David L. Stanley
2023 Tour de France:
Jonas Vingegaard & Doping
David Stanley is an experienced cycling writer. His work has appeared in Velo, Velo-news.com, Road, Peloton, and the late, lamented Bicycle Guide (my favorite all-time cycling magazine). Here's his Facebook page. He is also a highly regarded voice artist with many audiobooks to his credit, including McGann Publishing's The Story of the Tour de France and Cycling Heroes.
David L. Stanley
David L. Stanley's masterful telling of his bout with skin cancer Melanoma: It Started with a Freckle is available in print, Kindle eBook and audiobook versions, just click on the Amazon link on the right.
David L. Stanley writes:
This latest Tour TT result has raised a lot of reasonable eyebrows. JV took 1:38 out of Taddy in a race of only 22.4, albeit rolling, kilometers. That’s 2.25 seconds per km. That’s also an average speed 5% faster than Taddy. That’s a serious gap, and when you have two competitors so closely linked that after 15 stages totaling 2,607 km they entered the time trial only ten seconds apart, you ask “What is going on, exactly?”
(I did all the math in my head. You want to complain that I’m off by a tenth here or there, then write your own column. Thank-you.)
Jonas Vingegaard on his stunning ride. Sirotti photo
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I skimmed through the history. It wasn’t a deep, statistical dive where I looked at every time trial of less than 40 km going back to Anquetil in the late '50s. I looked at years where I knew that the winner was noted as a strong chrono-man, and a few years chosen at random in each decade. I looked at probably 2 dozen Tours in total. I couldn’t find more than a race or two where a leader in a short TT took so much time out of his closest competitor. It was common, however, to see many races where the top 2 or 3 blew away those not close to the podium.
1961 does stand out. A 28.5 km TT around Versailles, stage 5b. Maitre Jacques blew away the field. 2:32 ahead of his closest rival. That’s a gap of about 6% average speed. I’m sure there are other similar gaps, but I didn’t want to spend my day looking for them.
It took a while to find this race. I started working backwards from 2021.
Jacques is generally acclaimed as the greatest stage racing TT rider of all time. We also know that Anquetil didn’t race ‘pane e acqua,’ eh?
Jacques Anquetil (center) in the stage 17 of the 1961 Tour.
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Take a look at today’s TT stage. What reasonable conclusions can we draw? I think all that can be said safely is that Jonas had a career day. Think back to Bob Beamon at Mexico City – a very talented long jumper who had a day that transcended all days in field events. Consider Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal in 2008 with one of the greatest tennis matches of all time – two extraodinary players who reached heights they could never have expected.
There was that record setting day in the men’s mile in 1999 when the first and second place runners, Hicham El Guerrouj in 3:43.13 and Noah Ngeny in 3:43:40, both set world records which are still unbeaten. Were they doping? Probably. Have others on PEDs taken dead aim at that record and failed? Yes.
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Where does that leave us with Jonas Vingegaard? He keeps passing the tests, and yes, we’ve all heard that before. For me, if he is using some gear, all the top riders have access to the same pharmacy. My advice? Enjoy the racing, raise an eyebrow or two, and withhold judgement and condemnation until we have any substantive evidence. Because doped or not, this last week of the Tour should be incredible.
David Stanley, like nearly all of us, has spent his life working and playing outdoors. He got a case of Melanoma as a result. Here's his telling of his beating that disease. And when you go out, please put on sunscreen.