Monday, November 5, 2012

Doping Era Climb Times for Alpe d'Huez

The graph above shows average winning climb times for the famous Alpe d'Huez ascent in the Tour de France (data comes from Wikipedia, note that not all years are represented). The degree of improvement in a short time period is evocative of East German swimmers of the 1970s.

It is routinely and correctly stated that performance improvements are not sufficient evidence of doping violations, but the Alpe d'Huez performance shown above sure should have raised some eyebrows. I have long wondered why the Tour did not publish a readily accessible time series of rider times. Perhaps this is why.

Thanks to @ReinerGrundmann for the inspiration and link to data for this post!

1 comment:

  1. I've got nothing to say about this, just feel you ought to get some comments for The Least Thing every now and then!

    http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Features/article1155948.ece?shareToken=8352496d7274981e34603b3de48c9c41 lovely article by Walsh on th whole Armstrong thing

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