, it would be disappointing. Not surprising, but would definitely be a bummer. I'd like to believe the technology, the aero, the diet, the increased training are all reasonable explanations. Jonas was tested as a teenager and his VO2Max is higher than Indurin, second highest of any athlete ever. That and setting Strava records were before TJV discovered him, when he was packing fish in ice to pay the rent. Do people think he was dirty then? Seems absurd.
But it's the nature of the sport. People are always going to be skeptical no matter how many years pass since back when the whole peloton was doping and ASO didn't GAF.
PIDCOCK Thomas (INEOS Grenadiers) is 14 minutes behind the peloton.
