I think the simpler answer or maybe question is- why wouldn't they all dope? and how could they possibly stop doping?- versus having shock with any given performance. Contador along with many other riders were connected to Operation Puerto- but that was shoved under the rug by the Spanish cycling mafia. Valverde is defended in Spain- yet banned in Italy because of compelling evidence. Nearly everyone on that top list of performances of VAM- has tested positive, been banned, highly implicated, or tested positively retroactively. Ever wonder why many athletes that initially race with lance and then go onto other teams get busted... heras, landis, hamilton, etc. Lance did donate 500k to the UCI- that's sort of a conflict of interest to take that- especially if the UCI has power to ban a rider for dope.
Here's an interesting interview:
http://www.bikeraceinfo.com/oralhistory/lemond.html Mabye Contador and the other top GC pros have VO2 maxes above 100... notice how you'll never see a top Pro publish their power data- but it's only domestiques.... you don't want to publish numbers that are physiologically not possible without assistance.....
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CB: Were you aware of what you could do in terms of average rate of vertical ascent? For instance, Ivan Basso made everyone's eyes bug out when he was ascending at 1800 vertical meters an hour on the Colle San Carlo in the 2006 Giro.
GL: What wattage was he doing? I would look more at wattage because the rate of vertical ascent could vary so much depending on the pavement. Wattage is the ultimate truth. You know I'm very controversial because I think that you have to look at numbers.
My wattage, relative to VO2 Max...a VO2 Max of 92 or 93 in a fully recovered way...I think I was capable of producing 450 to 460 watts. The truth is, even at the Tour de France, my Tour de France climb times up l'Alpe d'Huez yielded a wattage of around 380 and 390. That was the historic norm for Hinault and myself. You've got times going back many, many years. But what was learned recently, in the last 5 years, was that when you start the Tour de France, you start with a normal hematocrit of, say, 45 percent. By the time you finish, it's probably down 10 or 15 percent. Which means my VO2 Max dropped 10 or 15 percent. So that's why I was never producing the same wattage. And then there a lot of other factors that help performance if you've recovered. My last time trial in '89, I averaged about 420, 430 watts, which would match or be slightly down from what my real VO2 Max was.
Of course, in the '90s drugs came on the scene, so the wattages have gone out. There are some things that are just not explainable, people with VO2 Maxs in the low 80s producing 500 watts. A physiologist friend of my said that for a person to do that, 500 watts, he has to have to have nearly 100 milliliters of Oxygen. There are a lot of questions there for me.
When I start seeing wattage down to the historic norm, I'll know that the battle of the drugs is starting to get back in place.
CB: We can at least understand that statistically, the physical gift that you possessed was one in millions?
GL: I read in a deposition in a trial that an expert witness said that I couldn't have had a ninety [VO2 Max]...that I would have been a one in a thousand in the pro ranks to have that. I happened to have been in the 1980s and was probably the best rider out of a thousand pros. So [laughs], I was one in a thousand.