There was a BBC documentary a good few years ago where the guinea pig bought a 10 week EPO course from China, had it checked that it was what he thought he’d paid for. Did a VO2 max while clean having got to his reasonable level of fitness then took the 10 week course and had an increase just under 10% iirc.
I guess if you were a decent level to start with and wanted to go to Kona just the one time it’s almost worth it to get the additional boost to get there, cheaper than legacy route and possibly cheaper than carbon and coaching
Our dog is on tramadol at the moment. Maybe I’ll crunch up one of his tablets with some pro plus and make a pro cycling style “finishing bottle” to get me through my long ride on Sunday
I knew a couple of cycling/Ironman ex-pros from when I was in London and I heard a few things, apparently much more common than you’d like to believe. Spending £10k on a Kona attempt? Why not make it much much more likely by spending a few hundred extra on the finishing touches gear? Apparently also pretty easy to get hold of and administer. I think there was a cycling journalist who publicly went on a course of PEDs and then wrote an article about how much they improved his performance.
Icarus guy did improve, quite significantly IIRR. His race was a complete failure though.
The most interesting bit for me was later, when he went on Armstrongs podcast.
Armstrong basically laughed at his doping efforts, said he was doing it all wrong with all these different injections, pills etc etc and that it all it boiled down was oxygen in the blood.
A friend in Oz, who was an extremely good cyclist (and KQer) volunteered for a program supervised by AIS (Aus Inst Sport) to take EPO over a number of weeks, as they wanted to see they effects and report to ASADA.
He said he couldn’t feel a massive difference in output but his ability to recover and back up day after day was amazing.
Remember O2 doping is only relevant once you are supply-side limited, which ultimately is almost always the case with fit athletes, however it’s often not the case with unfit athletes or multisport athletes in a particular sport.
If you have plenty of O2, but your muscles can’t use it, having even more O2 doesn’t help.
Spirit of the sport is quite open to interpretation though. You could argue expensive shoes and equipment, expensive supplements, etc are not creating a level playing field
They are not risking health though which is key in most things on the list. You need to use common sense as well, supplements how do you test for vit B, vit D, or glucose, protein etc. The shoes were considered to be banned, but its Nike so … dollars.
