Yeah, but that movie annoys me a bit, some guy who rides his bike around town every so often trains and beats an olympic cyclist in a matter of months. I don’t know what test they were doing but it wasn’t a vo2 test, it was basically how long can you go on a set treadmill ramp test, you’re not trying to attain a certain time in a vo2 max test, the test terminates as soon as the tester deems you have hit your max hr and an oxygen consumption plateau.
He wasn’t an Olympic cyclist, he was an alternate. Don’t you remember the poster… he looked at Muzzin and gave up. That’s the point of VO2max though, it is quite possible for “some guy who rides his bike around town” to match a highly trained athlete because VO2max is pretty much genetically determined and not very trainable. One could argue it’s more believable he could do that on the test as opposed to what he did in the race.
Yes, but Muzzin would have been on the team if he hadn’t gotten beaten by opinions, and the Russian I thought was an Olympian as well.
John
The point was that Marcus never made the Olympic team (regardless if it went). He didn’t have the intestinal fortitude when it counted and he gave up against Muzzin in the Oly qualifiers. The guy I was responding to said it was unlikely his little bro, David, who just rode around NY in fantasy races in his head, would beat Marcus on a VO2max test, because Marcus was an Olympic athlete. My point was 1) Marcus didn’t qualify for the Olympic team and 2) due to genetics, they might both have high VO2maxs, and since VO2max isn’t that trainable, it’s quite plausible that a recreational athlete (a gifted one, granted) could beat an Olympic alternate in a VO2max test. That’s one of the knocks on a VO2max test, it’s a test of genetics more than anything else. (edit: 3- Remember, in the 80s the Olys were amateur only, at least for the West, and therefore, the cream of the crop cyclist would not be in the mix (e.g. LeMond) at least on the male side).
Heck, Lance Armstrong only had a VO2max of 75 ml/kg/min and he won 7 TdF.
P.S. I’ll also grant that the actual test performed in the movie wasn’t a VO2max test because there was no metabolic gas collection. That being said, max treadmill running speed at the end of an incremental test has been argued by the likes of Noakes to be a better predictor of performance than the VO2max itself.
I thought you were talkong about the race for some reason, not the vo2ish test.
John